Robert Wyatt

With his masterpieces Robert Wyatt wrote a soundtrack of post-industrial existentialism, pairing it with a moving act of faith in human dignity. In perspective, the work of Robert Wyatt represents an artistic monument that can be placed among the peaks of music of the twentieth century.

Soft Machine's Third Moon In June had fully revealed the qualities of Robert Wyatt, who was not only a drummer or a singer, but was capable of playing all the instruments and amalgamating the sound with an unusual fusion process that draws on equal measure jazz, pop and electronic music, at the same time endowed with a marked artistic sensitivity.

At the time of his departure from Soft Machine he had already made his first solo album: End Of An Ear (CBS, 1970). He had meticulously overdubbed hours of solitary improvisation, then adding the parts played by Elton Dean, David Sinclair, Mark Charig, and others. The "end of the ear" is in the anomalous sounds, in the orchestral noises, in the vocal pastiche, in the curious and capricious anarchy. The obligatory reference is Moon In June, the young drummer's first escape from the geometric and metaphysical canons of the Soft Machine. Like there, the medium tone here too is a dadaist solfeggio without a plot that explores sound rather than architecture.

Las Vegas Tango represents the zenith of the album: in this piece the experiments on voice, percussive fantasies and para-jazz piano playing find a definitive arrangement; the shapeless magma of voices, moans, chants, tongue twisters, nonsense, shouts, animal verses takes shape, where melancholy madness and alienated neurosis are sublimated into radiant and desperate yearning. The dissonances of the piano hold the climax in an expressionist psychodrama suspense, but the carnival of vocalizations, which steals "manners” from all genres, softens the tension in a spectacular excess of psychedelic solfeggios. The vortex drags slices of mind and universe into an absolute tango, an apocalyptic dance of the dissolution of forms.

The second part, on the other side of the record, renounces electronically deforming the song, but tries even more difficult vocal balancing. On the tightrope of percussion and keyboards, Wyatt ricochets from one side of the delirium to the other; and dull rhythms, dull clamor, hissing and ticking mixed in intoxicating potions, distort and tear the message, which in the end remains in a state of pure, vaunted madness; or declaimed, recovered as an instrument of salvation in the face of more distressing and more rational realities.

The crisis of the "Movement", the collapse of ideals, the decomposition of the Sixty-eight are the presuppositions from which the mild madness of the disk proceeds. And this "political" theme joins a more metaphysical "moral" theme. The complex, extremely intricate, sound universe of Las Vegas Tango portrays the soul overflowing with contradictions and frustrations of the man who has failed a cosmic enterprise, and who now abandons himself to the stupidity and uselessness of all things, perhaps seeking in that nothingness the ultimate purpose of one's own existence. The voice, overdubbed at different levels, drifts on a minimal musical background (often nothing more than a dissonant piano tinkling), on a dreamlike intonation iterated over and over and clearly inspired by jazz-rock. It is a new form of mantra, which feeds on free-jazz and heterodox solfeggios. Ultimately the experiment stands alongside those of Meredith Monk and Joan LaBarbara among the great attempts to reinvent the role of the voice instrument.

The other episodes of the album, entirely instrumental, are above all affectionate dedications to friends, dispensing wisdom on the mistakes of others, surreal parodies of their defects and their obsessions: the whistle that echoes mechanical and eternal in To Saintly Bridget, terrible and beautiful on wind and percussion instruments; the grotesque industrial march of the wind instruments of To Mark (Charig), an expressionistic mini-masterpiece; the babelic confusion of To Oz Alien Daevid And Gilly; the "creative" duet of cornet and saxophone on To Nick (Evans), an excellent foray into the area of the glacial free, rain of random and "creative" digressions in the furious chaos of percussion, with a continuous and dizzying invention and reproduction of music for fragmented phrases, impulses, spasms, nervous jerks, thrills and hollows; the confidential melody of To Caravan, carried on a hypnotic rhythm by a religious organ and a dissonant plan; the experiment of trumpet, electronics and free percussion of To The Old World; and finally the tender and joyful elegy of the piano in To Carla Marsha And Caroline.

The most striking effects are the rhythmic tones of Mark and Caravan, where a new form of dada-primitivist dance seems prophesied. But songs like Old World and Nick are located on the far reaches of the avant-garde, electronic and jazz respectively, and therefore have a more historical importance.

After delivering this masterpiece to English rock history, Wyatt forms the Matching Mole (the name derives from an assonance with the French translation of "soft machine", that is, "soft machine"), gathering around him Phil Miller 

(guitar), Bill McCormick (bass) and David Sinclair (keyboards, but soon replaced by Dave McRae). At the beginning of 1981 their first album came out, more conditioned by jazz and less personal than the previous one.

The medium pitch of the first album, Matching Mole (CBS, 1972), is more subdued. Wyatt's anxious existentialism permeates the vocal parts as usual, but the instrumental contortions spoil the global Weltanschauung with excessive lucubration, although the immaterial song that opens Instant Kitten, the circular electric solo at the beginning of Dedicated To Hugh, and the gloomy anarchy of Beer As In Braindeer are as many metaphysical nightmares.

Equally brilliant emotional arabesques are found in Caroline, a desolate serenade in a lunar Middle Ages; in Instant Pussy, an exhausted lament, a silent prayer; in Signed Curtain, the long feverish frenetic fever of a sage that melts his useless chant to the unknown gods. Immediate Curtain's icy orchestral apotheosis pinpoints a pessimistic morality on the disc: man's littleness in the inevitable tangle of his destiny. Built on a horrendously defeated serenade from the cosmic furnace, it is a crescendo of anguish that slowly floods all the free spaces.

In the summer the group is back in the studio to record the second album: Little Red Record (CBS, 1972). This album, which also boasts of the participation of Brian Eno and the production of Robert Fripp, is more group work than the previous one, and in this sense, it heightens the depersonalization of music. On the cover, the portrait of four guerrillas with Mao's red booklet in one hand and in the other a machine gun raised towards the East clarifies the political intentions of Wyatt, a declared proponent of socialist music.

The value of this difficult album is mainly due to Wyatt's vocal games, adorable nonsense for psychic monsters of the twentieth century. Wyatt leaves to others (especially McRae) the responsibility of composing the sound plot, and instead devotes himself to a stubborn research on the use of the voice. While McRae and the others get even closer to jazz, Wyatt works both within music, participating as a drummer in collective jazz-rock, and on music, in those sung parts that constitute a result of all importance in its own right, the continuation that is, of the wonderful experiments of Las Vegas Tango. That way of humming with half-closed lips, steeped in mystery and melancholy, is a metaphysical pirouette in the sign of more scientific nonsense. It is a flow of consciousness through whispers of syllables, unfinished chants, inner moans.

High examples of this brandishing vowels on the defenseless body of music are Starting In The Middle Of The Day (almost a liturgical tenor) and Righteous Rhumba's delightful paranoid council. In more decidedly jazz territories, the Dadaist flowers of Marchides and the liquid instrumental brush of Brandy As In Benj grow, as well as the iridescence of keyboards on Nan True`s Hole, an underground nightmare of electronic moles, then dozing and light a la Zappa.

The inanimate sequences of Gloria Gloom, with the metaphysical vortices of Eno's synthesizer and Wyatt's spatial echoes, almost shouts down and blows through the ways of the cosmos, and Smoke Signal, which opens the door of perception (music melts in the oceans of reflections, the intertwining of barely touched keys and vibrant dishes sinks flexibly and sprawling in the shadow of the abyss, a signal of smoke for warriors of infinity) perhaps constitute the culmination of the adventure of the group.

Other 1972 recordings will appear on Smoke Signals (Cuneiform, 2001) and March (Cuneiform, 2002).

WMWS (Robert Wyatt, pianist Dave MacRae, saxophonist Gary Windo and bassist Richard Sinclair) performed live in 1973, as documented on One Night Stand (Gonzo, 2015).

The Matching Mole dissolved in the fall of 1972. Just when he was putting them back together, in June 1973, Wyatt was the victim of a bad accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down, and, after six months of hospital rehabilitation, forced him to a wheelchair. The silence that always surrounded his work seemed to have enveloped the character definitively. After six months Wyatt resumed playing and, on the contrary, prepared his masterpiece.

Rock Bottom (Virgin, 1974) was recorded with a wealth of guests: hugh Hopper and Richard Sinclair on bass, Gary Windo on clarinet, Mongezi Feza on trumpet, Mike Oldfield on guitar, Fred Frith on viola, Ivor Cutler on concertina and Nick Mason as producer: half of the Canterbury school paying tribute to its ruler. The response of music critics was enthusiastic, but it was not enough to reverse Wyatt's financial distress. Wyatt could no longer play the drums and therefore played the keyboards, of which he had been a sophisticated user since the days of Moon In June. The album, abandoning the agitated and cerebral jazz-rock of Matching Mole, was born under the banner of an inner quest, a descent into the depths of the self. There is a kind of breathing, a shared vital pulse, that animates all the tracks, as if exhaled from an organic mass of feelings. For this demanding program of stream of consciousness, Rock Bottom fuses the two main components of Wyatt’s music: the sentimental melodicism of Moon In June and the pataphysical vocalism of Las Vegas Tango. Under the sign of free jazz, a suite-form of great suggestiveness and emotional intensity thus emerges.
Beyond the extensive use of electronic keyboards and this “breathing” common to all the pieces, Rock Bottom has another defining trait: its calm, relaxed, almost resigned tone, which slows and softens the music of one who had been an irreducible dadaist. Experience and knowledge have stripped him of his proverbial musical humor. Now he is a sage who gazes in dismay at the becoming of the universe, renouncing any attempt to understand it, yet tragically aware of the human condition.
The first two tracks are entirely in the hands of the keyboards, rising and falling as they guide the humble, sorrowful voice, while dispensing with horns. The funereal elegy of Sea Song (almost a solo by Wyatt on keyboards, voice, and drum) hovers within a sinister, despairing harmonic vortex, advancing with the slow gait of a secret ritual. Last Straw sinks even more ominously into occult mysteries, unfolding in a way that recalls a more linear and nervous Las Vegas Tango, with an arrangement that conveys the sense of a fractured mind and impending apocalypse.
And apocalyptic indeed are the major sarabandes, whose guiding themes are two: that of Alife (Wyatt’s wife Alfreda) and that of Little Red Hood (Little Red Riding Hood). These also represent the two fundamental states of Wyatt’s art: titanic lyricism and dadaist nonsense, that is, the yearning for the absolute (“unendliche Sehnsucht”) and the paranoia of everyday life. The voice abandons itself to delirium and convulsions in a subdued tone far removed from past garglings, while the horns embark on long journeys, tracing nightmarish arabesques over already deranged atmospheres.
Alifib is almost a solo by Wyatt for breath and keyboards. Over the gymnastic repetition of the same neurotic inhalation (a breath keeps time in place of the drums!), Hopper’s bass embroiders a stream of consciousness, while the keyboards unfold serenely in celestial chords; then a nonsense crooning—melancholically in love and tenderly mad—weaves a “faded” serenade, like certain sparse ballads by Buckley. Alife takes shape: symphonic keyboards flood the cosmos and the clarinet crackles nervously, while Wyatt declaims, Brecht-like, his nursery rhymes over a martial piano.
Little Red Riding Hood is instead a hymn to chaos: trumpet and mellotron devour vast spaces, the piano weaves epic prayers, the percussion drives with tribal insistence, and the singing stretches over the pandemonium toward impossible melodies. It is a kind of catastrophic “wall of sound,” creating a climate of terror through the accumulation of absolute sounds.
The second part, Little Red Robin Hood, which concludes the album, is even denser and truly represents the “rock bottom”: the singing begins with a martial litany, superbly marked by a military drum and the wintry breaths of the mellotron, in a truly apocalyptic atmosphere, and then fixates obsessively on the same line, like a gramophone needle stuck in a faulty groove (a danse macabre for the new millennium), before the viola chords and the solemn, liturgical, Brechtian declamation of Cutler cause everything to collapse into a chamber piece for dissonant strings.
It is an intense and desolate lullaby that seems to search for meaning and purpose in a godless world, a harrowing delirium in which fate and faith confront each other, both without hope.
If End Of An Ear can be considered a “praise of madness” dedicated to man, Rock Bottom is a “praise of chaos,” dedicated to the cosmos.
Anti-epic pessimism, made of profound sadness and frivolous cheerfulness, reaches its most perfect expression. Madness and melancholy merge into a single feeling of loneliness in the crowd, of helplessness in the universe. The animal that symbolizes Wyatt’s philosophy is the mole, which lives underground, in darkness and silence, useless and subversive (“moles are of no use to anyone and therefore must be killed”).

Compared with his masterpiece, Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (Virgin, 1975) was a half-baked album, an unfinished project that did not have enough good material when it was prematurely released. Soup Song could be a Bob Dylan rigmarole from the mid Sixties. Muddy Mouse is a tedious whining ballad that sounds like the exact opposite of the elegies of Rock Bottom. The instrumental Sonia is a trivial horn fanfare. Team Spirit is a jazzier and (mostly) louder version of the ballads of Rock Bottom: no magic, just pomp. At least the instrumental Solar Flares is decent jazz-rock in the vein of Nucleus and Keith Tippett. It was the first failed album in Wyatt's career, a sign that a phase of his career had ended. The word "disappointing" doesn't even come close.

In the following five years of artistic silence, Wyatt lived off occasional appearances as a guest of honor in other people’s concerts or records, enjoying the gradual critical reappraisal of his work, the belated interest of the public, and the respect of the younger generation.

Having retired to Twickenham, in a quiet little house of old England with his wife Alfie and a son, he spent his free time at the local branch of the British Communist Party, or listening to music.

Around 1980 Wyatt broke his isolation by recording a few singles, mostly agit-prop revisions of tunes from bygone eras, collected on Nothing Can Stop Us (Rough Trade, 1981). These “civic” songs, which Wyatt wrote to comment (from the left, of course) on contemporary events, constitute the final act of a noble militancy within the ranks of the musical intelligentsia. Shipbuilding (1982) is a successful collaboration with Elvis Costello.

The slow, steady recovery passes through a precious soundtrack for the film Animals (Rough Trade, 1982), half an hour of free sounds among the most hallucinatory and evocative of Wyatt’s entire output, capable of stirringly evoking the atrocities denounced by the film: Wyatt comments on the scenes, absentmindedly humming haunting lullabies made of overlapping, resonant monosyllables, unfolding on the piano keyboard the Eno-like charm of “discreet” and “ambient” notes, and paraphrasing on the drums the rhythms of slaughter and agony.
The nightmarish atmospheres recall the climate of resigned despair and faint madness of the jazz chaos of Rock Bottom, albeit from a completely different technical angle. The album’s onomatopoeic electronics arise from the intersection of various technologies of the new rock (from ethno-jazz to transcendental minimalism, from commercial synth-pop to industrial music), demonstrating how little distance separated the brilliant intuitions of End Of An Ear from the music of the decades to come.

In 1985 Wyatt continued his militant discourse with two 45s of social critique, Age Of Self, a relaxed and melodic cocktail-lounge jazz-rock piece, and Wind Of Change, and recorded the first non-programmatic work of the previous ten years, Old Rotten Hat (Rough Trade, 1985). The album, entirely played by Wyatt, is a collection of “unfinished” pieces by the author set to militant lyrics. Solemn and sorrowful ballads make their way through the ruins of the contemporary world, and the bard of Judgment Day points to them one by one, delivering for each a sermon of harsh yet moving grief. The eight transcendent minutes of Gharbzadegi, built from jazz piano and interwoven chants that rise in a spiritual crescendo and fade into a music box, and the folk ditty British Road, with its hypnotic minimal cadence and medieval arrangement (tambourine, clarinet, harmonium), flow with the intensity of religious hymns in an increasingly personal universe. The tragedies of humanity merge and blur with individual anxieties, and his fragile vocals seem to want to cradle universal horror in a solemn lullaby.

Dondestan (Rough Trade, 1991), divided between the idyllic watercolors of Alfreda Benge and Wyatt's political sermons, ranks among his most introspective works. Wyatt again prefers simplicity over the "symphonic" sound of his masterpieces. It is a wildly uneven collection. The soul seems to disintegrate in the electronic whispers, the piano notes and the rhythmic breathing that accompany the anemic psalm of The Sight Of The Wind. The most intense moment comes with the catatonic jazz ballad Catholic Architecture, Wyatt's voice sculpting psychological landscapes against a backdrop of floating electronics, fragile piano figures and slow beats. Even thinner is the atmosphere of N.I.O., a dreamy chant that seems to drift inside the tapestry of nothingness. The notable experiment is Shrinkrap, not quite a rap, but certainly a surreal spoken piece with staccato piano and booming percussion. On the other hand, songs such as the bluesy Worship or the jazzy CP Jeebies are rather plain and unexciting, memories of past glories overshadowing the actual songs. The childish Dondestan mocks vintage charleston dances, but doesn't quite know what to do with that idea. Costa evokes Matching Mole's convoluted jazz-rock, but, again, rather inconclusively.

The EP A Short Break (Voiceprint, 1992), a home recording, collected five more lieder of his personal purgatory. If A Short Break seems to hint at a mature serenity, Kutcha and Venti Latir sink in the old quicksands of neurosis, and the terrifying Unmasked questions "is every moment forever?" No matter how humble he tries to be, Wyatt can't help revealing existential angst even behind the most tender acceptance of daily domestic life.

Mid-Eighties (Rough Trade, 1993) contains Old Rottenhat, the EP Work In Progress (1984), mostly devoted to covers, and some rarities.

Going Back A Bit (Virgin, 1994) is a career anthology. Flotsam & Jetsam (Rough Trade, 1994) collects unreleased music.

Shleep (Hannibal, 1997), one of his most professional-sounding albums, performed by veterans such as Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera, Paul Weller, jazz guitarist Philip Catherine, jazz saxophonist Evan Parker, trombonist Annie Whitehead, is, again, mostly notable for how Wyatt fails to evoke a younger himself. The Caribbean novelty Heaps Of Sheeps or the Mediterranean spleen of Maryan or the African polyrhythm of Alien, or the lengthy duet with Hopper, Was A Friend, or the plain rigmarole of A Sunday In Madrid, are not worthy of the man who recorded Rock Bottom.
On the other hand the accompaniment to the spoken fairy tale of The Dutchess employs a surreal mixture of jazz, Middle Eastern and neoclassical music, September The 9th begins with a dissonant horn fanfare that blends free-jazz and folk melody, and the dilated Out Of Season reenacts at least the lyrical introspection of Dondestan. And they do what they do with grace and depth. A Bob Dylan tribute (Blues In Bob Minor) and a Neil Young-ian meditation, Free Will And Testament ("is there freedom to un-be"?), seal what may have been his extreme attempt at uttering the word that sits between "love" and "the end".

The fact remains that very little of what Wyatt has recorded since Animals is memorable.

Solar Flares Burn For You (Cuneiform, 2003) is nominally a film soundtrack, but the music dates from as far back as 1972. In the era of low recording costs, even Robert Wyatt couldn't resist the temptation of releasing leftovers from his glorious career. We are treated to very inferior versions of his classic, to sometimes embarrassing minor compositions, to ridiculous covers of pop muzak, etc. Sure, the surreal horn fanfare of Blimey O'Riley, the atmospheric percussive jazz of Twas Brillig, and the dissonant/minimalist concerto Solar Flares Burn For You would be considered masterpieces on many artists' albums. But the most criminally under-rated (or, better, ignored) musician of the 20th century deserves more than an anthology of leftovers from his monumental career.

Cuckooland (Hannibal, 2003), Wyatt's first album of new material in six years, returns to the format of the pop song, which has never been Wyatt's forte, no matter how ethereal, melodic and melancholy the songs turn out to be. However, the collection is less uneven than the albums of the 1990s. This is actually four albums in one: the Wyatt songs, the songs written by main arranger Karen Mantler (that are actually ruined by Wyatt's vocals), the ones co-written with his wife Alfreda Benge and a couple of awful covers. No surprise that it ends up sounding like several records mixed into one.
Wyatt's album, though, is unusually tight, brilliant, elegant, to the point. The dense, disorienting pastiche of vocals, sax, electronics and tinkling percussion of Just a Bit is the closest he has ever been to repeating the miracle of Rock Bottom. Nothing happens in Tom Hay's Fox, other than setting the noir atmosphere for something that was supposed to happen. The colloquial tune of Trickle Down hides behind busy old-fashioned swinging rhythms and a confused tapestry of trombone sax and trumpet melodies. Foreign Accents sounds like a version of Michael Nyman's minimalism for vocals and trombone. Brian the Fox is indeed Wyatt at his most ethereal, whispering his four-word lyric inside a bubble of electronics, trumpet and trombone.
The music for Benge's poems is pretentious but occasionally captivating. Despite being simply a duet with a reed player, Old Europe is a lively, swinging, intricate chanson that runs through several different styles of jazz music, from bebop to dixieland, besides boasting a catchy singalong melody. The lazy vocals of Forest flow smoothly over a bed of bluesy jamming, while Cuckoo Madame stutters under the weight of the voice's existential agony. Trombone and accordion create an eerie background for the rather plain Lullaby for Hamza.

The 62-year old Robert Wyatt composed his self-portrait with the 16-song cycle Comicopera (Domino, 2007). Wyatt's chronic melancholy is one of the greatest icons of the contemporary world's weltanschauung. It is a great metaphor for all the horrors brought to human civilization by the genocidal ideologies of the 20th century, from Nazism to Communism (despite his communist beliefs, his music is a fitting soundtrack for the genocides carried out by communist regimes). This "comic opera" is a way to summarize everything that he has felt, sung and implied on the topic. The work is structured in three acts: "Lost In Noise", a suite of mostly love songs (a de-facto collaboration with Alfreda Benge), that digs into the private aspect of his soul the way Rock Bottom did; "The Here and the Now", a suite of sociopolitical anthems; "Away With the Fairies", a suite of protest songs from around the world. The first part is by far the best one. Past Anja Garbarek's Stay Tuned (the jazziest song, featuring the stellar line-up of Brian Eno on keyboards, Seaming To on clarinet, Annie Whitehead on trombone, Yaron Stavi on violin, Wyatt himself on drums and lead vocals, and a contralto on backup vocals), Wyatt intones the slow, nocturnal lullaby Just as You Are (a duet with Brazilian vocalist Monica Vasconcelos, with a melody reminiscent of early Leonard Cohen), and the funereal You You, against a calmer version of the horns-driven maelstrom of Rock Bottom. The transition from the private to the public is marked by A Beautiful Place (a mediocre imitation of Bob Dylan), the hilarious religious parody Be Serious on a sparse jazz-funk rhythm, and the jovial Latin-tinged instrumental On the Town Square (featuring Wyatt on cornet, Del Bartle on guitar, Gilad Atzmon on saxophone, Orphy Robinson on steel pans). The "political" part comprises the old-fashioned pop ditty A Beautiful War (with Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera on guitar) and the duet with Brian Eno Out of the Blue, boasting the densest arrangement (fractured staccato keyboards, turbulent horns, processed vocals). Wyatt cannot resist the temptation to add political overtones to his music, a vice that has always been his main weakness, wasting his talent in silly communist covers (including a moving tribute to none less than Che Guevara, the man who was in charge of Fidel Castro's firing squads during the Cuban revolution). However, this album also contains what he does best.

Radio Experiment Rome February 1981 (Rai Trade, 2009), documenting a multitracked improvisation by Robert Wyatt on vocals, keyboards and percussion, was released only 28 years after the fact.

For The Ghosts Within (2010) documents a collaboration with the Israeli-born saxophonist/clarinetist Gilad Atzmon and the British violinist Ros Stephen. The album includes some old (bad) Wyatt songs and a few covers.

'68 (Cuneiform, 2013) collects Robert Wyatt's solo recordings of late 1968.