And then this later front cover where he's in the nuddy.
Not at the time of course - this is much, much later, in the 21st Century. Tentative probings into the forbidden prog zone. Growing fascination for Virgin Records in its pre-Sex Pistols identity, and the role of Simon Draper. One of my "nearly books" - twice!
I fear that Oldfield might have turned in a Brexity direction and possibly gets exercised on the question of farmers's inheritance tax and similar issues. Yes indeed he has complained about the UK becoming a "nanny state" and expressed a desire to play at Trump's inauguration.
His lead character Benjamin Rotter, who makes this kind of instrumental rock-as-classical composition, is clearly based on himself, then.
Good evening, glad to be with you, albeit it remotely, for this celebration of the great Robert Wyatt.
Another great Englishman Mark E. Smith once said “I hated
The Soft Machine and that kind of thing. Rock and roll was ruined when the students took
it over”.
Having been a student once, and middle class through and
through, it falls to me to mount a defence of the bourgeois contribution to
rock
Let’s start with Canterbury, in the south of England – where
Soft Machine formed and where other groups directly related to them or influenced
by them also hailed from, resulting what was known as the Canterbury Scene or
the Canterbury Sound - an incestuous cluster of post-psychedelic jazz rock
outfits who were sometimes endearingly whimsical and sometimes forbiddingly
abstruse and often both at the same time
With its superfluity of universities and colleges, Canterbury has the highest ratio of students to native residents of any town in the UK. Think
of all the academia-related jobs and ancillary work that institutions like that
support (book shops, theatres, cafes, etc) and how that changes the make-up and
vibe of a place.
Now in talking of the middle class contribution to rock, I’m
not really talking about bank managers or entrepreneurs, but a particular kind
of non-business oriented bourgeoisie - the professions, public servants, non
profits. People like Robert Wyatt's tolerant, encouraging mother, Honor Wyatt,
a journalist and radio presenter - a free thinker sort - who made her home an
open house for Wyatt and his friends. Later on, when she moved to South London,
her small house was home to the entire Soft Machine and their girlfriends. “I
don’t how we all fitted in there,” Wyatt told me. “But we did and we made our
racket and my mum was fine about it.”
What’s striking about
Soft Machine and the other Canterbury groups like Caravan and Hatfield and the
North is their relationship to American black music. Unlike other British
groups of the Sixties such as the Stones or Yardbirds, they’re not trying to
swagger like Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf. Although Soft Machine were obsessed with jazz, they don’t attempt to
be supercool like Miles Davis.
Almost alone in the British sixties scene, they don’t even
sing in a fake American accent
Wyatt was one of the very first British singers of the rock
era to sound English.
The other main ones are Kevin Ayers, also in Soft Machine,
and Syd Barrett, from Pink Floyd, the band that Soft Machine played alongside
at psychedelic clubs like UFO, and a band also spawned from formed at another
genteel university town, Cambridge.
Wyatt has described his style as “it sounded like me
talking, only with notes.”
So one thing I find endearing about the Canterbury groups is
that they not pretending to be anything other than what they are: nice middle-class South of England boys,
educated and well-brought-up. They fit a
new archetype of masculinity that I call "soft male" – this is the first
generation of British boys to be molded by permissive child-rearing practices
(picking up the baby when it's crying rather letting the infant cry out). The
first generation to grow up without the stiff upper lip implanted at birth –
nor did they experience being toughened up by national service in the Army,
that ended around 1961.
Their backgrounds might be genteel but they themselves tend
to sound socially indeterminate - a
syndrome I call middleclasslessness – if you listen to Robert Wyatt speak, it’s
mumbly and slightly faltering, softened by self-deprecation. In other words, it’s evacuated of the
confidence and entitlement that rings out clearly in the voices of the truly
posh.
This late Sixties, early Seventies breed of English musician
are not without faults, a self-indulgence, a reluctance to grow up – there
might be the odd bit of sexism in the mix.
But these young men are finding ways to play the music they
love (jazz, rhythm and blues, rock) but also be themselves. Hence the urge to
complicate things with time signatures shifts and distorted textures ... but
also the puerile humor, the Anglo-surrealist whimsy, elements that parallel Monty
Python. An odd combo of sophistication
and regression.
Take a song by Hatfield and the North in which Robert Wyatt
does guest vocals. It’s called "Big Jobs No. 2 (By Poo and The Wee
Wees)". You hear the singing and you think, ah there’s Wyatt – but
actually it’s one of Hatfield singing, Richard Sinclair singing. But he sounds like a
dead ringer for Robert – I call it Wyatt-ese. That is the natural singing and
speaking tone of many of these groups.
Although further into "Big Jobs" Wyatt does appear - but doing a little
bit of guest scat. No pun intended. He’s scat singing, sublimely.
This is one of Wyatt’s great inventions – an
instrumentalization of the voice. In Matching Mole, the group he formed after
his acrimonious expulsion from Soft Machine, he does the songs “Instant
Kitty” and “Instant Pussy” – the titles are whimsical, perhaps even lewd, but the abstract vocalese is astonishing, comparable
to things that singers like Tim Buckley was doing on Starsailor. Wyatt told me
that he was inspired by Roland Kirk’s playing. On his solo tune “Muddy Mouse” Wyatt vocally mimics the sound of a muted trumpet to exquisite effect. On
the later song “Born Again Cretin” – a hilarious satire of right-wing thinking
– the main Wyatt vocal is backed by a sort of bullfrog barbershop quartet of
multi-tracked Wyatt wordlessly wheezing and gasping in rhythmic accompaniment. Like so much Wyatt music, it is simultaneously
whimsically absurd yet utterly ecstatic.
For his regular singing, when he had a lyric, the model was
Dionne Warwick – a very un-rock’n’roll model to have. He has said that he
generally found women singers to be inspiring, what he wanted to emulate.
Both modes are heard on what might be his great single work,
“Sea Song”, the opening track of his 1974 masterpiece Rock Bottom – which
starts as an eerie serenade to a mermaid, then spirals off into mystical
flights of wordless falsetto
Rock Bottom came out after the break-up of Matching Mole. Wyatt had started to form a new group
involving Francis Monkman of Curved Air and various Canterbury-aligned
musicians, and Virgin Record wanted to sign the group. But then, during a party at the mansion-block
flat of socialite and Virgin recording artist Lady June, Wyatt tumbled out of
the window of the bathroom. The accident left him paralyzed below the waist,
unable to play drums again or participate in a touring rock band. So instead of
signing the planned Canterbury supergroup, Virgin released a solo album by Wyatt - Rock Bottom, a heartbreakingly poignant allegory of Wyatt’s emotional
regression and gradual self-rebuilding during his recovery from the accident,
couched in a blurry oceanic sound that recalls Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way
and Jimi Hendrix’s “1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be).”
Rock Bottom is dealing with some heavy, heavy stuff but it
still has the trademark Wyatt whimsy.
Even Wyatt's lovesongs are skewered by irony. In the
wonderfully sentimental 'O Caroline', Wyatt warns his sweetheart "if you
call this sentimental crap you'll make me mad", while 'Calyx' is full of
oddly phrased praise: "close inspection reveals you're in perfect
nick". The follow up to Rock Bottom, titled Ruth is Stranger Than Richard
'Soup Song' is sung from the point of
view of one of its reluctant ingredients, a slice of bacon.
Another Canterbury Scene hallmark that Wyatt might have invented is the meta-song, a song that addresses its own circumstances of
recording or composition, or talk about the lifestyle of the musician.
A version of Soft Machine’s 'Moon In June', Wyatt
extemporises about the joys of doing a radio session for the BCC
The opening line of the first verse of Matching Mole’s
“Signed Curtain” is
“This is the first verse”
And in fact it’s also the second, third, fourth and fifth
line of that first verse.
The next line?
“This is the chorus / Or perhaps it’s a bridge”
It closes with the lines “It only means that I lost faith in
this song / 'Cause it won't help me reach you”
“O Caroline” similarly starts not with the lover but with
the action in the studio – David on piano, Robert on the drums, “we try to make the music /We'll try to have
some fun”. Then it gets romantic “But I just can't help thinking that if you
were / Here with me /I'd get all my thoughts in focus and play /More
excitingly”
There is the story of how Robert Wyatt had a small pop hit
with a cover of “I’m A Believer” by the Monkees and appeared on Top of the
Pops. Apparently the idea originated with Richard Branson and after its success it became an
obsession for him, an idee fixe – he would ask other groups, later on, over the years, to cover "I'm A Believer".
But after that unexpected hit, there was a lull, Wyatt stopped making music
for several years. And a strange thing happened – his earlier music had
resolutely apolitical but strangely he did become a believer – a born again
Communist, a dedicated reader of the Morning Star newspaper. Even tuning to Radio Moscow to hear the non-Western Bloc viewpoint.
When he was
coaxed back into the studio to record a series of singles for the label Rough
Trade, many of them expressed his newly militant beliefs. He did the song
“Trade Union” with Dishari Shilpee Gosth, a Bangladeshi band of musicians from
the East End of London; he covered the World War 2 pro-Soviet song “Stalin
Wasn’t Stalling”; he brought out a political subtext to the Chic ballad “At
Last I Am Free”. He sang “Strange Fruit” and “Guantanamera” and Violeta Parra’s
“Arauco”.
Best of all though was his version of the black humorously
anti-authoritarian ditty by his friend Ivor Cutler, “Grass”, plays the role of
guru imparting wisdom to an acolyte, the power relation underlined by lines
like "While we talk I’ll hit your head with a nail to make you understand me". It ends "And when I’m gone you can feel the lumps upon your head / and think about what I said"
Around this time Wyatt also composed a moody instrumental soundtrack to
The Animals Film, a documentary about human exploitation and cruelty towards
animals, with narration by his friend Julie Christie.
Not long after the Rough Trade singles series ended, Clive
Langer and Elvis Costello wrote the song “Shipbuilding”, an oblique protest
against the Falkland War, and invited Wyatt to record it. That gave him his second hit single.
Wyatt has said that his attraction to Communism was its
internationalism - which is why he found
the imperialist nostalgia of the Falklands War aggravating.
He describes himself as a xenophile – someone who resists
the kneejerk British suspicion of Johnny Foreigner.
I’m sure he was aghast at Brexit and is horrified about the
nativism and authoritarian nationalism resurgent all across the globe.
He’s the kind of singer that people in the UK
call a national treasure – but he’d probably hate that .
