Watch James Rhodes play Bach

James Rhodes has just told me that Mozart’s Jupiter is the greatest symphony ever written. But then he gets on to Bruckner’s Seventh. “One of the greatest moments of my life; greatest symphony ever written. It’s like having Kylie and her sister in the Dorchester, in a bath full of honey.” He’s an excitable man who moves through a world of extremes. On his inner right forearm, “Sergei Rachmaninov” is tattooed in big Cyrillic characters; on his left wrist, a “significant” date is inscribed, in the manner of an Auschwitz tattoo, and there’s a symbol signifying wellness, peace and prosperity. “It’s a bit new-age, I know, but you can’t go wrong with those.”

Rhodes is 33, has large brown eyes and is possessed of a birdlike, electric alertness that seems to have shocked his hair into a tangle of curls. He wears a fashionably huge watch and there’s a pack of Camels on the table beside him. He always asks for an ashtray in restaurants — we’re in the Wallace Collection’s, in central London — even though he knows he can never smoke. He loves smoking: “Greatest invention ever.” He’s voluble, wittily au fait with contemporary tropes and very slender — no, he’s fragile, very fragile. This makes one wonder. He is about to be launched on the world as a classical piano star: can he take it?

The fragility is not merely physical. This is a man whose mental scars are as extravagant as his tattoos and the self-inflicted razor slashes on his upper arms. His CV is a total nightmare.

“It is,” he says, “a weird f***ing story.” (That expletive peppers his conversation; I don’t like asterisks, so insert your own.) He was born to “a nice middle-class Jewish family” in St John’s Wood, north London. He doesn’t have much to do with his family now, though he says he is close to his mother. “I had a very difficult childhood, a lot of abuse. I was really miserable at school, very isolated, nervous tics, bed-wetting, the usual stuff.”

The abuse happened at school — “Sexual and otherwise. The 1980s were a heyday for abusers. My parents weren’t around as much as they could be; emotionally they weren’t present, but it wasn’t the most functional of families. For whatever reason, I felt really alone. It was serious abuse — a gym teacher, it’s always gym teachers — to the extent that I had to have a back operation at 13 because he’d shattered my spine. It wasn’t just the odd touch or grope. The police tried to trace the guy, but he was a ghost — false name, false address.”

In the midst of this hell, when he was seven, Rhodes stole one of his father’s CDs. It was Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. “I used to listen to music,” he says. “I’d love all the loud, fast, exciting stuff, so I’d always listen to first movements, then skip to the last. This time, I couldn’t be f***ed to get out of bed and press fast-forward, and the second movement came on. It was the first time I cried. I’d never heard anything like it before in my life. It was an Elvis moment — from then on, I was obsessed with the piano.”

He had found a place that wasn’t home or school, and was determined not to lose it. But he didn’t get much help. Piano tuition at his school began to struggle at Grade 3, so, for the next seven years, he taught himself. He worked his way through everything from Chopin’s Fourth Ballade to “some cheesy piece” by Richard Clayderman. Life had failed him, but music never did: “It was an escape. Drink, drugs, cigarettes, everything is an escape. Music is the least damaging, the one that never lets me down. It is the most rewarding, I think.”

He got out of the hell of his primary school at 10, went to boarding school, then, at 13, went to Harrow, where he finally found a proper piano teacher, Colin Stone. “He had a really tough job,” Rhodes recalls. “I was so insanely enthusiastic and lacked any kind of self-discipline. I’d picked up so many bad habits. I don’t think you can teach yourself if you want to play pieces like the Fourth Ballade. I loved Colin’s first report — it said, ‘If enthusiasm equalled talent, James would already rival Ashkenazy, but unfortunately it doesn’t.’ ”

At 18, he was ready to be offered a scholarship at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, but “for whatever reason, dad wasn’t having any of it. He insisted I get a university degree. So I did psychology at UCL”. He laughs: “Talk about the blind leading the blind.”

For years, he defied his nature and abandoned the piano. After university, he took a job in the City and found himself earning big money. Then, at 26, he married — “a writer, 10 years older than me, an American Catholic” — and they had a child, Eddie. He was suddenly stricken with guilt. “I thought, there will come a time when he says to me, ‘Dad, you’re obsessed with the piano, you listen to it all the time, it’s all you talk about. Why don’t you do this for your job; why do you get up at six and go to a job you hate?’ So I quit.”

He was a fan of the Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov — he is, of course, “the greatest pianist in the world”, though, on the other hand, so is Evgeny Kissin. He wrote to Sokolov’s agent in Italy with the vague thought he might become a music agent himself. The agent responded, and Rhodes sent him a bottle of Krug champagne — “I was Charlie Big Potatoes in the City, and Italians like that kind of thing.” Finally, he visited the agent in Genoa, who heard him play and was astounded. “He said he’d never heard anyone who wasn’t a professional pianist play like that.”

Explore Music

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette