Robert Wyatt

Canterbury

Robert Wyatt was born in Bristol on 28 January 1945. He played in the Wilde Flowers, and in 1966 was invited to join Soft Machine, where he drummed and shared vocals with Kevin Ayers, an unusual combination for a stage rock band. In August 1970, on a break from the group, he recorded his first solo record, The End of an Ear, mostly free jazz and vocal experiment with no lyrics. A year later he left, after his musical ideas kept being turned down by the others, and formed Matching Mole, a name that puns on the French for soft machine. They made two albums in 1972, the second produced by Robert Fripp. A third was planned for 1973, but in June that year a fall from a window left Wyatt paralysed from the waist down, and the planned album was cancelled.

Rock Bottom

Wyatt wrote most of Rock Bottom in Venice before the accident and went to record it a few months afterwards. He denied that the music was a direct result of what had happened to him. Nick Mason of Pink Floyd produced. Part of it was taped at a farm near Little Bedwyn in Wiltshire, with a recording van parked in a field and cables run through the windows, so that donkeys and tractors are on the tape. The rest was done at The Manor Studio in Oxfordshire and at CBS in London. Ivor Cutler, Hugh Hopper, Richard Sinclair, Laurie Allan, Mike Oldfield and Fred Frith played on it.

Wyatt wanted an upside-down jazz-rock, with the looseness and improvisation of jazz inside the song forms of rock or folk. Virgin released the album on 26 July 1974, and it reached number 13 on Billboard's FM Action chart in 1975. Pitchfork's Douglas Wolk called Sea Song the most immediately gripping piece on it, and Chris Dahlen of the same site heard the stretched-out time of convalescence in its drones and long melodies. On 8 September 1974 Wyatt played the whole album at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, with a band drawn largely from the record and John Peel as master of ceremonies.

Singles and songs of conviction

Two months after the album came a single, Wyatt's version of I'm a Believer, produced by Mason, which reached number 29 in the UK. He sang it on Top of the Pops from his wheelchair. Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard followed in May 1975, built mostly on other people's music with lyrics by Wyatt. His work grew more political from the mid-1970s. In early 1980 he recorded a run of cover singles for Rough Trade, collected in 1982 as Nothing Can Stop Us, where only one song is his own and the rest range from Chic's At Last I Am Free to Ivor Cutler's Grass.

In 1982 he recorded Shipbuilding, Clive Langer's tune with Elvis Costello's lyrics about the Falklands War, with Costello and Langer taking part as performers and producers. Reissued in April 1983, it reached number 35, Rough Trade's first UK Top 40 entry. Old Rottenhat (1985) was performed by Wyatt alone, and Trouser Press called it a perceptive, beautifully performed and ultimately bleak view of ongoing political struggle. Dondestan followed on 22 October 1991.

Shleep and the later albums

Shleep, released by Hannibal on 26 September 1997, was his first album in six years and brought in Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera and Paul Weller among others. After the largely one-man records of the 1980s it returned to working with other musicians, as his 1970s albums had. The Wire named it record of the year, and Wolk wrote in 2010 that it re-established Wyatt as the center of attention. Cuckooland (2003) was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. Comicopera (2007), his ninth and final studio album and his first for Domino, was also The Wire's record of the year.

In 2014 an authorised biography by Marcus O'Dair appeared, and Wyatt told Uncut that he had stopped making music. His most recent public appearance, at the Brighton Dome, was on 16 December 2016.

Legacy

Tears for Fears dedicated I Believe to Wyatt, and its B-side was a cover of Sea Song. Rachel Unthank and the Winterset recorded the same song in 2007, and in 2011 the Unthanks issued a live album of Wyatt songs with Antony and the Johnsons, of which Wyatt said he loved the idea. Pitchfork ranked Rock Bottom number 98 among the albums of the 1970s, and a 2024 animated feature drew on his life and music.