Instrumental (17 page)

TRACK SEVENTEEN

Schubert, Sonata No. 20, D959, Second Movement

Alexander Lonquich, Piano

(if you can find his recording anywhere. Otherwise Severin von Eckardstein nails it with appropriate madness)

In 1994, EMI released what was for me the greatest disc of Schubert's piano music ever made. A young pianist called Alexander Lonquich was at the keyboard. Born in Trier, Germany, but residing in Italy, Lonquich was EMI's shining star.

Bear in mind that this was a time when classical music had serious money. This was EMI in its heyday, with huge marketing spend and a loyal and large fan base. The main work on the CD was Schubert's immense A major Sonata, D959. As is the case with Beethoven, Schubert's last three sonatas (of which this is the second) are his crowning achievement. They are ethereal, mesmerising, astonishing and immortal. Schubert's madness has never been more clear in the bipolar slow movement where any pretence at tonality and
structure flies out of the window, and the genius of the last movement of this piece is such that I can (and have) listened to it hundreds of times, not once being anything other than enraptured. It is, in my opinion, the greatest thing he ever wrote.

Hundreds of pianists have recorded this work, but Lonquich is in an entirely different league. He manages to do the impossible and make it seem that, even in its most insane moments, there is space between every note. The music floats into your ears and simply takes over your mind. I know it sounds pretentious and distinctly un-British, but I first listened to it after a piano lesson in Verona, sitting at a cafe in the sunshine, drinking the finest coffee known to man, and openly wept at the genius on display. It was a genuine reminder of everything that is great about the world.

Lonquich's sound, his staggering technique, his ability to make the entire sonata seep into every cell of your body and make you stare open-mouthed in wonderment is the rarest of feats. It is a disc I come back to again and again and again.

As an aside, because it's interesting to me, at a time of money, marketing, loyal fans and with the impressive weight of EMI behind him, according to a good friend and ex-flatmate of his who is also in the business, Lonquich's album, his superbly recorded, bar-raising reinvention of Schubert has, to date, sold just over seventy units. Seven zero.

THE THRILLS AND SPILLS OF
2012 began with Channel 4. They came to us via the production company that had done the Sky Arts series and suggested a one-off documentary looking at music and mental
health. Which was perfect. All too often someone in my position is asked to front a programme for one of the major TV channels and ends up doing something that runs totally counter to their ideals and ideas. But they do it because, well, it's Channel 4, or the BBC or ITV or whatever. In this case I was lucky enough to find the perfect fit on my first shot. I'd done the Sky Arts series and the BBC4 documentary about Chopin so was used to filming, loved the whole process, and Denis and I had always dreamed of being on terrestrial TV. When I worked in the City, we used that awful phrase ‘channel to market' all the time. And as far as classical was concerned, the biggest channel to market was terrestrial TV. It was the fastest and most effective way to get core classical music into people's lives and living rooms. It's what the major labels had always moaned about wanting because it was such a powerful medium, but could never seem to find the right people to do it.

We were due to start filming in July of 2012. The idea was for me to go into a secure, locked psychiatric ward (this time as a guest), meet some of their most vulnerable patients and talk about their histories, and then I was to find a piece of piano music I felt would resonate with them and play it just to them on a giant Steinway concert grand. It was, for me, a testament to the power of music and its ability to cut through even the heaviest medication and perhaps shine a little glimmer of light on an otherwise fucked situation.

Now I know that music heals. I know that it saved my life, kept me safe, gave me hope when there was none elsewhere. And the
thought of capturing that, in some small way, on TV was an amazing opportunity for me. Alas a few days before filming started, my relationship fell apart, and this time it felt like it was for good.

It had been coming for a while. Both Hattie and I, despite sharing a seemingly bottomless pit of love, were on different pages. She wanted marriage and kids, I didn't feel brave enough to go down the road again after what had happened to me the first time. She had certain past traumas that had left her fragile in ways that made it hard for her to feel secure and confident, and I didn't make it any easier for her with my constant controlling and dickish behaviour. Ultimately we decided that we should end things, and in early June she moved out.

And the tragic thing is that the moment she did, I knew it was a huge mistake. Look, the easiest thing in the world is to cut and run. From anything, not just relationships. It neatly avoids taking responsibility for things, learning lessons that
have
to be learned at some point, reinforces blame and, in my case at least, ensured I would simply repeat the same shit with someone else.

I went off to the hospital, a couple of hours outside London, and started filming while she collected her things and emptied our flat. All of which meant I was stuck in a mental hospital, with a film crew, wanting to die, alone and afraid and miserable. Which made for good TV at the very least. I was there for a couple of weeks, meeting these astonishing patients, hearing stories that defied belief, many of which couldn't for legal reasons make the final edit. It had been very hard getting into the hospital in the first place – such is our culture that many of the staff thought we were an undercover
Panorama
crew or
similar, ostensibly there to make a doc about the patients and music, but in reality there to expose their awful practices and show the world how dreadfully the patients were treated and how low the standard of care was.

Which was nuts, because the staff were, to a (wo)man, incredible. The patients had all been sectioned, had spent many, many years in hospital, many of them decades. They had violent backgrounds, severe self-harm issues, shatteringly awful histories and symptoms. And as the days went on I started to get more and more wobbly. The smells of the hospital, the medication times on the boards, the carpets, the air of desperation, sadness and everything else that comprises mental hospitals brought all of my stuff back, and the one person I wanted to call had moved out and moved on.

The crew were terrific, we did everything we needed to do, the patients were at once humbling and inspiring, and the time I spent there seemed to provide the director with enough material to make a 47-minute film.

I left and got the train back to London very late on a Sunday night. It was pissing with rain. I walked through my front door to an empty flat, Hattie's keys gently laid on the table, everything neat and tidy and soulless and quiet. I just sat there and cried, feeling very sorry for myself. And I felt that awful, creeping and all too familiar chill of destruction and depression knocking at the door.

Depression abhors a vacuum. Despite a run of concerts, filming, recording and writing, I suddenly found myself empty. There was very little in the diary, I was exhausted after the end of the relationship and an intense period of work on the documentary, alone in
my flat, my son on the other side of the world, friends busy with their own lives. Denis was around, he always is, and yet when people like me spot a space we tend to tunnel into it rather than out of it. We're as stupid and as incapable of learning as moths circling a light bulb.

And the following twelve months were the closest I've been to disappearing for good since being hospitalised. The whole cosmic, self-help mantra of being given what you need when you need it, of needing to hit rock bottom, having to go through things rather than around them is, sadly, true. At least for me. If I'd weighed a few stone more, had the constitution to handle alcohol, heroin and crack, a lot of cash and no issue with sleeping with hookers, I could perhaps have got through things a different, slightly more entertaining way. But I finally had time, space and loneliness forced upon me by some force greater than myself and, as it turned out, I came through the other side ready, for the first time in my life, to live well.

There are not seven stages of grief. Not in my experience. Why does everything have to be boiled down into bite-sized, manage-able, understandable chunks? Are we that fucking stupid and incapable of living without definitives or corners or edges? There was just one long stage of hell. It would switch in an instant from absolute anger to inconsolable sadness to despair, hopelessness, an unfillable emptiness. There were occasional moments of peace, usually as a result of having only two hours' sleep and being too tired to feel anything. There was the occasional relapse into self harm and cutting, a couple of disastrous dates, one brief, mental
fling and a soulless one-night stand, but primarily there was an awful lot of time on my own, thinking, sitting, feeling. Without medication. It was a first for me, and something that was inevitable, essential and, more by dumb luck than anything else, ultimately redemptive and restorative.

There was a certain desolate routine that I stumbled into. Up at three or four in the morning after a few hours' sleep, giant pot of coffee, couple of hours of piano in my little spare bedroom, more coffee, endless cigarettes, talk radio for company, more piano, shuffling out to Starbucks when it opened and watching, with open hostility, those couples going to work holding hands. Glazed eyes, ‘fuck off' tattooed invisibly on my forehead, losing weight day by day. There was no focus in my life other than on its lack of focus. And that is a terrifying thing for someone who has entertained thoughts of suicide or self-harm. And the most painful thing was not that I had lost the one true love of my life, but that she was, in my head as per usual, going about her life with a spring in her step, having spectacular sex with a succession of handsome, well-built, rich men, partying until the small hours and giggling with joy the whole time.

I know there's nothing new here. Nothing that isn't happening to a million unfortunate bastards every fucking day. And yet when it's happening we all feel like we are the only ones. Grief and sadness is always wretchedly unique.

Denis and various friends tried their hardest to help but I guess I didn't want to be helped. It became apparent that this was not simply pain that came from the break-up of a relationship. It was bigger than
that. Evidently, after a few weeks, most people would simply snap out of it, move on to someone new, put it down to life experience. Hattie and I had had five years, which was long, but by no means seriously long-term. We hadn't had children, hadn't been married, had only lived together for a couple of years. But I simply could not get over it. If anything, the pain was getting worse.

Six months down the line I was still in pieces. Everything I saw reminded me of her, everything I did was empty because she wasn't there. Even now I hate myself slightly for just how full of self-pity I seemed. I was a friend's worst nightmare. The crushing bore, obsessed with his own pain, with no room for any other news.

Nothing was working, and it felt time-sensitive. Like chances are I would not make it if things carried on much longer. I made a new will, wrote goodbye notes to a select few, played around with the idea of ending things once and for all. And once again, Jack stopped me from doing it just by existing. I made a goodbye video for him, watched it back and knew then and there that it wasn't a viable solution. I could not, just absolutely could not leave him. It didn't matter that we saw each other only a few times a year.

I did the occasional concert on autopilot (grim, jet-lagged performances in Chicago, Hong Kong, a few in London), practised every day, did what I could to function at the bare minimum.

What was lovely was how, despite my mood, despite giving concerts where some were good enough and some were, to my mind, a bit shabby, my audiences were consistently, overwhelmingly supportive and brilliant. For all my personal ups and downs and raging, self-critical head, they were so incredibly kind and reassuring.

One highlight was when I flew to Austria to play two concerts in one day. We landed and drove to the British ambassador's residence where I played for ninety minutes to an assorted audience of well-heeled Viennese and English socialites and influencers (whatever the fuck that means). And then immediately afterwards I was driven to the Konzerthaus for an evening recital – a concert hall steeped in tradition and history and Austria's equivalent to the Wigmore Hall.

Backstage they had a fridge full of chocolate, a Nespresso machine, bananas and Haribo (Southbank Centre take note). And even more delightfully, a smoking room where I sat with my coffee and chatted to a few violinists and cellists – who turned out to be members of the Vienna Philharmonic. Feeling a little like a football fan in the Stamford Bridge players' cafeteria, I dribbled and blushed my way through five minutes of music chat (turns out Sakari Oramo is a proper gent) before rushing back to the piano, realising stupidly late that I was about to play Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin to a soldout Konzerthaus in bloody Vienna.