Aged four, at a school for the blind in south London called Linden Lodge, I met Adam Ockelford, who was the music teacher there, and he decided to take me under his wing. He started out by teaching me at home. He tells me I didn’t take kindly to being told what to do. I’d push him out the way and so he’d pick me up and place me in the corner of the children’s room where we practised. He’d play a tune while I found my way back to the piano and then I’d repeat what I’d heard, just like that.

I loved practising and worked really hard, every day before breakfast and in the evenings. I first appeared on TV when I was only eight, in 1987, on the Derek Jameson Show. The next year, I hit the big time, playing the Pink Panther for Terry Wogan on UK national television, with an audience of millions. Suddenly, media from all over the world were interested.

As a teenager I’d often get frustrated and angry, and furniture would fly. But Adam helped me channel all those emotions through music and we would improvise together for hours. Today, playing the piano isn’t just my vocation, it continues to be the key to my emotional wellbeing as well.

It’s hard to explain, but any time I hear a piece of music it goes straight into my memory and stays there. I never forget a piece once I’ve heard it. My musical brain works really fast, too. When I listen to a piece, I can copy it straight away, less than half a second behind. Nobody knows how many songs I know – I certainly don’t. But it must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pieces.

For me, playing the piano is as easy as breathing. At a gig in a school north of Manchester a few years back I fell asleep when I was accompanying my friend Hannah Davey, the classical and jazz singer, but I carried on playing. And there doesn’t seem to be a limit on what I can learn. I memorised a full piano concerto with 11,000 notes just by listening, and played it with orchestras on the South Bank in London and in the Mainly Mozart Festival in San Diego, California.

In fact, I do lots of concerts, from schools to some of the world’s great concert halls and arenas – from Taiwan to Las Vegas. I love to entertain people – the bigger the audience the more I like it. And I’ve never been nervous when I perform. I just know I can do it.

People are mystified, because part of the show is when I ask the audience for requests. They can choose anything they like. As long as I’ve heard the music before, I can reproduce it, even if I’ve never played it before. If I haven’t heard it, I just ask them to play it on their phone and then I’m off. Think of a song right now and I’ll be able to play it, whatever it is.