The overlay here of one kind of Old Wave (Free's raunchy bluesy hardrock strut) with another completely ill-suited Old Wave (Mike Oldfield's whatever-it-is-you'd-call it) makes for a magnificently quintessential Old Wave moment, even more so for happening deep into the New Wave era, in 1980
Bonus points for the presence of Bill Oddie for added beardy Old Waviness (does he fit that syndrome of the folkie turned comic - Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrott? Seemingly not - but he was certainly the driving force in the Goodies music).
Talking of Old Wave bucolicism, I do find this both touching and pleasing to the ear
It's sort of anti-cosmic rock, space rock renounced - he'd rather be riding on his horse through rolling English countryside than "flying through space"
A kind of decelerationist anthem
His singing sister is Old Wavey, but also seeping towards M.O.R. / New Age / Euroshlock - Nana Mouskori / Enya.
Voted Guitarist of the Year in 1975 by Melody Maker readers, I believe. (Actually - astonishingly - it was 1980 that he got that accolade from MM readers.)
But not a reference for guitarists today I shouldn't think. Although he was great playing with Kevin Ayers.
I wonder what stung him so much about NME 's coverage? (This is from 1982). Probably ALL of it. I should imagine (unlike the Maker) they made fun of him from the start, not just after punk.
Fuck me, my memory is terrible - I already did Mike Oldfield in this series, #2 Quintessence of Old Wave, back in early December!
Worth dredging these images up again, though
And then this later front cover where he's in the nuddy.
I seem to remember rather liking Hergest Ridge, and parts of Ommadawn.
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 do love the cover of this
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.
Jonathan Coe, who named a wonderful novel after a Hatfield and the North album, and who includes in its storyline the Virgin Crisis tour of '75 (ultracheap admittance for the young citizens of a failing economy - to see the likes of Henry Cow), confesses in the New Statesmen, as part of their 'roads not taken' series, that once he dearly wanted to be the next Mike Oldfield.
The paradox is that, back in the 1970s when I desperately wanted to be Mike Oldfield, I didn’t even like Mike Oldfield.
Or rather, I did, but I wasn’t prepared to admit it. At our elite, direct-grant school in the centre of Birmingham, the cool thing to do was to champion music that was off the beaten track. If I had been really cool I’d probably would have been into reggae or northern soul, but my preferred bands were white, nerdy and esoteric. Many of them (such as Henry Cow, and Hatfield and the North) were signed to Richard Branson’s Virgin Records, a label whose profitability was founded entirely upon one album: Tubular Bells, by Mike Oldfield. Its tinkly, complex instrumentalism wasn’t at all far removed from the bands I adored, but I distanced myself from it: too commercial, too well known, too popular.
And yet, when I started to write my own music a few years later, I sounded pretty much like Mike Oldfield. I used two cassette decks, bouncing tracks back and forth so that there could be three or four of me, playing guitar and keyboards with myself and building up layers of harmony and counterpoint.
Unfortunately, by the time I started getting any good at it, it was the middle of the 1980s and this kind of music was completely out of fashion. Even Mike Oldfield didn’t have much luck being Mike Oldfield in the 1980s. Meanwhile, I formed a band and had a stab at conquering the music world that way, but never stopped writing and recording my own, more introspective, more personal tunes on the side.
But I realised my ambition in the end. Nowadays anyone can release an album, of course, and the distillation of all those years of effort, a 50-minute oeuvre called Unnecessary Music, sits quietly on Spotify under my own name. Every year, my royalties from streaming come to a less-than-Oldfieldesque £1.50 or so. Better than nothing, you say? Yes, maybe. But I have a strong suspicion that the person doing most of the streaming is me.
His lead character Benjamin Rotter, who makes this kind of instrumental rock-as-classical composition, is clearly based on himself, then.
Here in fact is Coe's "Unnecessary Music" for your delectation
https://sparoad.bandcamp.com/album/unnecessary-music
Crikey, there's more - a band performed it at jazz festival in Italy.
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
And in fact it’s also the second, third, fourth and fifth
line of that first verse.
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.
