Robert Wyatt - To the Heart of Rock

After years of recording silence, to the delight of fans of more cerebral music, Robert Wyatt has resurfaced — one of the sharpest minds in the whole varied landscape of world rock. The occasion for meeting him was an invitation to the Salone della Musica in Turin, where the British composer was awaited amid widespread curiosity. Curiosity also fuelled by the tribute album on which several Italian artists, including Franco Battiato, Csi and Cristina Donà, tried their hand at covering some of his classic songs.

This gentleman in his fifties, confined to a wheelchair after a trivial yet fateful accident that forced him to switch instruments and go from drummer to keyboardist, has recently released his latest album, "Shleep", on the independent label Rykodisc — the product of a mind open to the most unconventional sounds. It's a record that marks another step in his sonic explorations, a journey begun back in the days of the Canterbury scene and Soft Machine.

Robert Wyatt has never stopped searching for new forms of life within the often too-traditionalist landscape of rock, reaching perhaps his highest achievement with the memorable "Rock Bottom" in 1974, which also boasts guitar work from Mike Oldfield. A masterpiece that would leave an indelible mark on the entire history of rock, with its eccentric sounds, its improvisations, its extreme deformation of the song form. Canterbury music — a singular distillation of rock, pop, jazz (both classic and free), anarchy, Dadaist provocation and very "British" humour — reached the peak of its creativity precisely with this incredible album, conceived by Wyatt on the Venice lagoon, in the company of his wife Alfreda Benge. Since then, the British master has proudly continued along his path as a brilliant experimenter, far from rock's spotlight, worshipped by critics but largely unknown to the wider public.

What does "Shleep", the title of your new work, mean?

It's a made-up word. When I decided to choose it as the album title I was thinking about my disturbed sleep, and this distorted word captured the idea well.

After so many years, you're not recording alone but with a large company of friends. How did the record come about?

I spent part of the Nineties dealing with a series of health problems that forced me to make an enormous effort to regain the social dimension of what we call music. Too often I've focused on music the way a poet focuses on 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.

One of these friends is Phil Manzanera, who made his recording studios available, and then there are Brian Eno and Paul Weller, people who belong to opposite musical universes. How did it go?

Playing with old friends or with younger musicians is the same to me. Now I have more experience in choosing the right people for each song. When I was the leader of my own bands, all my songs were played by the same musicians; now Phil Manzanera plays on the song "Alien", and the way he plays is perfect for that song, Philip Catherine and Brian Eno for theirs, and so on. I'm not loyal to any particular kind of music. What I look for in the people I play with is character and intellectual rigour.

You once said you didn't like white people's music…

No, what I meant was that what reached my heart, what made me love music more than anything else and saved my soul, was Black music. This isn't out of disrespect for other musical genres. In fact, America as a whole has been important for giving different races the chance to redistribute their cultures into different forms of expression. Maybe it's the only good thing about America, but it really is a great thing! (laughs).

Ride the wave of great music

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