London - Maverick and rebel are the words most commonly used to describe James Rhodes. Anyone who has seen this acclaimed classical pianist at the Royal Albert Hall or concert halls around the world (he was in Rotterdam a few nights ago) would understand why.
He wears jeans and trainers on stage, not a stiff collar and tails, has the name of Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov tattooed on his right forearm in Cyrillic characters and chain smokes (Marlboro Reds) during performances. Rhodes doesn’t just look different: his renditions are interspersed with anecdotes about Beethoven (‘He was like Liam Gallagher strutting around’), Schubert (‘He got syphilis and lost his hair’) and Chopin (‘He was slightly racist’).
In 2010, Rhodes, 40, became the first classical musician to be signed by a major rock label, Warner Brothers. The first album went straight to the top of the iTunes classical chart.
You may have seen him on TV last year in Channel 4’s Don’t Stop The Music, when he launched an ‘instrument amnesty’, calling on the people of Britain to take their rusty bassoons, detuned cellos and obsolete keyboards to their nearest Oxfam shop so they could be donated to schoolchildren.
He has been called the Jamie Oliver of the grand piano because of his mission to bring classical music back to the masses.
He recently spoke in glowing terms of the TV chef: ‘What he has done is to make cooking easy, accessible and fun. I can think of nothing better than doing the same for classical music.’
Among his closest friends is Sherlock Holmes star Benedict Cumberbatch. The two were contemporaries at Harrow as teenagers: the recently married actor received piano lessons from Rhodes in the weeks before his nuptials in order, so the story goes, that he could serenade his bride at the wedding reception.
Next week, Rhodes’s autobiography, Instrumental, is to be published. However, the subtitle, ‘A memoir of madness, medication and music’, hints at a much darker tale than simply that of a prodigy from a privileged background who became one of the most talked about concert pianists in the world.
Indeed, the contrast between his iconoclastic stage persona and the real James Rhodes, between perception and reality, could not be further apart.
H e was just six, he reveals, when he was raped for the first time by a master at his prep school.
‘I went overnight from a dancing, spinning, gigglingly alive child who was enjoying the safety and adventure of a new school to a walled-off, cement-shoed, lights-out automaton,’ he writes in one of the opening passages of his book.
‘It was immediate and shocking, like happily walking down a sunny path and suddenly having a trapdoor open and dump you in a freezing cold lake.’
Could there be a more haunting depiction of the effect sexual abuse can have on a child?
The abuse has cast a shadow over Rhodes’s life, something he has touched upon in interviews in the past, but which is laid bare in the book.
He’s been through depression, attempted suicides, eating disorders and several mental institutions. The legacy of what happened to him as a boy also destroyed his first marriage.
Until now, James Rhodes has been unable to tell his story. His former wife obtained a draconian injunction last year, under an obscure Victorian law, banning his autobiography on the grounds that their 12-year-old son could be ‘harmed psychologically’ by the graphic detail.
But this week the Supreme Court lifted the injunction. Significantly, the five judges who heard the evidence ruled that though Mr Rhodes had argued persuasively that publication would help other victims, he should not have to make a public interest case to justify it at all.
‘The right to report the truth is justification in itself,’ they said.
Benedict Cumberbatch was by his friend’s side for the verdict. The two hugged each other outside, with the actor declaring the judgment ‘a searing vindication of freedom of speech’.
At a time when, it could be argued, this fundamental principle is increasingly under threat — by gagging orders, in particular — few would disagree.
Such has been the secrecy around the case that the initial Court of Appeal judgment (preventing publication of the book) bizarrely described Mr Rhodes’s former wife as living in Ruritania (the fictional country in central Europe that forms the setting for the classic Anthony Hope novel The Prisoner Of Zenda), while their son was said to have ‘dual British and Ruritanian nationality.’
They actually live in America, but still cannot be named.
However ill-judged taking legal action might have been - apart from anything else, it has amplified publicity for the book — it is impossible not to have some sympathy for the woman Mr Rhodes was once married to (they divorced in 2009) or respect her motives for embarking on such a course of action.
Their young son, it emerges, is highly vulnerable, having been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, attention deficit disorder and other health problems.
Rhodes sees him regularly. ‘I love him more than anything,’ he said after the court victory. ‘He is not going to read the book. This is not a children’s book.’
Today, that harrowing, but sadly all-too-familiar narrative, can be revealed in full for the first time. Much of the background, including passages from his memoirs, is contained in the 37-page Supreme Court judgment.
James Rhodes was the middle of three children born to a middle-class Jewish family in St John’s Wood, North London; his father is an eminent lawyer.
When he was five, James went to Arnold House, an exclusive prep school serving the affluent neighbourhood where he lived and a conveyor belt for Westminster, St Paul’s and Charterhouse, as well as Eton and Harrow. The comedian Michael McIntyre was in the year below.
Rhodes had been at the school for a year when the abuse began, though he says in the book that it is wrong to describe the ordeal inflicted on him as ‘abuse’.
‘Abuse. What a word. Abuse is when you tell a traffic warden to “F*** off’’ . . . I was used, broken, toyed with and violated from the age of six. Over and over for years and years.’
A full five years, to be precise. The perpetrator, he says, was his boxing master, someone he looked up to.
Few details about him, other than his name - Peter Lee - are given in his autobiography, but our inquiries this week led us to Birchington-on-Sea, near Margate, Kent.
Here, we discovered, Peter Lee lived with his wife in a large Sixties bungalow with white painted window frames, opposite a primary school. Mr Lee died, aged 87, in 2011, five years after his wife passed away. They had no children.
Around 200 friends, family and members of the local council attended the funeral of the man who founded the gym at Margate Boxing Club and served in the Navy during World War II.
His coffin, draped in the Union flag, arrived at the chapel in a horse-drawn hearse.
‘He loved Frank Sinatra, so we played Summer Wind as we went in,’ his nephew Denny Barter is quoted as saying in the local paper. ‘I sang a song for him during the service and we finished with Sinatra’s The Best Is Yet To Come.’
What few people knew, outside his close family circle, was that shortly before his death Lee was arrested and faced trial for paedophilia. Mr Barter confirmed that his uncle was a boxing coach at Arnold House, was facing criminal charges and was the same Peter Lee that James Rhodes accuses of molesting him. Were there any other alleged victims?
‘I would rather make no comment,’ Mr Barter informed us politely. Nor could we illicit this information from the police.
Many of Lee’s friends, however, were unaware of the pending trial. ‘It’s shocking,’ said one. ‘Peter was such a nice bloke. He was well known in the area.’
Yet, this frail old man and popular community figure was the same individual, it seems, who violated James Rhodes so violently that he required spinal surgery as a child. The emotional and psychological scars he left on Rhodes went much deeper; like almost all victims of sexual abuse, he suffered in silence, ‘learning to dissociate himself from what was happening’.
The judgment reveals how, when he moved to other schools, he had learned to offer sexual favours to older boys and teachers in return for sweets and other treats.
He found refuge in music. Rhodes began playing the piano at seven but, remarkably, only had his first proper lessons at 14.
He turned down a scholarship at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama on the advice of his parents, who feared his personality was not suited to the uncertain career path music offered.
He ended up in financial publishing in the City. He met his future wife, an American novelist working in London, around this time. They wed in 2001. He was 26; she was 36.
‘The poor thing didn’t have a chance,’ Rhodes admits in his book. ‘I’ve honestly no idea what I was thinking of, beyond that rather sad hope that if I continued to do what normal people did then I would somehow become normal.
‘But the idea that a man like me could not only get married, but maintain, nurture and commit to a marriage was ridiculous. My whole concept of love was skewed.’
Their son was born three years later; the effect this had on Rhodes is recounted with searing and brutal honesty. He wanted to be a perfect father, he writes, but: ‘I don’t think I will ever be able to make my peace with the fact that the ripples of my past became tidal waves when he was born.’
For the past had installed ‘an unshakeable belief that all children suffer through childhood in the most abominable ways and that nothing and no one can protect them from it.’
Eventually, he sought professional help from a charity specialising in helping victims of child sexual abuse and was told he must tell his wife about it. He did. Their son was then four years old.
‘Apparently, it is very common for the world to spin completely off its axis when your child approaches the age you were when the abuse began,’ Rhodes writes, an observation that will surely resonate with many others who have gone through a similar experience.
Rhodes ended up having a series of breakdowns that led to eight months in and out of mental institutions in Britain and America ‘doing my level best to kill myself’.
A t his lowest point, he took a train to Eastbourne, then a cab to Beachy Head, where he sat for hours on the cliff, his legs dangling over the edge.
There is a particularly moving account in his book - reproduced in the judgment - about rebuilding his relationship with his son.
‘That’s the weird thing about kids - they have a capacity for forgiveness that most adults can only aspire to.
‘He has always loved me - it is inbuilt and immutable - and I him. After a few weeks of playing, singing, hanging out we felt absolutely connected and back to normal.’
The marriage could not be repaired, though. Rhodes resorted to self-harming and his wife moved back to the U.S. with their son.
‘Understandably and justifiably, she’d had enough,’ he says. ‘There had been so much destruction, so much uncertainty and pain, and she decided that our son’s needs had to come first. She was a mother first and foremost and not some patron saint of lost causes.’
By then, Rhodes had given up his job in the City to pursue his real love: music. Yet, it was only after he emerged from this dark spell in 2007 that he met his present manager and his career as a concert pianist began in earnest.
His concerts led to press interest, including an interview with a Sunday newspaper in which Rhodes mentioned the abuse at Arnold House. This prompted a senior member of staff to contact police.
Peter Lee was still coaching young boys boxing in Margate. He was charged, but died before standing trial.
Rhodes has found happiness again with singer and writer Hattie Chamberlin, 31; they were married last year. Cumberbatch was an usher at their wedding.
‘Maybe one day I will forgive Mr Lee,’ Rhodes says in his autobiography. ‘That’s much likelier to happen if I find a way to forgive myself.
‘But the truth, for me at any rate, is that sexual abuse of children rarely, if ever, ends in forgiveness. It leads only to self-blame, visceral, self-directed rage and shame.
‘But shining a light on topics like this is hugely important.
‘And getting hundreds of supportive and grateful messages from people who had also gone through similar experiences was an indicator to me that it needs to be talked about even more.’
Brave: James Rhodes flanked by his wife Hattie and Benedict Cumberbatch outside court
Daily Mail