Robert Wyatt is one of those English pop mavericks who manage to be both outsider artists and national institutions. The grizzled rock scholar will remember Wyatt in his youth as drummer in The Soft Machine, a jazz/prog-rock product of the fertile 1960s arts-lab culture that nurtured The Beatles, the Stones, Pete Townshend and Pink Floyd. For the John Peel generation he's best known as the plaintive voice of Shipbuilding, released at the height of Falklands War hysteria, maybe the most understated and affecting of early 1980s protest songs. For students of the avant-garde end of rock'n'roll he's the wheelchair-bound elder statesman of Marxist-modernist pop, the quintessential BBC Four/6 Music heritage act.
Different Every Time, the first book to accord Wyatt the full biographical works, adheres to a two-act structure. Part one profiles a bare-chested, heavy-drinking, womanising, virtuoso drummer dogged by chronic depression. (He was barely 17 when he first attempted suicide.) His parents were self-educated eccentrics, and young Robert had a relatively enlightened and indulged upbringing for a postwar lad. By the time he was a teenager he'd already socialised with poets (Robert Graves), painters (Paul Klee), minimalists (Terry Riley), jazzbos and British beats.
Marcus O’Dair efficiently maps these early years, the mid-1960s Canterbury scene that nurtured not only the embryonic Soft Machine but also Kevin Ayers, Caravan and sundry other purveyors of pastoral, paisley jazz spiked with Edward Lear whimsy. The Soft Machine and Pink Floyd, according to Nick Mason, were the “twin house bands of the underground”, the soundtrack to counterculture happenings in London clubs such as UFO and Middle Earth: high-volume freak-outs characterised by lysergic lighting shows, back projections, free-form dancers and hour-long improvisations.
Soft Machine exit
Wyatt was blooded on a US tour supporting Jimi Hendrix in 1968, the year of race war, riots and assassinations, but tour burnout soon took its toll. Following a third Soft Machine album, interpersonal relations descended into acrimony and Wyatt was ousted from the band he founded, thereafter drifting into musical limbo and marital breakdown, cutting his wrists and drinking himself insensible. (O’Dair’s book might have been written with the full consent and co-operation of its subject, but it spares no blushes.)
In time Wyatt resumed playing with Matching Mole, collaborating with the likes of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, but just as he found domestic stability with his wife-to-be, the film editor Alfreda (Alfie) Benge, disaster struck. On a June night in 197, Robert and Alfie attended a party in a Maida Vale flat. Drunk on wine, whiskey and punch, Wyatt attempted to leave the bathroom by crawling down a drainpipe. He fell four floors and broke his back, an event that provides the book’s dramatic fulcrum.
“I remember hearing, in the distance, a scream like a wolf’s howl,” he tells O’Dair. “I mentioned this later to somebody and they said, ‘That was you.’ But I remember it as though it was distant, across the traffic. So I heard my own scream as a wolf, echoing in the distance. I was quite detached from it. I remember being bundled into an ambulance. Anyway, then six weeks later – because apparently, you’re put on so many drugs in hospital that you’re completely out of it – I wake up and I’m in a hospital bed, and that was a whole new world.”
Wyatt had broken his 12th vertebra and was paralysed from the waist down. He was discharged from hospital in January 1974, a paraplegic at 28. The once reckless and hyperactive drummer was forced to find a new role as a composer, singer and musical arranger. With the help of the actor Julie Christie and funds raised by Pink Floyd benefit shows – they were now an A-list act thanks to Dark Side of the Moon – Robert and Alfie moved to Twickenham, and Wyatt began work on his first solo album, the wryly named Rock Bottom.
‘Rock Bottom’
It was the record that made his name, not least because physical restrictions demanded focus and musical innovation. Rock Bottom, released on Richard Branson's fledgling Virgin label, was a surrealist's wedding album, an amalgam of free jazz, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and Indian classical music, featuring hand percussion, rudimentary keyboards and that distinctive fragile-sounding voice. There were also walk-ons by Mike Oldfield and Ivor Cutler.
Following a triumphant Drury Lane show in September 1974 (vividly described by O'Dair), Wyatt scored a fluke hit with a cover of the Monkees' I'm a Believer, which landed him on Top of the Pops. The show's producer found his wheelchair unsightly and insisted he perform propped in a chair.
For the next six years Wyatt dwelled in the margins, more entangled in activism than music, until a series of diverse and politically charged singles for Rough Trade established his indie cred. Then, in 1982, he received a cassette of Shipbuilding, cowritten by Elvis Costello and the producer Clive Langer. A cult classic and perennial Peel standard was born. Wyatt's version became the Strange Fruit (which he had recorded) of the postpunk era, and sealed his reputation as a cult icon.
Over the next 30 years Wyatt would battle depression, writer's block, alcoholism and physical disability even as he gradually assumed elder-statesman status and gained the approbation of everyone from Paul Weller to Björk. His career culminated in a turn as Meltdown festival curator and the career-high epic Comicopera, released in 2007.
O'Dair, a journalist, broadcaster and musician (with the Ninja Tunes act Grasscut), relates these latter years with insight and flair. His prose style rarely attracts attention to itself, but he proves a shrewd music critic, diligent researcher and sensitive interviewer, eliciting hours of unguarded testimony from Wyatt and his collaborators. The reader is left with the sense of having borne witness to an extraordinary life. Peter Murphy's novels include John the Revelator
