Jarvis Cocker has called James Rhodes’s forthcoming book Fire on All Sides – his account of a concert tour accompanied by his ever-present personal demons – “hysterical, harrowing, honest”. Now we can hear the music in all its hysterical, harrowing and honest reality: the Bach, Chopin, Beethoven and Rachmaninov that kept Rhodes from going under. There is real pain in the pivotal chords that shift the mood in the last movement of Beethoven’s piano sonata No 31 in A flat major; aching tenderness and stately grandeur in two Chopin nocturnes (B major, Op 62 No 1 and C minor, Op 48 No 1) and glorious triumph against the odds in Rachmaninov’s prelude in D flat minor, Op 32 No 13.
