He was a dervish who dragged on his drums with a naked torso and sometimes even – like the great Elvin Jones – abrupt a melody. He was a deeds and a heavy slide, a dadaist and fun maker, an anarchist and a jazzer, one who only had to be overcome because it had to be overcome. Then he fell out of the window at the age of 28 and had to move in a wheelchair from then on. In his music, however, he overcame this restriction himself, let his sad, beautiful voice sound like the trumpet of Miles Davis and converted the pain into beauty.
Robert Wyatt-Ellidge was born on January 28, 1945 as the son of a journalist and a psychologist in Bristol, English. He went to school in Canterbury, got to know the American drummer George Neidorf, who gave him lessons, and the Australian hippie Daevid everyone with whom he played in bands – first in Daevid inspired by Sun Ras Free Jazz, then with the jazz -infized, song-oriented wild flowers, where he first sounded his high voice. Plates did not publish this band, but it was the seed from which the Canterbury Scene Spross: Wyatt moved to Soft Machine with Kevin Ayers and Hugh Hopper, everyone briefly got in, but then founded Caravan.
Jazz and psychedelia
Soft Machine combined their love for jazz with the quirky psychedelia of the time, played alongside Pink Floyd in the UFO Club in London and in the Roundhouse and toured the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Ayers left the band in 1968 to pull through the country (and beds) as a troubadour, soft machine played from there on suites instead of songs, became more virtuoso and more complex; Her third plate, a crazy jazz electronics rock fusion plant, was finally her masterpiece. After that it soon became too serious to the instinctive Wyatt and theoretically and he left the band to continue making music with the fun group Matching Mole for a while.
At the beginning of 1973 he accompanied his girlfriend Alfreda Benge to Venice, where she worked as a cut assistant to Nicolas Roeg’s “when the gondolas wear mourning”. The two moved into a house on the island of Guidecca with the leading actress Julie Christie, and while the women were shooting in the city, Wyatt wrote on a small toy organ love songs for his Alfie to play her up when she had overlooked Guidecca again at the moonlight:
“”You look different every time you come
From the Foam-Crested Brine
It’s your Skin Shining Softly in the Moonlight
Partly Fish, Parly Porpoise, Partly Baby Sperm Whale
On the i Yours? Are you mine to play with?“
Rock Bottom
In June 1973 he wanted to go to the studio with the new songs. But in the evening before the recordings, he fell very drunk from the fourth floor of a residential building in Maida Vale, London. He spent eight months in the hospital, which he finally left in a wheelchair to go straight to the studio and record his love songs on Alfie.
For the first time he could no longer hide behind his drums and sang in a fragile voice to a child -played keyboard, while Soft Machines Hugh Hopper, Caravans Richard Sinclair, Fred Frith and the young Mike Oldfield created an almost weightless sound that did nothing else Sound in the Prog-Rock-contaminated England. These songs seemed more of a soulful continuation of CAN’s ocean “Future Days”. One almost had the feeling that the tragic accident was at the end for Robert Wyatt a liberation from the bonds of virtuosity and the elite attitude of the prog rockers and jazz fusionists.
On the day when the album finally appeared, he married his Alfie. With a cover version of the Monkees hit “I’m a Believer”, he even made it into the single charts in the same year and appeared in the British chart show “Top of the Pops”. However, his appearance was not broadcast: a man in a wheelchair was not a family -friendly program, it said.
Liberation songs
A pop star was no longer made of him. It was not an easy life without money in a small chamber in London that didn’t even offer enough space for a piano to compose new music. At the end of the seventies, Wyatt joined the Communist Party and refused to absorb further albums for the Majorf Iron Virgin. Instead, he preferred to make singles with protest songs, workers and liberation songs for the indie label Rough Trade until the end of his contract.
Under bad conditions to sing songs of freedom with limited possibilities – that was called punk at the time. Wyatt sang “At Last I am Free” by Chic and Elvis Costello and Clive Langer wrote a song about the Falkland war for him, which was called “Shipbuilding”. In 1985 a new solo album appeared at Rough Trade that sounded like a demo. But even with modest means, Wyatt with “The Age of Self” gets an extremely catchy pop song and with the epic “Gharbzadegi” one of his most beautiful songs.
At the end of the eighties, the Wyatt couple moved north from London. In the small town of Louth in the Grafschalt Lincolnshire. Since then the two have had a small house for themselves, and Robert finally has a room in which he can make music undisturbed and listen to old jazz plates.
Robert Wyatt’s late work
The first album that was built in Louth was “Dondestan” in the early nineties. However, the recording of the new songs, some of which were poems of alfies, became a nightmare for the artist: he initially took over the costs for the studio to avoid the printing of a record company. After three days that cost him about £ 2000, he listened to the recordings and hated them. The idea of spending money that he did not have for music that he did not like did him. He had to cancel.
Finally, ex-Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera invited him to his studio in London and offered him to take up for a package price until he was satisfied with the result. In this way, the following albums also emerged: the impressionist “Shleep” (1997), the shimmering, diverse “Cuckooland” (2003) and the colorful concept work “Comicopera” (2007), on which Wyatt bears all of its cosmos in three files: From the music of freedom that is called jazz, about the protest against oppression and martial dust, to the escape of reality to the avant -garde.
End with hope
In 2010, he interpreted standards of Johnny Mercer, Thelonious Monk and Billy Strayhorn on “For the Ghosts Within”, his album with the Israeli saxophonist Gilad Atzmon and the British composer Ros Stephen. In the end he sang again “at least I’m free” and finally closed with “What a Wonderful World”. When you hear Robert Wyatt sings these songs, you believe for a few minutes that they could be true. So he ended his career with a glimmer of hope, if one disregarded a few guest appearances.
A poet, the Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard explained at the beginning of his main work “either-or” be an unfortunate person who has deep agony in his heart, but whose lips are so shaped by the sigh and the cry over them Expose, they sound like nice music. ”Robert Wyatt gave the suffering the most beautiful of all voices.