This unconventional British virtuoso is shaking up the classical piano world.

James Rhodes doesn’t look, dress or talk like a concert pianist. Seeing him taking voluptuous puffs on a cigarette outside the sushi restaurant where we meet in Sydney’s Surry Hills, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was from an indie rock band. He has slackly trimmed long hair; he wears thick, geek-chic glasses; he flails his tattooed arms when he talks. Only zoom in for a second… The tattoo on his arm reads “Sergei Rachmaninov” in Cyrillic. And the conversation we’re having isn’t about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. It’s about pianists. Great, dead pianists. With a serving of sex and drugs on the side.

Rhodes is an anomaly in the classical music world. He didn’t take up the piano seriously until the age of 28, and he is now recording standard piano repertoire on a pop label, Warner Music. He is their first and only core classical artist. For them he has just released what that industry might call a “concept album”, Bullets and Lullabies, his third studio recording. But before we even touch upon the album, our conversation is whizzing from one great pianist...