Robert Wyatt

The Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench is the point in the Pacific Ocean where the greatest marine depth is reached: roughly 11,000 metres. It is the bottom of the Ocean.

It's a place where no form of "normal" life could possibly exist; we can only imagine flora or fauna with utterly unknown characteristics. That is the realm that stands as the ideal border between the "real" and the "fantastical"; and it is there that this wonderful album by Robert Wyatt will take us.

It is Wyatt himself who points to the connection between the genesis of "Rock Bottom" and the sea, in the liner notes of the latest Rykodisc edition: "This music began to take shape in Venice, during the winter of 1972, on the little island of Giudecca, in an old palazzo overlooking the lagoon".

Although we can be sure that the music on this record was already immense and beautiful at its birth, there is one event that left an irreversible mark on it, on all of Wyatt's music to come, and on his life. In June 1973, the year in which the third Matching Mole album was due to appear, Robert fell from a fourth-floor window and fractured his spine, permanently losing the use of everything below the waist; confined to a wheelchair, in 1974, eight months after the accident, he began shaping the material that had been left unfinished or partly worked out in hospital during his convalescence. His new condition would inevitably filter everything that had been taking shape back at the start of '73.

At last, the fusion of rock and jazz languages, which had meant so much to the development of progressive rock ever since "Bitches Brew" (Miles Davis's seminal work), is complete. Unlike anything Wyatt had produced up to that point, the album shouldn't be thought of as a collection of six tracks, but as a continuous flow, like those invisible ocean currents that travel from one end of the planet to the other, plunging into the depths and resurfacing again: one long, 40-minute suite.

"Sea Song", the prelude to the descent, is as calm and unsettling as anything you could imagine; you pass through the great gateway of the coral reefs, and there begins the slow descent of the solitary man.

With "Last Straw" he passes through the densest layers of water, ever thicker and ever colder: the chill of the soul. A tense atmosphere built from a keyboard counterpoint over which dances an alienating guitar melody (played by Wyatt himself). The transition through the dense layers is complete; by now the sunlight is pale and becomes ever more a faint memory; the sounds take on a new timbre, and as we near the extreme depths we glimpse, for the first time, the remote life-forms of the abyss.

Robert, on his no-limits journey for the ear and the mind, introduces us to this magical vision with the explosion of the countless overdubbed trumpets of Mongezi Feza, in the following "Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road"; the (acoustic) sight of this unknown world takes your breath away and seems almost to make him give up, as though he didn't deserve such an experience: "Oh dear me, heavens above, oh no, no I can't stand it / Stop please, oh deary me, what in heaven's name?" The bottom is reached... The echo of the welcoming trumpets and a subtle bassline (the magnificent Richard Sinclair!) are all that remains; the world as we know it ends here, along with its entire universe of sounds.

The time spent at the bottom of the Challenger Deep is represented by the double track "Alifib/Alife". Words, a useless hindrance to the expression of one's feelings, empty themselves of everyday meaning and become pure sound; the phrases abandon any pretence of coherence, leaving only rhythm and metre. This realm of new sounds expresses man's immense solitude and his yearning for salvation; love of life, love for his own woman, are the only things that can keep him alive in such extreme conditions: "I can't forsake you, or forsqueak you, Alife my larder...", words that ooze the noblest of feelings yet are incomprehensible at sea level. It is this dichotomy between the man who touches the bottom of the sea and all those who remain on the surface that defines the double life of this track, probably the most intense moment in Wyatt's entire career.

The rebirth of the new man (it's worth recalling the ending of Kubrick's magnificent "2001: A Space Odyssey") comes through his gradual, inexorable annihilation; with "Little Red Robin Hood Hit The Road", the catharsis of the journey is complete, the new man has finally shed the burden of his past experiences and can begin the slow ascent back to the surface. The joy of living has saved the traveller, who, over the drone of a chord (played by Ivor Cutler), recovers his life and his loved ones, taking nothing for granted.

The ocean is, therefore, simply an allegory for the brain; just as deep space was in "2001" or the Overlook Hotel in "The Shining". The man descending into the ocean depths is, thus, the intellect; like David's pod on his journey beyond the infinite in Kubrick's aforementioned film.

The questions raised are urgent, and the answers will represent the very reason that drives Wyatt the man to rise back up from the depths: who am I? what must I do?

His relationship with his past, the place of memory, leaves these questions unanswered. It is only through the annihilation of everything that "was" that Wyatt can hope to (re)live. After all, it is Wyatt himself who reveals to us the secret of his new psychology: "...it causes me a lot of problems to talk about what happened before the accident. I recognise myself in 'Rock Bottom' and 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 clear dividing line between my adolescence and the rest of my life".

Musically, "Rock Bottom" represents the attainment of Wyatt's expressive maturity. By his own admission, he owes much to the suggestions of his partner Alfreda Benge (affectionately known as Alfie); the dense structures that had characterised his compositions with Soft Machine first, and then with Matching Mole, were finally abandoned. In their place came a relaxed, calm atmosphere, almost a peace of the senses, reclaiming and amplifying the mood of a "minor" Beatles song, "Flying", which he has said is one of his 10 all-time favourite tracks. Though it had become a necessity for him, Wyatt threw himself into keyboards and voice (from then on his true "instrument") to drown out the rage of the dada-drummer he once was. The rhythm section of the double track "Alifib/Alife", entrusted to breath/sigh, has forcefully entered the ranks of the most brilliant "inventions" in the entire history of music.

Although there are many guests, it's undeniable that the record sounds like the work of a solitary, subterranean man, so much so that he earned the nickname "Mole". Skilfully guided by this minstrel, this pied piper of souls since the days of "Moon in June", his friends Richard Sinclair and Hugh Hopper (on bass), Laurie Allan (on drums), Ivor Cutler (spoken voice and drone), Mongezi Feza (on trumpet), Gary Windo (on sax and clarinet), Fred Frith (on viola, worthy of Cale's on "Heroin"), Mike Oldfield (on guitar) all give the best of themselves, often delivering passages that have made the history of their respective instruments. It is thanks to their love for their dear friend, to the production of Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, and to Alfie's devotion that Robert Wyatt gave the world a work that it would be far too reductive to call merely musical. Every intellectual "conceit" and "perversion" has been abandoned, and an entire life with all its experiences (sex, alcohol, tastes...) is annulled. The circle opened by the epoch-making "Moon in June" is definitively closed, handed over to the judgement of history and posterity. The tectonic tension born of the eternal opposition between jazz and rock folds in on itself, leaving only chamber music, the triumph of the new intellect; just as David, at the end of his hallucinatory journey, finds himself in a room decorated in eighteenth-century style (the century of the "Enlightenment") at the close of "2001", of which "Rock Bottom" is, in my personal opinion, nothing less than its hallucinated, musical remake.

"Rock Bottom" represents the definitive close of an era, both for Wyatt the man and for the history of popular music. It is the inescapable fulcrum of rock history, and any judgement of what came before and what came after must, in one way or another, be traced back to this record. Even today it is acclaimed as one of the greatest rock records ever made, winner in '74 of the French Grand Prix "Charles Cros" Record of the Year Award, and it is the record for which Robert Wyatt still receives, daily, countless expressions of affection and devotion from all over the world.

Rarely does a work of art fuse with the life of its creator to the point where no boundary seems to remain between the two existences: after all, couldn't Wyatt's personal ordeal, accident-convalescence-resurrection, be seen as the metaphysical journey of David from "2001", on a par with his own work? How many times has this triad given birth to art? In Caravaggio's paintings, in Beethoven's late string quartets, in Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment" and, finally, in "Rock Bottom", the multiform souls of their creators, whose intimate tragedies were hidden from those around them, needed "the rippling wave of [their] feelings, of [their] impulses, of [their] frustrated hopes, of [their] revolts, of [their] melancholy and, in spite of everything, of [their] will to power and to joy; [they] needed the most agile and most intimate polyphony." (R. Rolland)

This record, in truth, contains a thousand and one allegories (of which the one described here is only one possibility) and contains none at all; each of us will find in it our own being and our own personal vision (all equally legitimate); provided we let ourselves be guided by this music without offering any resistance, without asking too many whys, and without ever taking ourselves too seriously... staying loose. It's the only way to emerge "unscathed" from this experience, with a little more humanity than before.

"The doctor was astonished. He told me: 'You must have been really drunk to stay so relaxed while falling from the fourth floor'. If I'd been even a little more sober, I probably wouldn't be here today: I would have tensed my whole body out of fear, and so I would have been smashed to pieces".

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14/11/2006