A few minutes ago this page was blank. I was staring at it, not knowing what to write. Then I closed my eyes and waited to see what was the first thing that came into my head when I thought about Robert Wyatt. It was an image of my desk. A small pine desk I bought in 1991. It stood in the corner of our bedroom in the little flat we rented for a few months just off the King’s Road in Chelsea. On it sat a brand new Toshiba laptop, my pride and joy. I used to boast to friends that this laptop had a hard drive with a capacity of 20 MB – big enough to hold the entire novel I proposed to write on it.
And so I began to write the novel. I already had a title – What a Carve Up! – and a pretty solid idea of the plot and structure. It was an ambitious book, and the main ambition was to write something intensely political which didn't make readers feel that they were being harangued. To combine anger with warmth and humanity.
Could it be done? For a long time I wasn't sure. I sat at my desk every day and every evening, and wrote what I could, which wasn't much. And then, later that year, pretty much on the day it came out, I bought Robert Wyatt's album Dondestan. It was his first proper album since Old Rottenhat, some six years earlier, and suddenly, hearing that voice again, entering that soundworld, being welcomed into that lyrical space where political engagement had always co-existed with generosity and humour, a realm of possibility was opened up to me.
Consoling soundtrack
The inspiration I'd been searching for had been under my nose all the time. It had been there on Robert's 1974 album Rock Bottom, when his extraordinary, wordless vocalising on the playout to Sea Song had provided the consoling soundtrack to many an adolescent romantic disappointment. It was there on Nothing Can Stop Us: on his sublime cover versions of Strange Fruit and At Last I Am Free (a less polished but much riskier version than the Chic original, stretching the melody until it becomes almost unbearably fragile and vulnerable).
And it had been there, certainly, on Old Rottenhat, the album that had, for me, crystallised the emerging ruthlessness of the Thatcherite tendency etter than any other, as well as foreshadowing the rise of New Labour 10 years before Tony Blair tore up Clause 4 ("If we forget our roots and where we stand / The movement will disintegrate like castles built on sand").
The fact that Robert had managed to make one of his most committed and passionate albums in the mid-1980s is significant, it seems to me now. He began his career, as is well known, as the drummer and vocalist for The Soft Machine, one of the key bands in the early years of the so-called Canterbury Scene.
Exception to the rule
A distinguishing feature of the Canterbury bands – besides their instrumental virtuosity, English self-deprecation and Dadaist leanings – has been their consistent inability to reach out to a wide audience, to break out from the pages of specialist music magazines and into the mass media. Too polite? Too obscurantist? Who knows. Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, a Canterbury record to all intents and purposes, is one of the two obvious exceptions to this rule.
The other is the oeuvre of Robert Wyatt.
In the British musical upheavals of the late 1970s, most of the artists who had emerged from that scene struggled to stay afloat. Their old records disappeared from the shops and no new ones arrived to take their place. But Robert seemed to thrive.
With Shipbuilding, written for him by Elvis Costello and Clive Langer, he became better known than before. A good deal of artistic longevity and popularity comes down to luck, but in this case I don't think luck had anything to do with it: or with the fact that now, more than 40 years after The Soft Machine unceremoniously dispensed with his services, his songs are more widely known, more widely covered and more widely loved than ever.
No, it surely has to be down to the breadth of his vision. After his Virgin albums of the 1970s, something changed: he brought in a wider and more eclectic range of influences, coming from the whole spectrum of world music, while still retaining his unique, instantly recognisable voice and instrumental mannerisms. He developed a new, more overtly politicised outlook, without losing any of his trademark humour or self-mockery. ]
Looking outward
Suddenly, Robert's music was no longer introverted, but outward-looking, inclusive and universal. He began to speak (and sing) for a whole generation. Much as he would recoil from that notion, I'm sure.
I shudder to think what the last few decades would have been like without the continuous, alternative running commentary that has been provided by Wyatt’s music and lyrics. (And when we talk about his lyrics, we must also, of course, talk about his wife Alfie’s: for theirs is a true creative partnership.)He once said something to the effect that he had no objection to songs not making sense, because when songs do make sense, more often than not he doesn’t like the sense that they make.
As for his own songs, they can be oblique, certainly; sometimes eccentric. But, to me, they make a better kind of sense than most things that are going on in the world at the moment. More and more, Robert Wyatt sounds like the voice of sanity. Sane songs for insane times. No wonder that I, and countless others, have been inspired and uplifted by them for so long, and will remain forever grateful.
Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt by Marcus O'Dair is published by Serpent's Tail.
Peter Murphy reviews the book in The Irish Times on Saturday, December 13th. An accompanying compilation, also called Different Every Time, is out now on Domino Recordings.
