Robert Wyatt - To the Heart of Rock

Amid the roar of the ambulance's turns, the screech of the stretcher down the hospital corridor and the murmur of the many friends who had rushed to be by his side, Robert could only make out Alfreda's voice calling to him.
At times the darkness grew thick and pitch-black, and his thoughts sank into it too, into that black hole that swallows even the soul; the brief moments of waking were like flashes of light, so blinding that they left him no time to grasp what was really happening to him. The only thing he could think of in those short spells of lucid awareness was that he was probably dead… then, total darkness.
The doctor tried to call out to him, lifting his eyelids and letting the light in as if it were a sword tearing through the black cloth trying to separate him from life. Robert struggled to control even the air going in and out of his lungs - in fact he wasn't even sure it was really his lungs drawing and releasing that air; he tried to grab onto something to feel grounded again: a thought, a feeling, anger. At some point a melody must have come to him, though it wasn't quite that, perhaps just fragments of melody - no, actually! It was a rhythm, something that followed his labored breathing, the kind of thing that maybe only comes to you when you're holding your breath underwater; perhaps he could feel his heart again too, that dull thud pounding in his ears like a bass drum miles away.
Robert wanted to flee that darkness, and he had the sense that his senses, which had seemed to abandon him forever, were starting again to send information and impulses to the amygdala; Alfreda, who for the first time was finally glimpsing a flicker of life in her man's eyes, understood that the nightmare was perhaps coming to an end.
When Alfreda asked for news, the doctor treating Robert, the one who had snatched him from death, replied in astonishment: "He must have been really drunk to stay so relaxed while falling from the fourth floor. If he'd been just a bit more sober, we probably wouldn't be here today: Robert would have tensed his whole body out of fear, and he would have been smashed to pieces."
It was the night between June 1st and 2nd, 1973, at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury, a town in southeastern England, in the county of Buckingham.

We like to think that music, this age-old art which has so often shown itself capable of incredible healing and redemptive powers, was the rock that Robert Wyatt could cling to so as not to fall into permanent darkness. Barely twenty years earlier, while attending Simon Langton School in Canterbury, Robert had met the Hopper brothers, Brian and Hugh, and then two other boys, Mike Ratledge and Dave Sinclair; music was the cement of their bond and their friendship, and music would stay with them for their whole lives.
Jazz, in particular, seemed to exert an irresistible pull on this small group of teenagers, making them feel a kinship with the poets and writers of the "beat generation". The afternoons spent listening to records sent over from the US were among the happiest moments, as Robert would recall throughout his life ("Stan Kenton," he would confess years later, "literally exploded in my head!"). Yes, we really wouldn't be surprised if it was music itself that pulled Robert out of the darkness.

Formative Years and Early Experiences (1945-1965)

Let's rewind a little. Robert was born on January 28, 1945, in a Bristol that still remembered the Nazi bombings of a few years earlier and still bore their scars. His parents, George Ellidge and Honor Wyatt, were open-minded people with openly socialist views, receptive to all the artistic currents stirring in the immediate postwar years; his father in particular taught young Robert to play piano and introduced him to his first jazz records along with some modern music (Hindemith, Shostakovich and Bartok). Through his mother Honor, whose surname he would later take, he got to know classical and Renaissance music (Monteverdi).
In 1956 came the first turning point in young Robert's life: George, a psychologist and industrial consultant, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and Honor, a teacher and radio journalist, decided to move the whole family away from the chaos of the city, to a place that could give George the peace he needed. After much hesitation, Honor decided to settle in Lydden, in the countryside near Canterbury; there they rented a house, and to help pay for it they began subletting rooms to people passing through, even for just a couple of days.
Despite George's debilitating illness, Robert and his siblings would remember their time in Canterbury as the happiest of their lives.
The Wyatt-Ellidge home, a Georgian farmhouse known as Wellington House, became a kind of harbour where all sorts of people would land, even if only briefly - often fascinating, eccentric characters, and often passionate about art in general; the afternoons and evenings spent all together listening to music (Schönberg, Webern, Stockhausen, Dolphy, Coleman, Coltrane), chatting about literature, painting and politics over a brandy or a beer, were the decisive moments in Robert's artistic and personal development. A few years later, he and his young friends Brian and Hugh Hopper, having travelled to London for a series of jazz concerts, found time to make their first recording: an acetate, lost to history, on which they cut two vocal versions of "'Round Midnight" (Monk's celebrated standard, which would often resurface in Robert's discography) and "Evidence".

It's the late 1950s, and from America a kind of music never heard before had landed in Britain and Europe, much as the revolutionary bebop had landed from the US twenty years earlier, in a Europe ravaged by Nazi-fascist madness. This new music, unlike anything heard until then, placed at its centre an obsessive rhythm evolved from R&B and boogie, and it had the power to turn young people (at the time a socially negligible, almost anthropologically insignificant group) into a tribe with its own codes and behaviours: rock'n'roll.
Among the many phenomena that landed in England, one day in 1960 Daevid Allen showed up at Wellington House, having come from Melbourne, Australia, crossed Europe and stayed in Paris, armed with nothing but a guitar, a handful of wild ideas, 200 jazz records and a stash of marijuana: this was the second turning point that upended Robert's life.
This eccentric dandy from the other side of the world exerted on young Robert and his friends the kind of fascination an alien might exert on a team of astrophysicists; the influence - not just musical - that Allen had on the group from then on was enormous and decisive. Robert often found himself at the piano improvising blues with this strange character; it was Allen who pushed him to play drums, even though at first both of them had to make do with a broken typewriter, a coat rack and an old ammunition crate left over from the war. This was an era when rock was a way of being before it was a way of playing, and young Britons, short on proper instruments and resources, often made do with whatever they could find (these were the years of "skiffle" and the nascent Merseybeat).
A few months later, another young man arrived at the Wyatt-Ellidge household, a tall blond lad with promising artistic ambitions: Kevin Ayers, who was handy on guitar and bass and, thanks to his build, had a striking baritone voice. Wyatt and Allen drew Ayers into the freewheeling jam sessions set up with the Hopper brothers; Sinclair and Ratledge increasingly joined in too. Without knowing it, without even imagining it, that small group of passionate, bohemian kids had just given birth to one of the most influential and revolutionary movements in pop/rock, better known as the "Canterbury scene"; we were on the eve of Beatlemania and the British Invasion, and that style would later help shape the rules of progressive rock.
Allen, though, was a wanderer, and before long he decided to go back to Paris (the bohemian city par excellence) for who knows what artistic business; he would return to Canterbury the following year, but not alone. With him came a certain George Niedorf, a broke jazz musician who, to pay rent to Honor Wyatt, gave drum lessons to young Robert; after the odd lesson from his father George, these were the only music lessons Wyatt ever took, and they proved decisive for his career. Shortly after, Robert chose drums as his main instrument - Allen had read him right!

In 1961, Wyatt also met the writer Robert Graves, who was in the area for a series of lectures at Cambridge and Oxford and was invited to the house by Honor; Robert was captivated by Graves and his anthropological poetics, which opened up to him and Daevid the phantasmagorical treasure chest of pataphysics.
The "hearth" of Wellington House could no longer contain the whirlwind of youthful, artistic ideas and passions it had witnessed being born.
In the summer of 1962, Robert Wyatt and George Niedorf followed Graves to his home in Majorca, Spain. There Robert kept practising drums, supported also by Ramon Farran, Graves's son-in-law, and met other people who would prove important to him (including multimedia artist June Campbell Cramer, known as Lady June, who would become one of the muses of the Canterbury scene).
Meanwhile, Allen was in London with the Hopper brothers, and together they put together a trio that played music and recited poetry - one of many bohemian experiments dear to the Australian imp. Robert, still in Majorca, was playing in a jazz club. In the meantime George Ellidge died, worn down by seven years of illness, part of it spent in a wheelchair... a dark omen.
Robert returned to Canterbury, and the others gradually made their way back too; the last to return were Allen and the Hoppers, who had in the meantime moved to Paris to share some electronic experiments with Terry Riley. For a while Wyatt joined up with Hugh Hopper and Allen, even performing at the famous Marquee under the name Daevid Allen Trio; the experience, however, was brief and ended there (a bootleg of that performance exists, simply titled Live 1963, released by Voiceprint in 1993).

Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers, however, wasted no time; they felt the moment had come to bring together and give shape to the fragmentary experiences they'd gathered, and in 1964 they formed a band they called Wilde Flowers; the name was suggested by Ayers himself, inspired by the dandy poet par excellence, Oscar Wilde. This line-up, which also included Richard Sinclair (Dave's brother) and the Hopper brothers, never actually recorded a single LP, but is unanimously regarded as the project that would determine the fate and style of the Canterbury scene.
Instability would be one of the defining traits not only of the Canterbury scene's story but also of the artistic lives of its leading figures, not least Robert Wyatt himself. So the Wilde Flowers too ended up becoming a kind of revolving door through which many musicians passed in and out (by the time of their official split in 1969, after not even five years, the band had counted ten full members); Voiceprint would again, in 1994, release a collection of the essential Wilde Flowers material, a twenty-two track compilation titled Tales Of Canterbury (loosely inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer).
The comings and goings within Wilde Flowers, however, laid the groundwork for at least two distinct strands of the new emerging style: one leaning more towards the jazz-rock pioneered by Miles Davis and enriched by the distortions of Jimi Hendrix, the other more intent on developing a melodic pop vein.
While the second strand, represented by the Sinclair brothers, coalesced into Caravan, the first, embodied by Wyatt, Allen and Ayers, gave rise to Mister Head, later renamed Soft Machine; these two bands, both with extremely turbulent histories, represent the heart of the Canterbury scene and, together with other groups (Giles, Giles & Fripp, later King Crimson; Mabel Greer's Toyshop, later Yes; The Nice, later Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and Garden Wall, later Genesis), laid the foundations of the entire English strand of "progressive rock"; it was 1967, rock's first major turning point, the year that saw the birth of both the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "The Velvet Underground & Nico", as well as Pink Floyd's "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" and Frank Zappa's "freak trilogy".

The Two-Legged Drummer and the "Soft Machine" (1966-1973)

In 1966 the newly formed Mister Head (Wyatt, Allen and Ayers) met the wealthy Texan Wes Brunson in Deià, on the island of Majorca. Believing he had stumbled upon a phenomenon on the verge of exploding, Brunson financed the band without sparing any expense: instruments, amplifiers, renting a house near Canterbury and every expense needed (the episode vaguely recalls the meeting between Epstein and the Beatles at the Cavern).
Unlike the more famous (and fortunate) Epstein, Brunson's involvement stopped there, but it was enough to set the "machine" in motion. Back in England, Hugh Hopper, having left Wilde Flowers, also joined the band, in the loosely defined role of "road manager".

During 1967 the band began performing in London alongside other figures of the city's fledgling underground avant-garde (particularly with Syd Barrett and Roger Waters's Pink Floyd, at the legendary UFO Club with Mark Boyle's light shows); the two bands made quite a stir in town (Barrett and Allen were in some ways kindred spirits, and the musicians of the two bands have remained friends to this day), and from time to time notable figures of the rock circus and the swinging London jet set would come to listen to them (as at the Roundhouse, where the likes of Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, Michelangelo Antonioni and Marianne Faithfull turned up). Their first single soon followed: "Love Makes Sweet Music/Feelin' Reelin' Squeelin'", the former written by Allen, the latter by Ayers.
The original line-up of Mister Head consisted of Robert Wyatt (vocals and drums), Mike Ratledge (keyboards), Daevid Allen (guitar) and Kevin Ayers (bass and vocals); they were occasionally joined by American guitarist Larry Nolan, who left even before the band changed its name to Soft Machine. On that note, Ratledge recalled that "the name was borrowed from Burroughs's book, which in turn had taken it from reading a physiology essay. 'Soft Machine' was a generic term describing all of humanity; we liked that concept and felt we had a lot in common among ourselves. As a result, we all felt like 'soft machines', and we wanted to be that musically too".
The relationship between the "machine" of Allen, Wyatt and Ayers and the business side of things was complicated from the start; as mentioned, the Texan Brunson had abandoned them almost immediately, and the first studio sessions, overseen by Gomelsky, came to nothing (the tapes would be kept by the studio owner and used as bootleg material some time later). Following in the Beatles' footsteps, they went seeking their fortune in the stingy clubs of Hamburg, where they played at the Star Club. But London was the real centre of the pop music scene of those years, and there - where the Soft Machine would temporarily find refuge once again at Honor's house - they became firmly embedded in the city's musical circles: alongside their friends in Pink Floyd they took part in concerts and evenings with Alexis Korner, Graham Bond, the Move, the Pretty Things, Pete Townshend, the Social Deviants, Ron Geesin, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Jacques Lebel, Andy Warhol, Zappa's Mothers of Invention, the Velvet Underground and many others; on April 29, 1967, at London's Alexandra Palace, on the historic night of the "14 Hour Technicolor Dream", organised by Barry Miles and "Hoppy" Hopkins, 10,000 people, drawn in by the beacon-call of "Astronomy Domine", flocked to hear the "new creatures" of rock celebrating underground London. Barrett's Pink Floyd (who were, in those very months, recording their astonishing and memorable debut album) were the main attraction of the event, but Soft Machine too carved out their own very distinctive space; their style stood out for its jazz arrangements of brazenly pop songs, played at extremely high volume and without pause. Lennon himself was seen wandering around Alexandra Palace that night, and one can be sure the author of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" and "I Am The Walrus" took plenty away from that experience.

The Sixties moved fast, at supersonic speed, and events followed one another in a tumultuous way, often openly contradicting each other; and so Wyatt, Allen and company were catapulted to the Côte d'Azur, where, between concerts and theatrical pieces (including Picasso's "Le Désir attrapé par la queue"), they managed to win over French audiences too (among them, Jean-Luc Godard and Brigitte Bardot).
Back in Britain, where Soft Machine were booked to take part in the pataphysical piece "Ubu in Chains", staged in Edinburgh by Jarry himself, Daevid Allen was stopped at customs because his visa had expired, and was forced to stay in France; this episode effectively marked Allen's departure from the band (he would go on to build another fundamental project tied to the Canterbury scene: Gong). Meanwhile the band was awarded the Order of the Grand Gidouille by the Edinburgh chapter of the Collège de 'Pataphysique. The artistic movement born from the pen of the French playwright Alfred Jarry had a considerable influence on Soft Machine, especially on Allen, Wyatt and Ayers, who picked up on its creative vein rooted in bitter irony, the absurd and non-sense. The insights gained through their involvement in Jarry's pieces would end up hugely influencing the band's early style; a style that, right from the start, lived within a meaningful dichotomy, with on one side the "pataphysical" drive of Ayers and Wyatt, and on the other the jazz-oriented, more properly prog leanings of Hopper and Ratledge. A dichotomy that would shape the band's future fate.

At the start of 1968, Soft Machine got their big break: crossing the ocean for a real tour; they were booked as the opening act for Jimi Hendrix's American tour, Hendrix being genuinely fascinated by Wyatt and Ayers's musical project. The tour lasted only nine weeks, at the end of which, in New York, Soft Machine had the chance to record their first LP at Record Plant Studio, simply titled Volume One. It's a record that perfectly captures the band's earliest phase, the one that, alongside Pink Floyd, had stunned the audience at the Technicolor Dream the year before: a fusion of jazz and psychedelia, oblique melodies and an almost unbroken flow of songs.
At the end of the sessions, in July of that year, the band (temporarily joined by a young Andy Summers, future member of the Police) set off on a new tour with Jimi Hendrix in the US; upon arriving in California to play the Hollywood Bowl, Soft Machine essentially broke up, before Probe Records (a sub-label of ABC) even released their debut album, as Ayers decided to leave the project and, once back in England, launch a solo career that would prove highly interesting. Robert Wyatt, meanwhile, stayed on with Hendrix and even played with him in the studio. It was during those very weeks that he recorded an early sketch of what would become the testament of this first artistic period of his: "Moon In June".

At the end of '68 Probe forced Wyatt to reassemble the band for the release of Volume One; in place of the departed Ayers, Robert called on his friend Hugh Hopper, who went from road manager to the band's new bassist. This event brought about a substantial shift in the band's style: Ayers's pop sensibility was replaced by the sharper edge of Hopper's fuzz bass. Surprisingly, this ended up "stabilising" the Soft Machine sound, which took on a much more solid shape that would soon bear its first fruit.

In 1969 the new line-up (Wyatt, Ratledge, Hopper) recorded their Volume Two as well as some tracks for Syd Barrett's The Madcap Laughs, Barrett having in the meantime been ousted from Pink Floyd during the sessions for A Saucerful Of Secrets.
The second album is certainly more mature and well-defined than its predecessor; the balance between Wyatt's pataphysical pop and Ratledge's jazz ambitions, underpinned by Hopper's fuzz, makes the record one of the stylistically most solid releases of that extraordinary musical year ('69 was the year progressive rock reached maturity, while the glorious era of the British Invasion was drawing to a close, with the events at Woodstock and Altamont marking its inexorable end). Born under the inspiration of Zappa's freak trilogy (Zappa himself even gave his colleagues some advice in the studio), this second record is certainly a tribute to Hendrix (the winking track "Have You Ever Been Experienced?" bears witness to that) and to the psychedelia of the era.

During '68 Soft Machine were also invited onto Top Gear (a very popular BBC radio show in Sixties Britain), where Wyatt managed to play his "Moon In June", not without some irritation from Ratledge and Hopper; for the occasion the band was joined by Keith Tippett's horn quartet: Mark Charig, Nick Evans, Lyn Dobson and Elton Dean. The latter was, by the end of '69, the only one to remain with the band, effectively becoming its fourth permanent member, and would go on to play an important role in the Softs' future.
At the start of 1970, the artistic differences between Wyatt and the others (Ratledge above all) became more pronounced; Ratledge and Hopper had little patience for the pop spirit Wyatt insisted on honouring in his compositions, rather than letting the band become fully fledged jazz-rock. The underlying unease, though, was more complex; indeed, although Wyatt was aware that the artistic rift was becoming unbridgeable, he kept putting in effort with admirable intellectual honesty, especially on tracks written by the other members, but it wasn't reciprocated. So when Soft Machine found themselves back in the studio to work on their third LP, the point of no return seemed to have been crossed. Wyatt turned in some of his finest drumming performances ever on Hopper's and Ratledge's compositions; in particular, "Slightly All The Time" showcased perhaps Wyatt's single best performance as a drummer in Soft Machine. But when the time came to record and give final shape to "Moon In June", a piece Wyatt had been working on for a few years by then, his two colleagues held back and only agreed to record a few parts (though it's worth noting Ratledge's beautiful Hammond solo). This episode left Robert utterly despondent, and during the recording of the material that would make up Third, he gave himself an outlet by recording a series of tracks straddling jazz and experimental psychedelia, on which he tackled vocal parts of staggering difficulty. All of this went into Wyatt's first solo album: The End Of An Ear.

The almost simultaneous release of the band's third official album and Wyatt's first solo record marked a crucial turning point in his career.
The Softs' album, despite all the difficulties of coexistence, represented the peak of that musical story; Hopper, Dean, Ratledge and Wyatt put together a double LP in which each side was taken up by a single, sprawling track - difficult to call them "suites" in the strict sense, but closer in spirit to those Davis recorded on the monumental "Bitches Brew". Four long jam sessions in which the four band members and their collaborators were at the peak of their powers and which, "Moon In June" aside, definitively marked the Softs' move away from psychedelia towards a more properly jazz-rock territory. Yes, "Moon In June"... this is a track that truly encapsulates the whole of Wyatt's artistic journey up to that point; a long musical voyage on which Robert is essentially alone (he plays virtually every part), one that builds to one of the most staggering climaxes rock has ever known, spilling into a finale in which all the preceding musical material seems pulverised, a rarefied dust drifting adrift in cosmic emptiness, broken only by a stray hiss around which the track fades to nothing. An unprecedented masterpiece, through which rock music reaches an expressive and musical peak never touched before and which, in this writer's view, will never be reached again - not by Soft Machine, not by Wyatt, not by rock music as a whole.
There is, however, one aspect that deserves closer attention: "Moon In June" was the only sung track on Third. For Wyatt, the voice was an instrument with every bit as much dignity as the others; indeed, in rock, it ends up being the only acoustic one, and therefore the only truly "real" and "natural" one; it was on this instrument that our musician decided to focus all his efforts, helped also by a highly distinctive vocal timbre with a remarkable range. This choice stood in sharp contrast to Hopper's and Ratledge's approach; it was precisely this that drove the final wedge between Wyatt and Soft Machine, aside from the small-scale pettiness that often crops up in artistic circles (such as obstructing live performances of that masterpiece in concerts of the time).

It's in this light that the "experiment" of The End Of An Ear should be read, a record every bit as remarkable as Third (if not more so), and one that anticipated the future of Wyatt's career - and not only his - in startling fashion.
Besides the astonishing vocal experiment of "Las Vegas Tango" (a Gil Evans standard), the record features tracks dedicated to some of his friends and colleagues, giving him the chance to put forward his own highly personal vision of jazz-rock, influenced as much by electric-era Davis (the rhythmic pulse of "To Mark Everywhere" is a close relative of "Spanish Key") as by the early Weather Report (who, in those very years, were making their first appearances in England). Backed by a number of musicians from the Canterbury scene, with this record Wyatt effectively positioned himself at the head of that movement, becoming a crucial point of reference for British progressive rock.
By the end of 1970 Wyatt was still part of the band that recorded Fourth. His drumming was more than solid, and he still appeared on the cover, though now in the background compared to Ratledge, who had become the band's undisputed leader - a position he would hold for only a few more years before he too abandoned the band to its fate in 1976. The album is well made and well produced, but by then Soft Machine were a jazz-rock band through and through, and Wyatt felt he no longer even had an instrumental role to play in that context. The paths of Robert and the band he had helped conceive a few years earlier had by now diverged completely; years later he himself would confirm: "It makes me very happy that people love the Soft Machine records, it's a wonderful thing; it makes me realise that, after all, it wasn't a waste of time. Personally, though, that whole experience left me with little self-respect and without a penny to my name, without anything at all! That's why, at a certain point, I said enough is enough".

The following year, Wyatt was now out of Soft Machine and entered a period of collaborations on other people's projects; among the most significant were Keith Tippett's big band, which recorded the curious Centipede, and the concerts at the Berlin Jazz Festival where he played alongside some members of the Mothers of Invention. Amid this whirlwind of commitments, Wyatt decided to form a new band, not yet feeling ready to launch into a full solo career. So he recruited his friend Dave Sinclair (who had meanwhile left Caravan), Phil Miller (also from Caravan) and Bill MacCormick (founding bassist of Quiet Sun with Manzanera). For the name, Wyatt drew on one of his beloved English puns and, exploiting an easy homophony with the name of his old band, called this new project Matching Mole (which, read in French, corresponds almost to "soft machine"). This time Wyatt's intent was clear from the start, and by the end of 1971 the band was already in the studio recording their first album. Released in spring 1972, it was simply titled Matching Mole and contained, among other things, a gorgeous song co-written with Sinclair that anticipated the musical turn Robert would be forced to take, against his will, a little over a year later: "O Caroline" (written as a tribute to his ex Caroline Coon, a feminist and journalist who a few years later launched bands like the Clash and the Police through the pages of Melody Maker).

Robert's love life has never been under the spotlight, nor has the rest of his private affairs; but while working in the studio with Matching Mole, towards the end of 1971, he had occasion to meet Pip Pyle's partner, who was working with him on one of Allen's records ("Banana Moon"). Alfreda Benge, of Austrian-Polish origin, is a poet and illustrator, who had made a name for herself at the time by writing the lyrics for Delivery's "Harry Luck" (Pyle's first band). The connection with Alfreda was immediate, and between Wyatt and Pyle there was a curious partner swap: the latter paired up with the former's partner, Pamela, while Alfreda got together with Robert. After his encounter with Daevid Allen almost ten years earlier, the one with Benge (whom Robert also calls Alfie) would prove to be the decisive encounter for Wyatt, including for his artistic fortunes.

Meanwhile, Matching Mole returned to the studio fairly quickly, not without some changes; the most important were certainly the replacement of Sinclair with Dave MacRae (a New Zealand keyboardist who had worked with Carr's Nucleus and had already appeared on Matching Mole's first album) and production duties handed to the despotic Robert Fripp. The album, released towards the end of '72, was titled Little Red Record (an explicit reference, even on the cover, to Mao Tse-Tung's little book, the bible of every budding young revolutionary of the time) and presented a Wyatt seemingly more withdrawn within the band. In reality, having focused on composition on the previous album, Wyatt decided to concentrate more on vocals and (politicized) lyrics, leaving the composing and arranging to his bandmates, with results of great experimental significance. A clear stylistic choice whose importance is often overlooked or poorly understood, with the result that the second album is frequently and unfairly underrated.
In the autumn of that same year, Matching Mole seemed to have already run its course, and Wyatt called for its temporary dissolution. His political commitment became more urgent, perhaps because he sensed that the era born out of the "summer of love" was coming to a melancholy end, giving way to phenomena that were not well defined and, at times, violent (not only culturally).
This historical-musical juncture is essential to fully understanding the scale of the change that youth culture underwent in that stretch of the decade, with the generation of "younger siblings" of those who had set '68 ablaze soon to detonate the charges lit, even unknowingly, by those whom the "summer of love" had in some way ignored (think of the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, MC5), who would later be identified, not all that originally, under the label of "proto-punk".

The twilight of the "summer of love", as noted, was a sad one, and the melancholy that accompanied that transformation came through clearly in 1971 in one of the greatest albums to emerge from the Bay Area, David Crosby's "If I Could Only Remember My Name" with its symbolic "Song With No Words", or in '73 with the transcendent epic of "The Gates Of Delirium" from Yes's "Relayer".
That new course, that "thing" which John Lennon had ironically dubbed "glam rock", was already in the air between 1972 and 1973; it began to peek through on the early albums by Roxy Music, as well as the Modern Lovers and David Bowie, and it did not leave rock's "sacred cows" indifferent, especially those of the progressive scene, who would soon be given a memorable send-off.
Robert Wyatt too felt the urgency of a new way to express his art and his poetics; armed with a Gem Riviera electric piano, he retreated with Alfreda Benge (then busy on the set of Nick Roeg's film "Don't Look Now"), now his stable partner, to the Casa del Leone on the island of Giudecca in Venice. The leaden atmosphere of the lagoon, always a source of extraordinary artistic inspiration, could not leave Wyatt's soul untouched. During the two months spent on the Giudecca, Wyatt wrote a number of songs which, building on the musical ideas already expressed in "O Caroline", brought into sharp focus for the first time Robert's new direction, marked by that latent sorrow which only the Venetian lagoon could have suggested to him.

Determined to put together a new band, he returned to England with those drafts. He called on fusion saxophonist Gary Windo, who had been working on the sessions for Hugh Hopper's remarkable "1984" and whom he had met during Keith Tippett's "Centipede" experiment, and Ron Matthewson, a Scottish bassist with solid credentials (having played with Stan Getz, Ben Webster, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson and other major jazz figures); Dave McRae joined once again, while MacCormick was in France trying to get into Allen's Gong. This new lineup took the name Wmwm (from the members' initials) but, aside from a few rehearsals later collected by Windo himself, the band didn't amount to much. In February of the following year, Wyatt decided to disband Wmwm and reform Matching Mole; this time he managed to bring MacCormick back on board as well, alongside Windo, and Francis Monkman, formerly of Curved Air. With this new lineup, Wyatt was ready to redefine the material born in Venice.

Towards the end of that spring, Robert showed up at the home of Gilli Smyth, Gong's frontwoman and Allen's partner, for her and Lady June's birthday party. Nearly all the friends from that scene were there, and during the evening Robert felt he was reliving the afternoon atmosphere of Wellington House from fifteen years earlier; there was music playing, smoke being passed from hand to hand, and there was alcohol, along with the usual discussions about art, politics and everything else. At some point during the evening, Robert decided to play a prank on everyone: he would disappear by climbing out of a window and then knock a second time at the front door. So he went up into the attic, found a window, opened it and climbed outside; he had to cross a short stretch of roof, then lower himself onto a balcony and get back in through the stairwell.
He set off already savoring the reaction his prank would get from his friends. Meanwhile the alcohol, which up to that point had simply added to the evening's cheer, had been coursing through his veins for a while and was beginning to undermine Robert's sense of balance, almost to the point of making him lose full awareness of himself. He took a couple of steps on the roof and then, missing his footing, lost what little balance he had left for good; he very nearly managed to grab onto the balustrade below and...

To the first people on the scene, the situation immediately looked extremely serious; Wyatt had fallen four floors and was rushed to the nearest emergency room. It was the night between June 1st and 2nd, 1973. Alcohol had been the main cause of his fall, but it was probably also what saved his life. "He must have been really drunk to stay so relaxed while falling from the fourth floor. If he'd been just a bit more sober, we probably wouldn't be here today: Robert would have tensed his whole body out of fear and would have been smashed to pieces."

A New Beginning (1973-1979)

Waking up in hospital, it doesn't take Robert long to realize that the man who survived that terrible fall is a different man from the one who fell off the roof; a transformation that would prove to be not only physical but human and artistic as well. From the waist down Robert can no longer feel anything, and the doctors confirm to him and Alfie that, on hitting the ground, his spine had been unable to withstand the impact and had inevitably been damaged; for the rest of his life he would be paralyzed and would have to resign himself to living in a wheelchair.
The event has a tremendous impact on Robert's spirit, and although sustained by unshakeable hope, he will also go through moments of deep despair. Soon enough, music too will come to his aid, and during his stay at Stoke Mandeville Hospital he will rework the songs composed in Venice and write new ones.
Rock loses a fusion drummer of great inspiration and technique, but gains an incredible songwriter, with a vein at once bitter, intimate and irreverent. The event of June 2nd changed Robert Wyatt forever, and perhaps it also ended up coinciding with the definitive sunset of an entire historical period and an entire musical movement. If in the years before the accident Robert Wyatt was essentially the drummer of a band who occasionally lent his voice, after the event of June 2nd Robert would be essentially a solo voice, occasionally working as a percussionist (a role he would take on less and less from then on); the only exception remains the incredible "experiment" of The End Of An Ear, whose true musical scope perhaps only now can we really understand.
"It's hard for me to talk about what happened before the accident. I recognize myself in what came after, but my adolescent self, the two-legged drummer, I don't remember him and I don't understand him. It's hard for me to talk about how I was before; (...) I see the accident as a kind of clean dividing line between my adolescence and the rest of my life," Wyatt would tell Michael King (author of the highly recommended "Wrong Movements") in 1994.

From now on, Wyatt would record only solo albums, with mixed commercial fortunes and varying critical reception; but everyone — punks, art-rockers, singer-songwriters, music journalists and critics, everyone really — would have nothing but words of esteem and affection for him, even amid differing views on pop and rock.
The band format had already proved rather stifling and limiting for Robert; his new "condition" would give him the push he needed to tackle his artistic adventure alone, a harmonic ocean that still astonishes today for its depth, surprises and dynamics.
With the start of 1974, Wyatt feels ready to return to the studio; the material composed in Venice and polished in hospital is ready to be committed to tape. How to go about it? This is where friends and colleagues confirm, if confirmation were needed, all the love that Robert and Alfie deserve; led in production by Pink Floyd's Nick Mason, a large host of musicians from the British scene make themselves available to bring Wyatt's artistic aspirations to life: among others, the great kwela-jazz cornet player Mongezi Feza stands out, along with Fred Frith of Henry Cow on viola, a very young Mike Oldfield on guitar, Gary Windo on clarinet, and the ever-loyal Richard Sinclair and Hugh Hopper alternating on bass, Laurie Allan of Gong on drums and Ivor Cutler on harmonium. Wyatt himself carves out a few specially adapted percussion parts. Alfie takes part too, contributing to the lyrics and personally handling the record's artwork. The result is one of the absolute, undisputed and indisputable peaks of pop/rock history; an album that, coming into being at the crossroads of two eras — both of that history and of Wyatt's personal story — constitutes an inevitable fulcrum for both, one that cannot be bypassed: Rock Bottom.
Recorded between February and March of that year, it was released by Virgin on July 26th, 1974. A doubly special day, since it also marked the official wedding of Robert and Alfreda.
On the preceding June 1st (exactly one year after the accident), Wyatt had taken part, alongside John Cale, Brian Eno, Nico and others, in a concert organized by Kevin Ayers; it was his first public appearance after his hospital stay, and he limited himself to playing some percussion, preferring to stay in the background (a recording of this concert survives on the beautiful "June 1, 1974", released under the name Eno/Cale/Ayers/Nico by Polygram).

Shortly after its release, Rock Bottom received the French Academie Charles Cros award, an early and important recognition of the work. On September 8th came Wyatt's first proper live performance after the accident; the concert (a tribute organized in his honor by friends and colleagues) took place at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, known as one of the most "haunted" theatres in the world — perhaps not a casual choice. On stage with Robert were Julie Tippett, Gary Windo, Mongezi Feza, Dave Stewart, Fred Frith, Mike Oldfield, Hugh Hopper, Daevid Allen and Nick Mason; a CD of this exceptional event was released by Hannibal in 2005 (three years later, Domino also put it out as a double LP).
The crepuscular vein that had already appeared in "O Caroline" and, in truth, at times already in "Moon In June", finally takes full possession of the musical material. The songs on Rock Bottom are a sort of metaphor for his transformation, both human and artistic; for Robert it is also the chance to hone a new artistic conception operating on multiple levels and marked by a constant sense of renunciation. The musicians who accompany Wyatt from time to time never come across as a proper band either, which lends a solitary character to this new and thrilling musical adventure. While "Sea Song" still lives on an intelligible, melancholy melody (certainly one of the most beautiful songs of all time) and the "Last Straw/Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road" sequence still carries the saturated, structured sound of progressive rock (where Feza's astonishing trumpet shines through), the two sides of "Alife/Alifib" illuminate hidden expressive corners perhaps unknown to rock until that point, leaning on the rhythm of Wyatt's own breathing; that laboured breathing he may have struggled with during the early days of his hospital stay, before giving way to the unsettling mantra recited by Cutler at the close of the album's final track. The whole thing, however, is cloaked in an elegiac, fairy-tale tone that leads the listener into an absolutely astonishing sonic realm, in constant flux, suspended between the light of hope and the darkness of unconsciousness. It is no coincidence that Rock Bottom is rightly considered our musician's absolute masterpiece. I would add, purely as this writer's own opinion, that it is probably the only rock album that truly reaches the formal, expressive and emotional heights of the great works in the history of music.

Incredible as it may seem, after almost fifteen years of activity, he even scores his first genuine (and perhaps only) commercial hit; Wyatt decides to record the famous Monkees song "I'm A Believer", written by Neil Diamond, and release it as a single, first with "Memories" (a song written by Hopper dating back to the Wilde Flowers days and revisited on Allen's Banana Moon) as the B-side, and then with "Yesterday Man", an old song by songwriter Chris Andrews. In fact, it was meant to be the latter that led off the single, but Virgin's producer, Richard Branson, considers it too sad and suggests, much to Robert's displeasure, swapping the tracks. Three years later, Wyatt would manage to put this song, very dear to him, on the A-side of a single.
Commercially, though, Richard Branson sees further ahead than Wyatt, and putting "I'm A Believer" on the A-side proves to be a spot-on choice. The single (again produced by Nick Mason) puts Robert, for the first time, into the UK top 20 charts, and his voice rings out on commercial radio across the Channel.
He is even offered a spot on the BBC's historic, hugely successful TV show "Top Of The Pops", but in the end nothing comes of it; the TV producer at the time, Robin Nash, on being presented with Wyatt in a wheelchair, voices his full disapproval: "It isn't right to show wheelchairs on family entertainment shows." Robert, who initially suggests to his musicians that they all show up in wheelchairs, decides to turn down the invitation; the performance would in fact be recorded but not broadcast (and would only be recovered by the BBC some years later).
This is obviously not a hard blow for Robert, who is used to living like a "mole", digging remarkable tunnels through the fabric of contemporary rock; the episode does, however, make him understand the real "limits" of his presence within the varied and often cruel world of the star-system and the music business. A world that, for that matter, he has never loved and never truly aspired to.

Despite this success, things are far from simple for Robert, and end up getting complicated in unexpected ways too. Nick Mason is always there offering proper support to his colleague and friend, but the work meant to follow Rock Bottom proves more complicated than expected.
The first to drop out is Mason himself, who, partly due to growing tensions within Pink Floyd, has to better redefine his role in the world of rock (he will try his hand at production, making important contributions to albums by Mike Mantler and Carla Bley, but will eventually settle back behind the drums with his original band); after producing Wyatt's track "Sonia" (intended as the B-side of "Yesterday Man", which would be released in 1977), Mason is effectively forced to leave his friend and the album then taking shape to fend for themselves. Wyatt, for his part, finds himself thrown off balance and short of adequate financial resources; the band (made up partly of musicians who had played on Rock Bottom, joined by Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music and Brian Eno) backs him up without a hitch, but Virgin's Manor Studio, where they are recording, allows him little time to finish the work.
The most obvious consequence is that the result inevitably sounds like something halfway between a work in progress and a covers album.

Indeed, perhaps because Wyatt has in mind to revive the pattern of the two Matching Mole albums, bearing in mind that Rock Bottom contains songs written entirely by him, on the new record the songs are mostly reworkings of other people's material, to which he has perhaps added lyrics. Even the chosen title is odd and tells us much more than we might imagine about the poetic nature of Robert: Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (which seems to offer a classic English pun on the phrase "truth is stranger than fiction", of Byronic memory), recorded between October '74 and March '75, was released, again on Virgin, in May of that year.
Structurally, the album is made up of two parts, corresponding to the two sides of the LP: the "Richard" side (containing more personal pieces) and the "Ruth" side (with reworkings of other people's songs). The first side, in particular, contains elements of great interest; the fruit of a closer collaboration between Wyatt and Fred Frith, it includes two Wyatt tracks (even though "5 Black Notes" reworks Offenbach) bookended by a piece credited to Frith/Wyatt structured as a prelude, an interlude and a finale (the latter of devastating beauty). It is one of Wyatt's most structured creations and certainly draws on the glorious progressive era; moreover, the dreamlike atmosphere that pervades these five tracks represents a decisive step forward from that of Rock Bottom, and looks with interest, more or less explicitly, towards the world of English fairy tales, with all their archetypes.
The flip side, as mentioned, is built on other people's songs (including a rendition of Charlie Haden's "Song For Che") presented in a more jazz-inflected key than on the previous album. As one might easily guess, the production is the album's real weak point; also because Wyatt's despondency pervades every track, and the melancholy atmosphere that so softly enveloped Rock Bottom instead ends up poisoning Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard. The burst of pride, sustained by the love of those close to him, which had allowed him to process and come to terms with what happened to him on June 2nd, 1973, gives way to a despondent acceptance of the reality of things. In fact, setting aside a few episodes and collaborations on other people's records and a handful of singles, Wyatt would not produce another album for almost ten years.

Before the release of Ruth, in December 1975 his friend Mongezi Feza died mysteriously in London; admitted to the London Hospital for a suspected nervous breakdown, during his stay he fell ill with pneumonia and suffered a series of complications that would prove fatal.
The dismay among his colleagues was enormous, and many did not hide their suspicions and misgivings about the way care had been administered to the patient, given that he was a Black African refugee. No one has ever learned the truth, but this sad episode increases Robert Wyatt's desire to engage more directly with certain issues; his family and cultural background, as we know, had always been inspired by socialist values and ideals (something he had already expressed musically without any reservations), but from this point on his political commitment takes on the character of genuine activism. This commitment would later become official when, in 1979, Robert decided to take out membership of the British Communist Party (a party founded in 1921 with the Third International, already in decline by 1956 and finally dissolved in 1991).

In the Service of Music (Other People's)

The chapter of outside collaborations on other people's records and in other artists' concerts is a fascinating part of Wyatt's artistic journey; they've often produced genuine musical gems.
Back in the Soft Machine days, as we've seen, Wyatt never shied away from outside collaborations - indeed, it was precisely during his involvement in Allen's "Banana Moon" that he got to know Alfie; we also find him on Ayers's debut album, "Joy Of A Toy". Well, even after the 1973 accident he would find ways to collaborate with friends and colleagues on their artistic adventures. In fact, just a few months after his official return to the scene in 1974, Wyatt is part of the line-up (percussion and vocals) that recorded the legendary "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)" by Brian Eno, and sings Phil Miller's gorgeous "Calyx" on the debut album by Hatfield And The North; this latter song, in particular, effectively picks up the vocal experiments of The End Of An Ear.
It's after the disappointments piled up with Ruth that Wyatt's outside collaborations become more intense, not just in terms of time invested but also as a further development of his artistic path; already in 1976 he joined Henry Cow's mini-tour, playing with them in London, Paris and Rome, where, in front of 24,000 spectators, he's in Piazza Navona to support the campaign for the decriminalization of soft drugs, and also gets an up-close look at the excellent world of Italian prog.

From this point of view, Wyatt achieves his most important results collaborating with Michael Mantler and Carla Bley; Mantler decides to bring him into a rather curious project, in which a novel by the American gothic writer Edward Gorey is set to music (two years earlier he'd done the same thing with texts by Samuel Beckett). The music Mantler composes has that magical, fairy-tale flavor that characterized Wyatt's masterpiece, Rock Bottom. It should come as no surprise, then, that the American jazzman chose our musician as his solo voice; a voice that, among other things, suited the macabre tenor of the lyrics perfectly. The result is perhaps Wyatt's single best performance on someone else's record, "The Hapless Child and Other Inscrutable Stories". The line-up itself is top-notch: alongside Wyatt there's Mantler himself, Carla Bley on piano, Jack DeJohnette on drums, Terje Rypdal on guitar, Steve Swallow on bass. Benge also contributes, and Nick Mason returns to production duties (something he'd repeat five years later with Bley's project "Fictious Sports", which however would be released under his own name for promotional reasons, and in which Wyatt himself would also be involved).
The collaboration with Mantler would be repeated shortly after with a third project similar to the previous one, "Silence", based on texts by Harold Pinter; the results, however, would be less satisfying, and "The Hapless Child" remains a rather extraordinary one-off.

Two years later, Wyatt would take part, playing piano, in another legendary record: "Music For Airports" by Brian Eno. With him and Manzanera, a very close form of collaboration had already taken shape some years earlier, one that would continue over time right up to the present day. Indeed, it would be Manzanera himself who would often and willingly lend Robert Wyatt his recording studio, which Wyatt would go on to use almost exclusively for his subsequent output.
From then on, we find Robert involved in several other artists' records; in particular, he would lend his voice (which had become a cult object) to records by Bjork, Ultramarine, Anja Garbarek, Cristina Donà, as well as Mantler; he would play keyboards on the hit "The Sweetest Girl" by Scritti Politti in 1982 and play cornet on On an Island by David Gilmour in 2006.

The Iron age (1979-1991)

The punk phenomenon set fire in 1977 to an England in full cultural and economic decline, left orphaned by the glories of the swinging era. This musical movement, born again thanks to stimuli arriving from across the ocean, did nothing less than anticipate and then confirm the violent transformation that young people of the time were about to undergo. The drugs that ten years earlier had opened the "doors of perception" (as Jim Morrison loved to say) now opened, and often closed for good, the doors of existence into a miserable abyss. Western society, devoted to the well-being of consumption, was discovering austerity and living day to day in anxiety. The ghosts of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange had by now definitively overwhelmed the hopes of rebirth with which the earlier 2001: A Space Odyssey had closed, and were projecting society toward the anguish of The Shining, with its rivers of blood pouring out of the hotel elevator.

Against this social and political backdrop, Margaret Thatcher arrives with full force in 1979; her monetarist policies would trigger an initial recession that would push unemployment to levels unthinkable just a few years earlier. Although the "cure" administered by the woman who would soon be dubbed the "iron lady" would succeed in bringing inflation back down to normal levels, it would essentially do so by trampling on the "social contract" that had kept English society stable up to that point.
The lines of unemployed workers outside factory gates touched the conscience of many artists who, after the grim end of the Vietnam War, found a new source of inspiration. The disjointed, desperate punk screams of the Sex Pistols and the rigorous, violent ones of The Clash became the soundtrack of this new era.
Robert Wyatt, as already mentioned, took on a "militant" stance that would also influence his artistic path; his commitment to the recording studio became, if anything, even more fragmentary, and for more than a decade his output would take on an episodic character - never schizophrenic, but certainly feverish; indeed, the ideological consistency running through that output is genuinely astonishing, though Robert would soon pay the price for it.
Obviously his militancy was first and foremost cultural and ideological, since Wyatt was and still feels himself to be in opposition to the colonialist policies of the West, the US and Great Britain above all; Britain's hypocritical stance toward apartheid, which became untenable from a human rights standpoint between the late Seventies and the Eighties, and its expansionist stance during the Falklands crisis, are the events over which Robert Wyatt raises his voice the loudest. He does so, naturally, in the only way he knows: through music.
His condition as a "recluse" made him feel a kinship with political prisoners, and indeed he began exchanging letters with some of them, Nelson Mandela among them.

Thanks to the interest of Geoff Travis, head of Rough Trade Records, at the end of '79 he returns to the studio to record a few songs from the world's protest songbook; the first 7-inch is "Arauco/Caimanera" (the second track being a reworking of the Cuban classic "Guantanamera"), followed by "At Last I Am Free/Strange Fruit" (the Billie Holiday classic) and then "Stalin Wasn't Stallin'/Stalingrad" in '81, all later collected on the EP At Last I Am Free.
What's more, Wyatt not only reinterprets the classics of political militancy, but also records the anthem of the Internationale (whose melody/motto would return again and again in his records) and the Trade Unions anthem, "Grass", together with Ivor Cutler.

Finally, in 1981 his efforts coalesce into an actual album, Nothing Can Stop Us, a compilation of the political songs recorded previously. With all its limitations, this record is nonetheless in some ways an extraordinary testament to militancy, one that anticipates the era of political commitment among rock stars that would reach its peak at the time with Live Aid in 1985, the giant global concert organized by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure. It's no coincidence that in 1986 Wyatt's record would be reissued with a wonderful and significant bonus track: "Shipbuilding". This song, written by Elvis Costello and recorded three years earlier, is certainly his biggest commercial success since "I'm A Believer". Wyatt and Costello would also make a video for it which, on the fledgling TV channels devoted to pop, ends up becoming a must-see, even though Costello's lyrics are an open condemnation of Britain's conduct during the Falklands crisis.

Wyatt's political commitment expands and finds new territories of protest; in 1982 he gets involved in the soundtrack for an animal-rights film titled, fittingly, "The Animals Film". It's a unique composition, about 30 minutes long, which revisits some vocal experiments already recorded in Rome at the studios of the newly founded Radio 3 (released on CD in 2009 by Rai Trade under the title "Radio Experiment Rome February 1981").
The following year he reunites with his friend Hugh Hopper and together they record another protest song, "Amber And The Amberlines", against the US invasion of Grenada (a small Caribbean island), carried out because the US would not tolerate another communist country nearby. This song, together with a cover of Peter Gabriel's "Biko" and two others by South American songwriters, ends up on the EP Work In Progress (all the EPs produced between the Seventies and Eighties would later be collected in a beautiful 1999 Hannibal Records box set simply titled EPs, which also contains some B-sides and the soundtrack to "The Animals Film").
This militancy would also give rise to other collaborations; among the most important, the reunion with the full Henry Cow lineup for The Last Nightingale, created to support the strikes against Thatcher.

All this sets the stage for the release of the album Old Rottenhat, the first proper LP since Ruth, ten years earlier. This work has mixed results and was recorded solo by Wyatt between '84 and '85, and produced by him; only Alfreda is with him in the studio (she also did the album cover).

The loneliness permeating this record is evident and carries a clear political meaning (the atmosphere is leaden, almost depressing), aimed above all at the world of rock, which, despite Live Aid, seemed to Wyatt increasingly short on credibility. The subjects addressed are those of burning political current affairs, and the songs represent the outcome of everything his militancy had produced musically.
This intense period - and, as one can see, a complicated one to follow in its developments - comes to a close with Old Rottenhat; afterward, Wyatt's own militancy abruptly fades, and after 1986 he seems to retreat back into that media obscurity he finds so congenial.

“I sleep on the wing” (1991-2009)

In practice, up until 1991 Wyatt's trail almost goes cold; he stays with Alfreda in Majorca for a while, before deciding to return to England, where he settles for good in Lincolnshire, in Louth. Here, at Chapel Studios in South Thoresby, working alone once again, he records Dondestan, which for Wyatt is an opportunity to attempt a reckoning of his activity, artistic and otherwise, since the 1973 accident. While the first half, with idyllic lyrics by "trusted" collaborator Benge, tries to revive the fairy-tale atmospheres of Rock Bottom and Ruth, the second half picks back up the themes dear to his militancy (notably the sharp-witted "CP Jeebies", in which Wyatt distances himself from the Communist Party he had supported since 1979). The atmospheres are still the claustrophobic ones of Old Rottenhat. This is partly due also to the financial troubles that continue to strangle Robert and Alfreda and that prevent him from completing the post-production phase with the calm it deserved. Indeed, Dondestan would be remixed a few years later and released as "revisited" (with a reworked tracklist) in 1998. Despite the difficulties, this record is certainly Wyatt's best since Rock Bottom and Ruth, and it would shape his artistic future from then on; a future made of renewed self-awareness and rekindled affection from his fellow musicians.

Among these, John Greaves, formerly of Henry Cow, certainly deserves mention, as he brings Wyatt into Songs, a 1995 record on which Wyatt turns in his best performance since Mantler's The Hapless Child. A short while earlier, Alucard (Arcana in Italy) had published Mike King's biography "Wrong Movements", and Wyatt's role in pop's varied and contradictory world finally seems to find its proper place.
Robert soon finds the opportunity to reconnect with the colleagues who had supported him years before; among these, the most "active" are certainly Brian Eno (who decides to lend a hand on his upcoming work) and Phil Manzanera (who once again makes his recording studio available to him). This new collaboration would prove decisive for Wyatt, who from then on would have the peace of mind he needed to work on his new ideas.

In fact, it doesn't take long for these new artistic efforts to come together into a new EP, A Short Break, and then into a new album, Shleep, which is certainly the most beautiful and fully realized record in his discography since End Of An Ear and Rock Bottom. Wyatt is finally out of isolation and, after dealing with some health problems, finds renewed inner strength; critics and rock journalists take notice of him again too, openly praising the new record. Eno's "hand" is more evident than usual, but it's necessary to help bring out his friend's new musical thinking (the intro to "Heaps of Sheeps" recalls some of the happiest moments of Eno's pop intuitions); as he would say in an interview published right here on OndaRock, "too often I focused on music like a poet with his pen. But music isn't poetry, it's a social art, and so I needed a company of friends to help me out of that isolation".
His musical approach also becomes more fluid, shedding a whole series of preconceptions and pressures; the Wyatt who emerges from the eleven tracks of Shleep (which also feature Paul Weller, formerly of The Jam and Style Council, and Anne Whitehead) is a musician finally free to express himself without hesitation, with the serenity of someone who, deep down, feels he's always given so much to others while getting little in return, and who now simply wants to make room for his most dreamlike creative vein.
Starting with the album's title, inspired by the Freudian subconscious, Shleep gathers the key elements of the melancholic style of his earlier records and presents them again clothed in the traits typical of the best part of his artistic output; songs like "Maryan", as well as "A Sunday in Madrid" or "Free Will And Testament" (which boasts one of the most beautiful and effective oblique melodies Robert ever produced) seem to lead us back into the elegiac realms that shone through his music twenty-five years earlier. There's even room for the irreverent, engaging flash of "Blues in Bob Minor".

From then on, numerous other artists would also pay tribute to him; among these, one of particular note is The Different You, which Italian artists such as Csi, Franco Battiato, Cristina Donà, Max Gazzè and others would dedicate to him, almost as a form of thanks.
With the new millennium, even his own country's musical institutions end up getting involved, and in 2001 he's even entrusted with the curation of the Meltdown Festival.

By now Wyatt can count on a fairly solid support network, and, in this renewed climate of trust toward others as well, he returns to the studio in 2002 to record an EP, Airplay, and in 2003 for the new album Cuckooland; in the studio with him and Alfie are the usual Eno, Manzanera, Weller and Whitehead, but we also find Karen Mantler (who, in practice, is the one who gave rise to the record), David Gilmour, Gilad Atzmor and others. Critical reception is extremely favorable and the record receives significant acclaim (including a nomination for the prestigious Mercury Prize as "album of the year"); in it there's a kind of artistic compendium of latter-day Wyatt, with music once again lit by a fairy-tale, melancholic glow.
Meanwhile, the BBC also remembers him and, riding the wave of this unexpected "rediscovery", puts together a very interesting television special in which Wyatt performs some of his songs live with Whitehead's Soup Band. This new chapter is often regarded as a "gentle" artistic twilight; nothing could be more misleading. In fact, Robert Wyatt still prefers to put himself out there rather than rest on easy laurels, and gradually finds the strength to stand in front of an audience again. While in 2003, during the SoupSongs Band's performances with Whitehead, he stays in the background (at times, no less than sitting among the audience), by 2006 we finally see him on stage, during a concert by his friend Gilmour, with whom he sings and plays "Then I Close My Eyes" and a heartrending "Comfortably Numb" (a performance that truly gives you chills).

So, in 2007, a new album comes out; incredible, when you consider that Wyatt once let as many as ten years pass between one record and the next. Twilight, my foot!
Comicopera, despite suffering from excessive length (the CD was never a format that did pop artists any favours), contains a hugely varied musical world, ranging from love ballads to nonsense ones, from jazz-oriented pieces to political anthems (like "Hasta Siempre Comandante" for Che, an essential point of reference for Wyatt); the latter recorded in Padua with Maurizio Camardi's band (Wyatt had already sung in Italy with Ricky Gianco). In the studio for the other fifteen songs are the Cuckooland musicians, joined, after more than thirty years, by Dave Sinclair.

Collaborations on other people's records also gain new momentum, since colleagues now look to him more for cultural and psychological support, something able to lend authority to their work; astonishing, if we think back to the isolated, almost self-exiled artist of twenty years earlier. We see him collaborating with Billy Bragg, once again with Kevin Ayers and Paul Weller, and also on the new album by the reunited duo Eno-Byrne.
So we arrive at 2009, the year in which Wyatt receives perhaps the highest honour he could have aspired to: an honorary degree conferred by the University of Liège. A recognition not only of his artistic output, but above all of his "guiding" role in the world of contemporary music; honoured alongside him that day were other artists of the calibre of Henri Pousseur (posthumously, having died shortly before) and Arvo Pärt, Archie Shepp and Anthony Braxton. The images from that day, showing Robert understandably delighted and in the company of such illustrious colleagues, are perhaps the finest moment of our artist's recent life, and they make clear how Wyatt is, in fact, living through something like a renewed youth, at least intellectually.

The Larva and the Butterfly (from 2010)

Robert Wyatt is still active to this day, and the innate drive that has always led him to explore new musical and poetic territories still pushes him toward new destinations. Meanwhile, he sets out to deepen certain strands of his relationship with jazz, especially those standards that have accompanied him throughout his life. Aided by the trusty Atzmon and violinist Ros Stephen's Sigamos Quartet, on For The Ghosts Within he reinterprets classics such as the beloved "'Round Midnight" by Monk, "Lush Life" by Strayhorn, "In A Sentimental Mood" by Ellington and Armstrong's hugely famous "What A Wonderful World". Wyatt's incredible vocal timbre still surprises, able to lend fresh freshness and elegance to those masterpieces; in this sense, his rereading of Bob Thiele's classic is an absolute interpretive masterpiece, and confirms, if confirmation were needed, that Wyatt is not only free of any (very long) artistic twilight, but that his musical and poetic universe still has plenty of surprises in store.
Besides, following Wyatt's artistic and personal story, one cannot help but realise how thoroughly he escapes any simple categorisation; how many Marxists can boast of the commercial success of a Monkees hit?!
This artistic and human journey is the most concrete testimony to this man's ability to remain true to himself while always keeping his gaze fixed forward; if in the past this consistency effectively led to a kind of isolation, today it is precisely why his presence in the world of music is perceived as a bastion of art-pop rather than mere consumer pop. Wyatt's lesson is a precious one for any musician (or self-styled one), because the transformation this towering artist has undergone is one of the most significant stories in contemporary music.
"I'd say I like to think that today's singer is the butterfly, and yesterday's drummer was just a little larva in the earth, working hard to become a caterpillar."

Published in 2014, Different Every Time is a collection that complements Marcus O'Dair's authorised biography: but while a book can recount in full detail the chronology of an entire life in music, the same cannot be said of a collection (however generous) of individual tracks, abstracted from their original context so as to only partially capture the essence of a giant like Wyatt. It should therefore be made clear that this is not, and cannot be, a best of, but simply a double album offering both a portrait and a self-portrait, however sketchy or even premature they may be.
The time span of the selection covers the Englishman's entire artistic journey, passing through Soft Machine ("Moon In June") and Matching Mole ("Signed Curtain", "God Song") all the way to the recent classic-jazz trio with Gilad Atzmon and Ros Stephen (the romantic "Just As You Are"). A string of genuine if modest gems that highlight the uneven development of his wry poetic streak, forever balanced between childlike play and the tenderness of an ageing lover, while the arrangements reveal his long-standing fondness for wind instruments and the softest of keyboard effects.
The second disc, meanwhile, gathers rare collaborations between the bearded songwriter and high-profile international artists, scattered across as many albums, EPs, 7-inches and esoteric compilations. Dubbed "benign dictatorships", they make up a far more varied and colourful sample, testifying to Wyatt's generosity and genuinely world-music vocation: in the long "Venceremos" alone, the musical journey stretches from São Paulo to tribal Africa, but there's also a stop at chanson – a tribute to the "prettiest" of languages – and at canto revolucionario ("Frontera", alongside South American-born guitarist Phil Manzanera), even arriving at a detached, wave-leaning excursion in the company of Pink Floyd's Nick Mason ("Siam", from 1981).
Different Every Time comes at the tail end of a series of respectful tributes to a musician of pivotal importance, on the threshold of his 70th birthday. In a period understandably sparser in unreleased material, we are at least left with the pleasure of an intriguing, nostalgic rediscovery thanks to collections like this one.

Contributions by Michele Palozzo ("Different Every Time")

Ride the wave of great music

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