Rock Bottom

Wyatt wrote most of the songs in Venice in early 1973, where Alfreda Benge was working on Nicolas Roeg's film Don't Look Now. He recorded them a few months after his accident. Part of the album was made at Delfina Entrecanales' farm near Little Bedwyn, where a recording van stood in a field and cables ran in through the windows. Wyatt said the setup was not really soundproofed and that a few donkeys and tractors going by are on the tape. The rest was recorded at The Manor Studio at Shipton-on-Cherwell and at CBS Studios in London, with Steve Cox and Dick Palmer engineering. Some of the percussion credits are domestic: Delfina's wineglass, Delfina's tray and a small battery.

Wyatt was dissatisfied with the jazz fusion that had gone before, which he thought took the worst of both rock and jazz with too much noodling. He aimed instead for an upside-down version, with jazz's looseness, rhythm section and improvisation set inside rock or folk song structures. Wyatt has denied that the material was a direct result of the accident. In an NME interview in October 1974 he said the accident did not haunt him or affect him as much as people might suppose.

The British music papers reviewed it well, and it charted on Billboard's FM Action chart, peaking at number 13 in 1975. Pitchfork's Douglas Wolk, reviewing the 2010 reissue, wrote that the six songs were a new kind of music for Wyatt, very slow and exquisitely deliberate. Pitchfork's list of the best albums of the 1970s placed it at number 98, and NME ranked it 358 in its 2015 list of 500 albums. Trouser Press noted that Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road appears in two utterly different versions. The sleeve is a pencil drawing of a seashore by Alfreda Benge, who said she wanted a cover that was minimal and quiet in an era of ever more elaborate prog covers.