I was such a well-adjusted kid.
The only thing that came close to my worship of all things piano was smoking. Fucking smoking. The best invention since anything anywhere. This whole book could be a love letter to tobacco. The only thing greater than being on my own as a kid and playing the piano was wandering around hiding from the world smoking cigarettes. These magical cylinders with the most extraordinary medicinal qualities offered me everything I felt was missing. Getting hold of them was easier than you’d think, especially in 1985 – friendly newsagents, older kids, the odd kind (and horny) teacher. Silk Cut was my best friend.
I look at my life today and realise not much has really changed – Marlboro now, but cigarettes and the piano are the central things in my life. The only things that will not, cannot, let me down. Even the threat of cancer would simply be an excuse to finally watch Breaking Bad in its entirety and take a metric fuck-tonne of drugs.
The thing about smoking that they don’t tell you is how good it is at stifling feelings. Later I found out that in several of the psych wards I was in, they actively encouraged patients to smoke as it made the nurses’ job a lot easier. There is nothing as terrifying to a mentally ill person as a feeling. Good or bad doesn’t matter. It still has the potential to turn our minds upside down and back to front without offering the vaguest clue how to deal with it reasonably or rationally. I am at least forty-three times more likely to top myself if I am not smoking. And so I smoke. Whenever I can, as much as I can. The odd occasion I’ve tried to stop has always been to please other people – the girl, family, society. Never works. I am a master at engineering a crisis that allows those close to me to grant smoking consent again. If there’s a loaded gun (real or imagined) or a pack of cigarettes in front of you, take the smokes every time. I know that’s off-message. But good God they work wonders for me. Even the thought of being able to smoke at a certain future event, be it a concert, party, interview, restaurant, keeps me on a somewhat even keel. Take that away (airports, for example) and I’m going to fuck your shit up. It’s why I more often than not come back out through security for a last smoke and then all the way back through it again before flying off anywhere. Totally worth getting molested by the TSA assholes yet again. I’m not proud of it. I know it makes me seem like a wanker. A slave. A raging addict in total denial. I don’t even care. I am all of those things and I will always be pathetically grateful for Big Tobacco.
So in a way, there were, on a good day, sufficient positive things to counteract the negative and I was happy enough at boarding school. I got into this cycle of terror (bullying, aggressive and unwanted sex, bewilderment) followed by the calm of space to smoke, play piano, listen to music. It reminds me of what it must be like for a soldier to come back from action to his home country for a few days before shipping off again. And this cycle continues unabated today. Terror of being on stage, of being intimate with Hattie, of seeing the psychiatrist, of being with my son and its attendant feelings, of being in social situations, circumstances I cannot control. And relief when home with a piano, locked door, ashtray, US TV shows, alone, uninterrupted. Time alone. The Holy Grail.
TRACK FIVE
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111, Second Movement
Garrick Ohlsson, Piano
In 1770, a child is born into difficult, violent, terrifying circumstances. His family is riddled with alcoholism, domestic violence, abuse and cruelty Things get so out of control that at sixteen he takes his own father to court to wrest control of his income so that his family can eat.
While in his twenties, he singlehandedly drags music by the scruff of its neck from the Classical into the Romantic age, focusing on emotions, looking inwards, flouting convention, staying relentlessly true to his own convictions, composing for the orchestras of the future and resolutely indifferent to others’ perceptions of him.
Totally deaf wracked with pain, emotionally fucked, he composes his thirty-second and final piano sonata in 1822, a few years before his death.
It represents the absolute summit of his musical output for the piano.
Two movements long instead of the usual three or four, it manages, somehow, to transcend the level of human existence we inhabit and take us somewhere higher, where time stands still and we actually experience the concept of ‘interiority’ that he had spoken about and the inner worlds his music represents. This was music not for God or the Court; it was about feelings, about looking inwards, about humanity, ee cummings wrote that ‘to be nobody-but-yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting’. Beethoven lived that every day of his goddamn life.
A WORD ABOUT TIME. BECAUSE it’s important. Space is nothing without time. Time is a buffer. A safe space in between stuff happening. There is literally nothing as comforting to me as a completely empty day in my diary. No meetings, dinners, appointments, coffees with friends, dates, concerts. The knowledge that I can be at home all day with enough time to do whatever I need to do. It’s the reason I arrive stupidly early to appointments, get to Heathrow five hours before my flight is due to leave, believe that a ten-minute car journey needs an hour. If there is enough time then I am safe. Needing six clear hours to do two hours of practice is about right. Same with every area of my life. Every album I’ve recorded I’ve been allotted three or four days’ recording time and have used half of it. Exams completed within half the allocated time. Deadlines met magnificently early. Chores done in a third of the time needed. It’s great for business, not so great for personal stuff. Dates don’t want to order within thirty seconds of being given a menu and be done with dinner after forty-five minutes. They don’t want to be next to someone constantly on the verge of a breakdown if they haven’t left for a party round the corner two hours before the start, who is always the first person to show up, who they know when you say ‘meet at 6’ will be there waiting at 4.30, hopping from foot to foot like a slightly anxious meerkat.
I am driven by a hundred thousand different forms of terror. Terror of being criticised, of running out of time, of not being good enough, of getting things wrong, missing out on something, not being able to focus on other things that may come up, letting other people down. It is a constantly shifting, free-floating anxiety that no matter what is done to assuage it, will easily and quickly attach itself to something new I haven’t even thought of yet. Like playing some David Lynch-inspired game of Whack-a-mole where every time you hit one on the head, a dozen more shoot up around you. And they smirk at you and say the most awful things and remind you of just how fucked you are.
I wake up with it. Always have.
If there were an ultra-neurotic Jewish mother, on coke, who was beyond evil and got wet off malevolence, that is that part of my mind. And so I hurl myself at the fucking piano as if my life depends on it. I throw myself into work. And from the outside I look like any other hard-working motherfucker who just wants to do the best job possible and not let people down. But the reality is that if I don’t then I will die, I will murder, I will fall apart in the worst possible way. It is incredibly lucky that occasionally the urge for self-preservation looks like you have a decent work ethic. Fear, masquerading as humility and commitment to the job at hand, is enough to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.
And that’s how I got through school. Terror-driven homework, panic-studying for exams, trying as hard as I could to make time expand and increase and cocoon things so that there was, at the very least, the illusion of safety there. I was a smart kid, too.