Robert Wyatt: Classic or Dud?

I know his reputation more than his music -- but based on his two songs with Ultramarine, he's got a definite something.

And the brilliant tracks include - yes - some political ones. "Alliance" for instance is reductionist and I don't agree with it (or more to the point I don't care about the actual political situation being described) BUT as a portrait of political disillusionment and betrayal it's superb and like a lot of great political songs it's a disappointed love song too - "It's hard to talk to enemies / And we are enemies / What we had in common / Makes it even worse".

Also m'lud take into account: "At Last I Am Free", "Shipbuilding", "Born Again Cretin", "Arauco", "Kingdom" and a large chunk of "Shleep" too.

I would hardly rank him in the same league as Simon and Garfunkel; I haven't heard anything on Soft Machine 3 or greater, but it can't be as staggeringly annoying as "Cecilia". Uff da.

see also "dondestan revisited"

shleep is a beautiful record and the first I discovered; both rock bottom and ruth hit my cd player regularly. I liked Old Rottenhat as well, which means I like pretty much everything I've heard by him, which I suppose means I'm a fan and therefore think: classic.

'old rottenhat' close behind. prefer the original mix of 'dondestan' over the polished 'revisited' one by ten miles.

The recent live Matching Mole discs on Cuneiform are pretty shit-hot too.

i like everything he's done, even "a short break" and "the end of an ear" (which i listen to with some difficulty). his voice is indeed the unifying factor and it is so inviting, his wordless vocalizing in particular. apparently he can *sing* entire coltrane solos from memory.

i can't quite get into some of the matching mole stuff but "o caroline" is one of the greatest things he's done. manages to be self-effacing and utterly serious at once.

What a fucking wonderful country, right?

What a disgusting legacy. FUCK the United States of America.

jara's songs are lovely b/c they take the road not (often) taken w/r/t political songs, where a story about people living their daily lives, things like love and sex and children and school and so on, connect to politics in these suggestive but nonetheless clear ways. as wonderful as wyatt's reading of "te recuerdo amanda" is, jara's is heartbreaking. i shouldn't even bother to attempt to apply any superlatives to it.

I'm like, at a loss for words whenever discourse centers on the ridiculousness of this place.

Anyway, yes Amateurist you are your normal smart, sensible self. Still, frankly, I can't dismiss people who have politics opposite to my own. Gosh, I'd like to think we all do.

Darnit, this world is fucked, but for Christ's sake some of us pine for the alternatives...

Wyatt rules.

this is a nice thread. there was a doc on robert wyatt abt a couple of months back on BBC4 and he came across as a wonderful person. I've heard some soft machine and i sort of struggle with it for some reason but I like his voice so i should check solo stuff.

and soft machine doesn't even compare to his solo stuff. it's slow, moody, post-prog political love songs. and his keyboard tones are so warm and thick.

i keep passing up this one single of his. it's him and a bunch of south african musicians. anyone know anything about it?

He was closely identified with the Popular Unity movement of Salvador Allende. After Pinochet's coup which toppled Allende, Jara was arrested, tortured, and later killed (along with 1000s of other Chileans).

His stuff probably shouldn't be too hard to find in any Hispanic music store (I'm not sure where you're at, but there's a million such places in Chicago), and on eBay you can sometimes find the remastered CDs from his catalog that came out in Chile last year.

Anyway we're talking about him because Wyatt recorded one of his most famous (and beautiful) songs, "Te Recuerdo Amanda" ("I remember Amanada").

Anyway, Jason - yeah I believe I paid something like $30 or $35 for EPs as well. Too much, but as I say I had to have it (maybe it isn't too much, i dunno; I don't know what it went for new, but it seemed like a lot to me). It's just a really beautiful package, a nice thing to have on the shelf, you know? Yeah that Animals soundtrack is unsettling, and I've never even seen the film.

I think it would give me nightmares.

Also he was on one of the best singles ever, Vivien Goldmans Launderette / private armies record

Since when was Robert Wyatt ever a "Stalinist"? What, because he sang "Stalin Wasn't Stallin'"? Do some research before accusing people of being Stalinists.

Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, what exactly does that mean? Wyatt was a member of the British Communist Party, he was a Marxist, he was not a Stalinist.

"Robert Wyatt! I got on well with Robert. The greatest problem between us was a political one. I had been in the Young Communist League -- when I was a schoolboy, I'd established a branch or two. And I was the one that didn't get beaten up on the way to our first meeting. I'd worked with the Communist Party of Great Britain's headquarters. I kind of knew what the party was like. One of the things that appealed to me about Marxism was its anti-utopian foundation -- it was infinitely preferable to wishing that the world was a nicer place, or that Robin Hood was elected sheriff. But through reading a lot of theory and working for the party, I thought, 'This ain't for me,' whereas Robert was getting more into it. I really liked him, but that was the principal reason for drifting apart: he was getting more Stalinist and I wasn't."

Anyway, why is it only Robert Wyatt who is hauled over the coals for having been a Marxist when other musicians like the various members of Henry Cow or AMM aren't? (I say having been a Marxist, but as far as I know, at least two-thirds of AMM still are Marxists.) I haven't heard anyone bring up Fred Frith's politics lately - least of all Fred himself. And let's face it, there's far worse things you could be than a Marxist: a Tory or a Republican or "New Labour" for instance.

do some research before you accuse people of being new labour

i have a deep respect coupled with a bit of bemused exasperation re. robert wyatt. he reminds me of a lot of people i knew growing up.

the album is very melancholic--it's the urgent combination of melancholy and whimsy (blended such that you often can't tell them apart) that is a big part of what makes this record so special to me. the wordless vocalizing at the end of the first track (??) is one of the most powerfully ... desolate stretches of music i know. such things are in the ear of the listener, of course. but considering the circumstances under which it was made it's not hard to imagine depression being one of many states that is being evoked in rock bottom.

i have a long and intense history w/this record (incl. listening to it in venice where wyatt composed much of the music)...

x-posts

*digs out dog-eared copy of End Of An Ear for comparison purposes*

Hmmm, I see your point. If it's Wyatt it's bloody good playing for someone who says he isn't that good at playing the guitar.

(either that or it's his funny Italian organ, or Hugh Hopper's bass speeded up?)

Interesting record, though, End Of An Ear; it's like an extended avant-scat variation on Gil Evans' "Las Vegas Tango."

-- Donnie Smith The Quiz Kid (what_d...) (webmail), September 17th, 2004 5:02 AM. (later) (link)

i can see our "interpretations" being complementary, more or less. but i'm reluctant to describe this album as being "about" any one thing, especially something as cliché as "learning to laugh again." i don't think the album has a narrative per se, or an obvious forward progression. or at least i've never chosen to hear it that way.

I agree that's not Oldfield on that track, but it's definitely Oldfield on the final track 'Little Red Robin Hood Hit the Road', the huge soaring melodic line that turns into the 'can't you see them?' riff. One of my favorite moments of recorded sound in the history of our world etc.

Oldfield is credited as a musician on the back cover of the original vinyl, but I suspect Oldfield's saying he wrote that entire solo, the melody and riff, and deserved a co-authoring credit for the entire track (I would be obliged if you could find his exact complaint)... the riff is nearly identical to one of the sections of 'Ommadawn'. I still see it as more of a break in the middle of Wyatt's song, but it is certainly Oldfield's solo that pushes it over the top.

YES

Wow...I'm lovin' it like a Mickey D's fruit walnut salad...

Really cool droney, crazy ol' man EZ listening prog or something....it's DEFINITELY something...that's for sure....Sea Song is just a heartbreaking love song...."Your madness fits in nicely with my own" is such a sweet like....I love the big droney songs called Little Red Robin Hood....

Great organ sounds....bewitching record.

That's Ivor Cutler and that's how Ivor Cutler sounds

ah cool...that makes me feel better about it...I thought it was Wyatt copping an accent for some reason....

Weird time for a revive, though -- I had a dream last night where I was playing "Sea Song" and my brother came in and said, "What the fuck is this crap? He sounds horrible!" and I was harping on about how he sounded better than any of The Beatles and how a lot of people think Green Gartside sounds a lot like him. I thought the discussion actually happened when I woke up until I remembered that he spent the night over at a friend's house.

i own the whole rbt wyatt discography, except for that 'solar flares' thing which i need to get and i guess the best-of which would be redundant. there's nothing bad in it. though i don't listen to 'dondestan' very much, i admit.

i have almost everything also, and i think my favorite is an ep that was put out as Nothing Can Stop Us Now, with a few extra tracks on the reissue.

my 2 oddities are the downloaded peel session where he performs with Slapp Happy and a 12 w/ UK faux-latin new pop types Weekend where he duets w/ Tracey Thorn.

Definitely Classic.

Check "The End of An Ear"!

How about if someone was extremely drunk and was trying to tell a joke that involved mimicking a Scottish and / or Jamaican accent, but wasn't actually very good at different accents?

I believe this sort of confusion is particularly common with Welsh and Indian accents.

Robert Wyatt? Classic, obv.

Best records best to least for me: Rock Bottom, Soft Machine vols. 1 & 2, Shleep, Dondestan (either mix), Ruth is Stranger than Richard, Old Rottenhat, Matching Mole, Cuckooland (enjoyed it but the cheap keyboards are starting to bug me - Leonard Cohen syndrome). I don't listen to Rock Bottom very often at all, because it's such a charged object for me; it'd be like having the Koh-I-Noor diamond lying around as a paperweight.

End of an Ear is a prog-jazz record which I enjoyed, but it has hardly any vocals on it. Solar Flares Burn for You is an odds-and-ends compilation which is notable for some Rock Bottom demos and 'Little Child' which is one step away from being Lil' Markie.

i hardly ever listen to Little Red Record, but the cover is GREAT. doesn't it have a terry riley homage on it?

first Matching Mole album holds up though... the second side "wyatt-discovers-the-mellotron" is drony and fantastic

Frith says he was signed up to join Matching Mole for their third album. But then, the accident.

do you know of this single i mentioned upthread where he's playing w/south african musicians? i never picked it up and now i kick myself.

Oh, I've got that... it's "The Wind Of Change", credited to Wyatt and the SWAPO singers. It's bright and jolly and swingy and catchy.

and a 12 w/ UK faux-latin new pop types Weekend where he duets w/ Tracey Thorn.

Ah yes, got that as well. "Venceremos" is the title - though it's actually a three-way performance between Wyatt, Thorn and Claudia Figueroa. It was Working Week's debut single; their second, "Storm Of Light", featuring Julie Tippetts (aka Driscoll) on vocals, is also outstanding.

Another good rarity is Wyatt's cover of Chris Andrews' "Yesterday Man", which was scheduled as a follow-up to "I'm A Believer" but never released. Instead, it appeared (in 1975) on a cheapo Virgin 2LP sampler called V. I also like his performance of Soft Machine's "Memories" on Daevid Allen's Banana Moon, and his harmony vocals on Kevin Ayers' "Hymn" and "Whatevershebringswesing".

"Free Will And Testament", featuring Paul Weller, remains the last 7" single I bought (not counting second-hand stuff).

Why the Stanley Spencer of pop?

m.

Sorry to Ivor Cutler! Sorry to the Welsh people...but somehow welsh sounds like an English dude doing a bad Carribean accident to me at first listen!

Rock Bottom: still ruling the school.

ha ha...Scottish, dude.

I'm totally banned from the Commonwealth....

definitely worked better as a two sided record -- I like every track okay, but they don't work as well all in a row, though "Muddy Mouth" at the very end is way up there with the best of his stuff

I love "Yesterday Man" so much. No idea why that wasn't a single.

Handy cided to leave
He'd come apart at the seam - endangered life and lawn order before
The more since he lies (even under oaf handy lies) when he feels caught
Between righthand wrong. I think he just might have been wrong this time
Which in turn left him with few alternatives to relieving himself by hand
Alone in the dark, wanking in the bog?

http://www.strongcomet.com/wyatt/lyrics/lyrics1.htm

"I'd meant to do a Neil Sedaka song but, typically, got the wrong Neil."

Check his entry on the C81 cassette booklet (that you had to cut out/staple from a page of the NME). I still don't know what precent serious he was...

And thank god I did, because cripes -- what a brilliant fucking collection. Of course, the Chic is time-stoppingly beautiful -- oddly, its secret is actually something in the way the tamborine is mixed. But the other chestnuts reveal themselves quickly. "Age of Self" -- I've had the (now out of print) Mid-Eighties comp for ages that includes the entirety of Old Rottenhat but never so much as noticed it. Casio beat cum subtle throwdown funk bassline cum wondrous lyric cum perfectly elegant melody.

The songs from Cukooland, particularly the Beach Boys/Water Canticle-esque vocal multitracks of "Foreign Accents", inspired me to go seek that record out -- and, of course, it's offhandedly brilliant how his cornet playing has adopted the phrasing and tone of Miles Davis -- as if that were simply the one sound he absolutely NEEDED in his arsenal. Combined with Shleep ("Free Will and Testament") the guy's been on a serious roll this last decade.

But in spite of his successful return to lush productions, in the process of digging through all of his records, I've found myself particularly drawn to his mid-80's minimalist stuff -- which extended to Dondestan which I hocked in college in a fit of immaturity, and of course that version's now unavaiable. There's a certain dignity to his use of so few materials in this material, particularly in light of its directly political nature. Works In Progress seems its perfect distillation, really, with "Yolanda", "Te Recuerdo Amanda", the exquisite reading of hitherto insufferable "Biko" and his collab. w/ Hopper "Amber and the Amberines" -- has any pop artist ever made doomed political causes sound so hopeful and infused with life? Admittedly, Old Rottenhat is significantly more funereal, but still...

Message from RW.....
Body:
After starting this little profile in honor of Robert's life & work, and after VERY quickly seeing for myself the love & devotion his fanbase feels for him, I soon decided to make the extra effort in bringing that love & devotion to Robert personally.

A few weeks ago I wrote to Robert, explaining the Myspace craze (in a roundabout way) and giving him the web URL in case he chose to check it out himself.

I also enclosed printouts of the entire RW profile, including the comments section and dozens of messages (addressed to him) which I'd received via the private message feature. If memory serves, I mailed the package a little under two weeks ago.

Today I received a reply, and there is no longer ANY doubt in my mind..... Robert Wyatt is the coolest man alive. Bar none.

How cool? Well..... first of all, he gave me back my stamps!!!

(The letter came inside a recycled version of my original envelope, with portions snipped away & taped together, the original return address now used as the regular one. Anyways, when I opened the letter, the stamped portion of the original envelope plopped out first, along with a friendly note: "thought you might be able to use these again?".... too cool, I tell you. Just too cool. I'll scan that little note as soon as I can.)

The reply itself was handwritten on a lovely origami design, again composed of recycled scrap paper. I'm assuming (and hoping) that Robert won't mind if I share some selected portions with his loving fanbase......

Hallo Alex -

what can I say xept thank you so much for your very kind thought, and actions

Not doing gigs of course, I don't actually meet or even know on the whole who's out there keeping an ear out for what I've been doing, so it's a relief to get such amiable feedback.

I dare not get too distracted, though: I'm still struggling to get the next things done, etc.

Besides, I'm vain enough already, in my little way! You ask Alfie!

RW

PS. I hope people'll understand that if I don't respond it's just that my communication methods are still stuck in the deep recesses of the Twentieth century!

Robert, if you're reading this...... thank you again for being who you are, and doing what you do.

PS. Robert also wrote a little message on the outside of the envelope.....

"thanks again - it's all a lovely surprise........"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrcOEoFttWU

The energy of Wyatt's drumming is incredible. He is awesome.

http://www.inandout.at/images/product/moreextended_wyatt.jpg

The More Extended Version/Cpt. Kirk - Round About Wyatt

can this really be dance remixes of wyatt tunes? the only websites i see of it are in german.

Well, I'll weigh in. I thought his cover of "Shipbuilding" incredibly moving... he swam into the song's core and found a very vulnerable kernel that for me makes the protesty lyrics even more poignant. (i love that about covers, when the artist finds some buried or hinted-at aspect of the original -- it could be anything from a bassline to a subtext to a half-suppressed emotion -- and delivers it to/rescues it for the listener).

Then I think of the record 'Shleep', the 3rd track, Maryan, with its eastern mode and meandering, searching melody -- what a gorgeous cut. That trumpet. And when the strings tremolo in around 1:50.

What moves me about him is the beauty of his vulnerability... and also the production details in his best songs, the sumptuous instrumentation. Though I find him middling to boring on peppier numbers; he just doesn't muster any urgency and strength.

Rock Bottom, however, bored the fuck out of me.

Really cool droney, crazy ol' man EZ listening prog or something....it's DEFINITELY something...that's for sure....Sea Song is just a heartbreaking love song...."Your madness fits in nicely with my own" is such a sweet like....I love the big droney songs called Little Red Robin Hood....

Great organ sounds....bewitching record.

-- M@tt He1geson (Matt Helgeson), Tuesday, 12 July 2005 02:01 (2 years ago) Bookmark Link

^^^^^^^^I agree with this.

I like how he sings "Joking apart when you're drunk, You're terrific when you're drunk" but then I don't like the next lyric "I like you mostly late at night, you're quite all right"

He had it right there...but then he lost it. ya kno?

Night/alright isn't the best, but then it goes into that little falsetto (I'm doing this from memory here): "But I can't understand the different you in the morning, when it's time to play at being human for a while."

Heartbreaking (to me) little observation of a couple who have drink and sex in common and not much else. I've been there.

Bear in mind that "when you're drunk" the singer is probly drunk too. And that he's already spoken about his own madness. I don't think the couple have little in common, I think the singer is talking about a distance forced between them by negotiating the mundanities of the day. But they're both only "playing" at being human.

It does feel like a song about a failing relationship, but isn't the whole album about his long term partner Alfie(?) (In fact I think they may still be married).

90 minutes or so of talking about his new album and old stuff and influences on freakzone yesterday:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/shows/freakzone/tracklisting_20070923.shtml

Guest: Robert Wyatt
Robert Wyatt - Stay Tuned
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles - Ooo Baby Baby
Max Roach - There Will Never Be Another You
Jimi Hendrix Experience - Fire
Robert Wyatt - On The Town Square
Soft Machine - Moon In June
Matching Mole - God Song
Matching Mole - Righteous Rhumba
Robert Wyatt - I'm A Believer
Rachel Unthank & The Winterset - Sea Song
Brian Eno - Excerpt From 1/1
Robert Wyatt - Awol
Robert Wyatt - A Beautiful Peace
Robert Wyatt - Cancion De Julieta
Robert Wyatt - Hasta Siempre Comandante

Balls, missed this. His (and Alfie's) interview in Wire with David Toop is v. interesting... for all you Wyattheads out there

Listen Again link is on the right...

Can't listen to that

The new album's pretty good!

I only listened once but I was quite taken with it. Two things I like about a new Robert Wyatt album: 1, there's always hot solos, and 2, there's always a song or two that's killer on a mixtape

I just listened to the new Robert Wyatt - Comicopera

i like the music on rock bottom a lot but his voice is going to take some getting used to.

So has Ned heard more Robert Wyatt since this thread was started? -- amateurist (amateurist), Saturday, 5 July 2003

This's a good question indeed, hah.

On a somewhat (un)related track I'd also like to kno' - so has the verbose'ssimist Otis Wheeler chewed off his own poisonauseous tongue yet?

I bought Phil Manzanera's Diamond Head last weekend and was intrigued by the voice on the first track. Turned out it's Wyatt, on a cover/version of one of his own songs. I also liked the interview in Wire earlier this year. Where's a good place to start in his own discography? Straight to Rock Bottom?

yeah sure, it's great. As I recall the other ones most recommended above are Shleep and Cuckooland, I am also really digging the new one a lot.

(expost)

Willem -- Yup, you could as well go through this entire thread again, to make up your mind! :)
Well why not start with the new one, Comicopera, even?
Or with Old Rottenhat?

As per Manzanera-Wyatt links, Wyatt plays and sings on quite a few Manzanera solo platters. I have 50 Minutes Later and 6pm, which are from 2005 & 2004, and he sure's on there too.

thx sleeve & t**t, read the thread - what a wealth of info and feelings about the man and his music. have started downloading.

Comicopera may be my album of the year. It's the first thing I've heard by him too.

It's the album of 2007 in The Wire magazine.

Since this thread is dominated by a fight over Wyatt's politics and Tom mentioned "Alliance" long ago, it's interesting to have come across this interesting point about the song courtesy of Marcello's CoM (excellent) entry on Cuckooland:

(Although Wyatt doesn’t mention it on the sleeve, his 1985 album Old Rottenhat begins with a deceptively bitter song called “Alliance,” essentially an attack on his former Matching Mole colleague and former fellow CP member, bassist Bill McCormick, for crossing over to the SDP. “It’s hard to talk to enemies/And we are enemies/What we had in common/Makes it even worse.” One wonders if this still rankles with him. McCormick is also, incidentally, the brother of the late Ian MacDonald)

Said lyrics:

There is a kind of compromise you are master of
Your endless gentle nudging left us polarised
It's hard to talk to enemies, we are enemies
What we had in common makes it even worse
You're proud of being middle class (meaning upper class)
You say you're self sufficient (but you don't dig your own coal)
I think that what you're frightened of more than anything
is knowing you need workers more than they need you
"A herd of independent minds" Chomsky got it right
Jogging into battle waving old school ties

These are some of the most bitter lyrics I've ever read -- and Marcello's right when he says "deceptively" so, b/c the melody is so languid and airy I'd just assumed that this was about some public figure, not a friend. My impression of Bill MacCormick was that he'd given up music to fight the good fight running for elected office. My my.

"Heaps Of Sheeps" really hitting the spot

one of his very best

That album's pretty agreeable as a whole, but HOS and "Alien" are the ones for me. Also "Was A Friend".

"heaps of sheeps" always reminds me of cities blanketed by snow

The wordless vocal bit is juuuuust heavenly

haha history repeating

i really need to get more wyatt in my life. that one album with 'little red riding hood' on it is Kid A 20-or-so years before the fact.

nah, it's way better than that :D

"beer as in braindeer" from the first matching mole album sounds a whole lot like damo-era can. never much considered a canterbury-kraut synergy before, but even robert's drumming's really similar to jaki liebezeit's tribal thump thump

new album with strings, violin, and sax....standards + originals...

http://www.dominorecordco.com/uk/news/07-07-10/album-for-the-ghosts-within-out-11th-october/

! didn't know about this!

love RW's happy beardy face

me too! this songs is real pretty...making me happy

!!!

Sounds very interesting - but I can't imagine him bettering his original cover of "At last I am Free"

The Chic version is better. Why some old communist would bore us to death with a useless cover of Chic is beyond me. Wouldn't the suffering masses prefer a box set?

His version is not that different really. The song was tailor made for him imo.

"mmmwow mmmwow mmmwow mmmwow mmmwow
mmmwow dbdbdbdbdeblelebelelelle Deep!"

―
Sorry to Ivor Cutler! Sorry to the Welsh people...but somehow welsh sounds like an English dude doing a bad Carribean accident to me at first listen!

there are actually 2 Cork accents 1 of which sounds a lot like this welsh/Jamaican thing. Would assume the Jamaican accent actually derived from an accent like this in a form from a couple of centuries back.

Wish I'd been walking around London with lists at Xmas, they had loads of Wyatt cds in for 5quid a pop in fopp. I think they sold from the display pretty rapidly & I forgot about them. Did pick up a couple though Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard and Old Rottenhat.

Was just thinking of going back to bed for a while and trying to find my Rock Bottom since I haven't listened to it in ages. Not sure where it is though. Must institute some kind of order in my cd storage.

Pretty sure Ivor Cutler is putting on a Caribbean (or possibly) accent on that track, by the way!

http://pitchfork.com/features/5-10-15-20/8776-robert-wyatt/

:)

<3 RW

yes that was a lovely read. i'll be missing the salon thing with him at cafe oto (when songkick sent me its email announcing "new concert for robert wyatt" i almost had a heart attack) because i'm a dumbass who always forgets to buy advance tickets these days, but i'm sure it'll be great.

that otis is being a big meanie upthread >:(

<3 RW

― dollar eye twinkling (admrl), Monday, February 27, 2012 4:43 PM (13 minutes ago)

There was a great little programme about RW on Radio 4 this week. "The Voices of Robert Wyatt", mid-morning, Tuesday. Listen to it this weekend before it drops of the i-Player.

Wyatt interviewed by Richie Unterberger, Richard Cook, Ian MacDonald ('74), and Ben Thompson, who also reviews Shleep--all currently in the Free section of Rock's Back Pages (click on a link and they send you a password)
http://www.rocksbackpages.com/free.html#W

There was a great little programme about RW on Radio 4 this week. "The Voices of Robert Wyatt", mid-morning, Tuesday. Listen to it this weekend before it drops of the i-Player.

this was very nice alright. seems a lovely guy.

Thanks for the heads up, this is a lovely documentary.

been listening to this one a lot the past few days for w/e reason

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsLAY1OdZrA

wyatt, lydon, idk

This guy seems like such an incredible human. I seem to recall reading that he and his wife go to AA meetings not because they are alcoholics, but out of sympathy and unity with those afflicted. Or something like that.

Nothing to do with the fact that he hadn't been pissed out of his head one night he wouldn't have ended up in a wheelchair?

No, Wyatt's an alcoholic and makes no secret of it. IN recovery for the last 5 years or so.

No, there was something more to it. Let me find it....

Oh, I see. I just misunderstood.

guy's a hero and a gentleman, despite his often inflexible and reflexive politics.

That BBC bit is indeed a lovely listen.

I recently put this proposed box set together and loved the hell out of it. He sure deserves something like it!

Nice collection, Gerald, and a very well-done compilation for people who've never heard him. But I think it relies far too heavily on album tracks and misses many fine moments not on LP (like my favorite, Wyatt's vocal on the Epic Soundtracks single "Jelly, Babies," which was a Rough Trade 7" a-side and not released on CD until last year.) And those Dondestan tracks - Dondestan or Dondestan (Revisted)? Those are small gripes, but Wyatt fans tend not to be "casual" fans and are likely to own the entire oeuvre (at least the main albums) and would probably buy a box set only if it had a fair number of obscurities on it.

That's said, I'm burning a copy tonight. Thanks!

You're absolutely right, I noticed those issues as well, but it's an interesting attempt. I find his albums a bit inconsistent and appreciated the guide.

I just discovered "Jelly Babies" last year and it is indeed magnificent!

Actually, why don't you suggest a best of Wyatt rarities comp?

well, there already is a wyatt rarities comp! it's called "flotsam jetsam" and it's fabulous.

that said, he has done a lot of guest work. here's some stuff he sings on i love. a lot of times it's just backing vocals but that's enough dammit! i'd suggest:
henry cow and robert wyatt- living in the heart of the beast (it's on "the road" but there's an FM broadcast, unlike the aud on the Road, that's even better.. if you can find it, ha ha...)
phil manzanera- frontera
robert wyatt- love (john lennon tribute "instant karma")
slapp happy- a little something (peel session version)
fish out of water- cry from the city (dub)
ben watt- walter and john
the last nightingale- moments of delight/in the dark year
working week- venceremos/we will win
ryuchi sakamoto- we love you
the shiny men- dream pussy
robert wyatt- rangers in the nightst ("miniatures" compilation)
ultramarine- kingdom
millennium- another great victory
michael mantler- a l'abbatoir
fat mattress- the clown
robert wyatt- violin concerto no. 2 in b minor, 1st movement (from a radio show he curated called "radio popolare"... he went from playing "lay lady lay" to singing over the beginning of the bartok piece and talking about how wonderful it is... everybody should hear this)
robert wyatt- radio popolare theme (he also sang a theme song for this series)
robert wyatt- catholic architecture (live performance 1991... not sure the context but it's on youtube somewhere... there was also a bbc documentary on him in '03 or somesuch that had him singing a few numbers live)
john greaves- the song (wonderful, wonderful!)
ricky gianco- hasta siempre comandante (not the same as the comicopera version!)
robert wyatt and the john peel singers- good king wenceslas (the famous john peel carols session with wyatt, sandy denny, i think t.rex, and others, late 1969... i think this was rebroadcast on bbc6 recently)
hatfield and the north- calyx
daevid allen- memories (the hugh hopper song oft-recorded by wyatt, i think this version is my favorite)
kevin ayers- whatevershebringswesing
brian eno- the true wheel
robert wyatt- locomotive
news from babel- heart of stone
john cage- experience
robert wyatt- september in the rain (japanese-only bonus track to "shleep")
pascal comelade- september song
robert wyatt- instant pussy (soft machine bbc session, 1969)
robert wyatt- dedicated to you but you weren't listening (soft machine bbc session, 1971)
robert wyatt live with hatfield and the north, december 1972 (broadcast on french television, the complete performance circulates as slightly wobbly audio)

well there's more but that should get you started.

Spotify's got this Wildeflowers comp, mostly diligent, advanced-placement kid demos (versions of Hopper's "Memories" get better and better)---but Wyatt, singing and drumming, is unmistakably himself, at all tymes. A couple of his ballads give me chills.

The 1972 French TV broadcast with Hatfield and the north is just breathtaking...kinda justifies the existence of the Internet

the song "i'm a mineralist" on the fictitious sports album is hilarious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqsm3C8nvFU
what a crazy great band (and what a crazy great drummer wyatt was)

Read that (up two) as "I'm a miserablist" from the fictitious "Sports" album.

Thanks for that list. I'm listening to his 3 tracks with Millennium - fantastic classical/dance mix with Robert the cherry on top! What's the story with this band?

I wish the "Sports" album was fictitious!

I also want to point out, among all the other ephemera that circulates (there are a couple bootleg comps some guy calling himself "Hemix" uploaded to guitars101 some years back... links are dead, but the files are still out there), there was a great adaptation of Rimbaud's "Season in Hell" on BBC3 a couple years back with Wyatt on vocals. Also, there was this guy named Paul Mex who did this 23-minute post-punk demo song in 1981 and Robert sings on that (didn't even know the guy's name until I did some searching yesterday... had it for years on one of those dodgy unlabelled cassettes that turn up sometimes!)

As for Millennium I don't know anything about them except that Curt Boettcher wasn't involved. :) I guess it was a collaboration between Wyatt and someone from Technotronic? I don't know, but I like it better than the Wyatt/Hot Chip collaboration. Also, if you haven't heard Wyatt singing on Bertrand Burgalat's "This Summer Night" you probably should!

There used to be this great website that exhaustively catalogued all of Robert Wyatt's guest work... it's still there but it hasn't been updated in the last fourteen years. :( Well, hunting for these things is half the fun!

Yeah, I found the Hemix comps and am assessing them along with Flotsam Jetsam and Solar Flares Burn For You. I find myself drawn to Stuff like Millennium which is a sound l normally wouldn't connect with but Roberts presence makes it work for me!

awww, bummer:

http://www.uncut.co.uk/robert-wyatt/robert-wyatt-i-ve-stopped-making-music-news

Well, he has earned it, but I love(d) "Comicopera", hoped there might be another record coming down the line at some point.

aw man, hope he enjoys his retirement

yeah, bummer. he's left us with tons of great music but every few weeks i wonder "when is the next robert wyatt album coming out, anyway?"

at least he's not stopping b/c he has to for health reasons -- i didn't get that impression from that admittedly brief summary of a longer article. if anyone finds the full article online don't hesitate to post it here. :)

this is probably my cue to check out all the various live albums, boots etc. from his time with soft machine. so far i mostly just know the proper studio records.

Saw him make a guest appearance with Charlie Haden and Carla Bley in 2009, singing and playing pocket trumpet, and his voice was already quite weak and ragged then, so that kind of diminishing may have played some part in this decision, along with the reasons stated in that article.

you can hear his voice weakening on the studio albums. it can't be a coincidence that they increasingly rely on guest vocalists. surely his last two albums aren't among his more original or ambitious but i still enjoyed them a great deal.

Oh. Was just listening the other day to his version of Chic's "At Last I am Free"

xp wtf Comicopera is as original and ambitious as anything else by him I can think of

Yeah, listening to Comicopera now and its lovely. He's "stopped" before though right? Am I wrong in thinking he was so angry another tory government got voted in, that he decided no-one deserved to hear his music? Something like that?

Just listened to Disc 1 of Different Every Time, listening companion to bio of the same name. "Signed Curtain" aside (vocal is definition of twee), the sequence of tracks just keeps building, so resourceful and assertive and dramatic and lucid and fluid and well you know. Wonder if he chose 'em?
Disc 2 offers new as well as old, according to the npr guy's mostly non-essential text ("wondrously elfin," yeeesh).
Streaming here for the moment:
http://www.npr.org/2014/11/09/361384516/first-listen-robert-wyatt-different-every-time

Buried lede is the very last song on that set. His version of John Cage's Experiences #2. I am so happy that's seeing an extended release finally.

Just finished the equally epic (maybe more, in terms of range and sweep) Disc 2, "Benign Dictatorships." Yeah, the Cage track is a strong finish to the astute sequence.

wait, i thought this hadn't come out yet. i'm tempted to get this, but i have all but one song on the first disc and probably 1/3 of those on the 2nd disc. but i don't mind sending some royalties robert's way, i suppose.

he really comes up with some corny album/song titles doesn't he?

He's a frustrated jazz musician.

i said corny, not horny.

Comes out Nov. 18, according to xpost npr

Good piece on Wyatt, reflecting on new bio, listening too. Don't agree w all of it--and discussing political songs, how could he leave out "Biko," "Shipbuilding," "At Last I Am Free," for that matter? Oh well, word limit, and he packs a lot into a small space, without murking up a knotty subject:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n22/jeremy-harding/short-cuts

Good point that teen R. Ellidge was already unmistakably Robert Wyatt on the Wildeflowers tapes.

I think I'll read this book

It's very good - much more thoughtful than the usual rock bio, with a ton of new research.

@amateurist: pls give some examples of not-corny titles you actually like.

most of 'em!

i even like the corny ones! they're just corny is all!

Good interview: looking at the world now, US in 60s while touring, the strength of pop music, other matters (got the idea at the end that his wife's health was more of a concern than his own, to him anyway)
http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/9544-robert-wyatt/

I love his honesty:

I'm spending a lot of time with Alfie, and I hope we have a long time, but this is kind of the end run. And I haven't been a particularly good husband, not very attentive. I'm trying to make that right. I really like her company. She makes me laugh. We watch things together, a lot of DVD box sets of shows like “The Good Wife” and “Mad Men”.

Wyatt has been an exemplar of honesty for so long, just by many accounts an absolute sweetheart with a knack for measured empathy. I wonder if he was always like this or, like his politics, if this is just the wisdom of age manifesting itself? Or maybe it's just my reading of him as a sort of sage-like monk genius who understands the perfect is impossible and always strives to improve himself.

I dunno. Anyway, Wyatt is special.

I've recently become obsessed with another Wyatt performance, the single Jelly Babies by Epic Soundtracks. I think it was on some sort of Epic Soundtracks comp recently and may or may not appear on an upcoming CD release you'll hear a lot about in the future. Wyatt and Soundtracks singing harmonies, a beautiful, melancholy song.

Know nothing by him except the Chic cover on Wanna Buy a Bridge (nothing by Soft Machine, either). Someone posted the Top of the Pops "I'm a Believer" clip on Facebook yesterday, and I don't remember being so moved by a cover version in a long time. I would have loved it in any event, but the context--first public performance after his accident--deepens everything significantly. (Details of said accident I didn't know either until I read some background yesterday--I'd probably always assumed there was a car accident behind his paralysis.) Wyatt's vocal and the fiddle-like affect around two minutes are beautiful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5hPENM6h78

Andy Summers on acoustic guitar and Fred Frith on electric guitar - only one of whom would make a few more appearances on Top of the Pops I believe.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/84/f6/34/84f6343375d4a44ae31c4c0d4be72d82.jpg

Wyatt with Hatfield and the Matching Police Floyd Cow

Looks like Nick Mason on drums in that Wyatt clip too

You don't know "Shipbuilding", clemenza? That's his most famous cover I'd guess. His version rules. Much better than Elvis Costello's original. And somehow I have the feeling with the Brexit Great Britain is going for another folly which is at least as irrational and nutty as the Falkland war.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Res3-YX4X8g

Robert Wyatt's is the original recording, Costello's version was released later.

But it was written by Costello, so it is his song.

To be accurate it was written by Clive Langer, he asked Costello to write lyrics for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipbuilding_(song)

He signed me up to CND in the mid-80s. He was often on Twickenham High St canvassing membership on Saturdays iat that time.

You don't know "Shipbuilding"?

I don't (even though I know it's just a click away). I did order both Rock Bottom and Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard because of "I'm a Believer" (and after a little reading).

Ruth is a little thornier/difficult imo, I'd also recommend Nothing Can Stop Us, Shleep, Dondestan, and Comicopera

ahhh you are in for a treat with 'rock bottom'

for whatever reason, 'reminds me of your rocky bottom' is the lyric from that album that sticks with me. the contrast between ones rough edges and the concept of hitting rock bottom are especially poignant to me i suppose

I walked past him in Lincolnshire market town Louth (he lives there).

Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard: wheelchair rock, for cats who haven't bought enough records by handicapped people this week. From what I can tell, it set a new standard for wibbling British nonsense. It makes listening to Henry Cow records seem like an enjoyable experience. (Obviously it doesn't, I'm just exaggerating for effect.) You can guess how I feel about Soft Machine.
― Otis Wheeler, Sunday, April 15, 2001 1:00 AM (sixteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm sometimes taken aback by the shitheadery of old school ILX, but this takes the fucking biscuit. How insulting to Wyatt and his work to suggest people only buy his albums because he's disabled. Ridiculous.

the good old days before ilx was mean

That TOTP clip is fairly infamous for the shitty way they treated Wyatt.

WYATT: The producer said, "l'm embarrassed by that wheelchair, it's not entertaining, can you go and sit in this wicker-work thing?" I told him to fuck off, and he said, "You will never work on this programme again" - but as I just told you, I am too posh to care, frankly. I mean, I can't wheel a wicker chair, and I need to be able to get out quick in case the cops are coming, for fuck's sake!

http://www.disco-robertwyatt.com/images/Robert/interviews/Uncut_feb_2014/index.htm

I did order both Rock Bottom and Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard because of "I'm a Believer"

you are in for a treat! Rock Bottom is amazing.

Robert Wyatt obviously classic as fuck

No love here for his (flop) follow up single?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhEeM5rBxJI

the two Matching Mole albums are also solid

I really like the Drury lane set too. Though it does drop in sound quality towards the end.

Also really like the stuff he did in 1975 with Henry Cow which I think is mainly live.

Matching Mole is pretty essential definitely. Especially the 2cd versions that came out about 5 years ago.

Don't know if anybody knows this but it's glorious...I could listen to it all day

https://www.reddit.com/r/progrockmusic/comments/4b7zkg/hatfield_and_the_north_rockenstock_french_tv_1973/

The Concert for Corbyn w/Paul Weller last December was widely heralded but I don't remember seeing a single review. There are one or two clips on YouTube, but little else.

i suspect it being about jeremy corbyn had something to do with its burial

Mojo reviewed it.

Mostly Daevid Allen...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wswhUGb1k6c

from Rolling Jazz---I mostly listened to these because of Wyatt (and Coyne):

Michael Mantler:
The Hapless Child
Watt/4
words by Edward Gorey
(from 'Amphigorey')

Robert Wyatt (voice)
Terje Rypdal (guitar)
Carla Bley (piano, clavinet, synthesizer)
Steve Swallow (bass)
Jack DeJohnette (drums)

recorded July 1975 through January 1976
Willow, NY, and England
A whirlwind right out of the gate, and I knew from later all-instrumental versions how strong some of these frameworks would be---did not expect the excellent and unusual studio effects on some of Wyatt's vocal turns---but eventually, when the words are more upfront, can seem overly emphatic---Gorey's dank little narratives work better with his spare, black white & grey drawings or etchings or whatever they be. Also, c'mon, it's Gorey---think I'll go on to the settings of Beckett and Pinter.

― dow, Thursday, May 17, 2018 9:18 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That is, the *overall* effect, the ensemble onslaught, not primarily Wyatt's vocals, can seem overly emphatic here.

― dow, Thursday, May 17, 2018 9:21 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Mantler again: Silence(1976)---the overemphasis here is confined to some of MM's heavier handling of Pinter's words, and Chris Spedding's often repeated use of sustain etc., drawing a note out and curving it around 'til it's a needle in my earphones ---but it can hurt so good, and the voices are strong and distinctive, Carla Bley holding her on with Kevin Coyne and Robert Wyatt---and sometimes everybody follows Wyatt's dustdevil percussion, without ever missing their cues (it's a play with a small cast/combo, compressed, maybe condensed, into a single LP's worth of songs).

― dow, Friday, May 18, 2018 6:10 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The text itself may grow on me, but so far doesn't seem up to several Pinter plays I'm more familiar with, though Mantler can highlight the weak spots in his literary sources, maybe by blurring some of the plot points.

― dow, Friday, May 18, 2018

Pretty sure I would have bought these in the 70s if had come across them (was mailorderphobic, opp extreme in 80s), and as a Wyatt fan would have been fairly satisfied.

never even heard of these, thanks.

wowowow this rules!!

That "Playa de Formentor" clip; wow, just wow! Thanks so much for that.

Some atrocious acting from young Robert there, he looks at the camera, the last thing you should do as an extra. Daevid is good though.

Yup, Daevid is good. Incredible seeing him so young with it all ahead of him.

Talking of which, this is pretty nutty, though it would belong on a Daevid Allen thread, if such a thing existed...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpPfn2Dmcrw

I hadn't seen that one either. Going by that and myriad other Daevid Allen TV appearances, French TV in the late 60s / early 70s was tres out there.

And yes, a scandal that there is no Daevid Allen thread.

DIY

There are Gong threads.

Another Mantler:
MANY HAVE NO SPEECH
WATT/19

words by
Samuel Beckett
Ernst Meister
Philippe Soupault

Jack Bruce (voice)
Marianne Faithfull (voice)
Robert Wyatt (voice)

Michael Mantler (trumpet)
Rick Fenn (guitar)

The Danish Radio Concert Orchestra
conducted by Peder Kragerup

recorded May through December 1987
Copenhagen, London, Boston,
Willow, NY
27 songs in 34 minutes: no sense of fragmentation, maybe in because I'm not following the words very closely, but on his site Mantler says they were chosen to fit together in several ways, and sonically they ripple back and forth (while somehow pushing on), between three languages and at least five voices, if you count the trumpet and guitar (singing behind/around the humans, never in the way), sixth is the orchestra far as I'm concerned, though it's never breathing too heavy.

Thread police may get me, because humans are heard pretty much in the order of their billing, I think, though some of these songs are just a few seconds long, and all three sound more flexible than expected.

But, for instance, "A L'Abattoir" will def make my personal travelling mix of RW, ditto "Prisonniers," which is either Wyatt and Bruce or Wyatt and Faithfull, or (more likely) Wyatt and Wyatt in different registers, maybe singing to each other through the wall (not too loud).

Pretty sure I would have liked all of this on first listen with no idea who did it.

"ILM Threads that need a NO CAUSE FOR ALARM warning when they are revived"

The Hapless Child is pretty awesome and sui generis though i have kind of sited it in my head next to Art Bears

xp yes, seriously

most of my love for Hapless Child is cuz of Gorey, it's a bit too fussy and prog for me but it's a very cool record regardless and essential for even semi-completists

"ILM Threads that need a NO CAUSE FOR ALARM warning when they are revived"

― mahb, Tuesday, 22 May 2018 08:33 (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Arr, but then again, I think our Rob would go straight to a dedicated RWRIP thread if there ever was one.

Really feeling The Hapless Child. Carla is a superstar on this.

Mantler's The School of Understanding (recorded in 1996) mainly features Wyatt on "Understanding," where he's the Guest Observer, riding into a language school on what might be a baby elephant or lofty llama, but is listed as Don Preston's syndrums, which I'd thought only made little pooty sounds, so even more education. Too ba
Too bad Wyatt and the syndrums only come in once, but the whole thing's pretty listenable; I especially like when other voices address the refugee student. Woman: "You are a victim, you have suffered so much---you must go." A guy: "What you have suffered is inconceivable." Meanwhile, Alien Girl remembers: "Don't think about it, go to work..it's a long walk through the war, bits and pieces." (Mantler wrote all the words for once, so far turning out at least as well as settings for his literary heroes.)

Digital drums appear once on Mantler's 2000 settings of Paul Auster's words,Hide and Seek (though tuned percussion brings constant and welcome companionship to co-stars RW and Susi Hyldgaard, compatible with Wyatt's own turns on xpost Silence---come to think of it, Preston's syndrums fit the feel of Wyatt's real kit of yore. This anomalous sound may be what's alarming the couple---he: "Have you, no-oh-ticed---?" she: "Yes! Yes! Yes!" "Have you any ideas?" "Yes, I'm going to scream." "When are you going to do it?" "Right Now!"
That's when the whole thing bumps up the word interest, which had previously been mostly Deep Thought mulch for granular melody and rhythm, vocal and instrumental. The final stretch develops circular and spiraling conversations (briefly) from repeated phrases---he: "I don't denyyy..." she: "What?" "Anything." "That's very clever of you." "I'm glad we agree." together/overlapping "I'm glad you're glad." Ho-ho well it sounds good, and yeah several more keepers for the deep fan mix.

So this popped up as a new release today.

https://open.spotify.com/album/1coZVDci03VoLGBtWzwjxS?si=8u8iWq8xSpaSnY6BZ7shaA

Audience Recording of the North Sea Radio Orchestra show with John Greaves and Annie Barbazza and Fred Frith as special guests At Cafe Oto 27 June 2019, presenting the Dark Companion album FOLLY BOLOLEY - Songs from Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom. (plus other songs)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt18LIAGNys&fbclid=IwAR22tc5DlrxwIqCRao9Ewkcb0zvCTk-hrEuK6UD4UMSkW66dPokmT7kizig

Oh well, search for Folly Bololey At Cafe Oto 27 June 2019

i'm not usually into these kinda things but this is really good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CS1SPrwOv4

live recording is great too. thanks for sharing

there is some slanderous bullshit at the beginning of this thread

haha yes

"I've heard very little of Wyatt's music thus far, but....................."

This is NOT a Covid-19 Revive. He's fine, far as I know (no news is good enough news, esp. these days).

Just came here to say that I have finally listened to 2013 Cuneiform release '68.
Track list and personnel from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2768_(album)#Personnel

All tracks are written by Robert Wyatt, except where noted.

No. Title Length
1. "Chelsa" (Kevin Ayers, Wyatt) 5:00
2. "Rivmic Melodies" 18:19
3. "Slow Walkin' Talk" (Brian Hopper) 3:02
4. "Moon in June" 20:36
Personnel
Robert Wyatt – vocals, piano, electric piano, Hammond organ, bass guitar, drums, percussion
Jimi Hendrix – bass guitar (track 3)
Hugh Hopper – bass guitar (track 4)
Mike Ratledge – Lowrey organ (track 4)

excerpts, incl. useful background breakdown from
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/68:

"The missing links in my life's work, no less!" – Robert Wyatt

"Cuneiform has delivered a Holy Grail with Robert Wyatt's '68 ... The sound on '68 is excellent; it was painstakingly cleaned up and remastered from original sources, making this a must for any Wyatt, Soft Machine, or prog head. The booklet also contains a lengthy interview with Wyatt by Aymeric Leroy with comments from Hopper. All killer, no filler." – Thom Jurek/All Music Guide

,,,,In September, 1968, the Soft Machine had just finished their second, exhaustive tour of the USA supporting the Jimi Hendrix Experience. At the conclusion of the tour, vocalist/drummer/multi-instrumentalist Robert stayed, working on recordings in Hollywood and New York City. Upon Robert's return to England to re-start the Soft Machine in December, 1968, these documents lay forgotten. Two of them were eventually found and issued, but half of these recordings were unreleased and thought lost forever...

Now, for the first time, all four of the recordings Robert made in '68 are collected together and released, all carefully worked on and presented in the best possible sound quality – and the recorded sound here is surprisingly excellent overall!

This release is fully authorized by Robert and the liners include an in-depth interview with Robert about his recollections of this period, with insights into his songwriting process, recording procedures and previously untold anecdotes of this period of his work and life.

There are four tracks. Two of the demos are shorter songs. Of these, one of them was a track Robert used to play with the Wilde Flowers, Brian Hopper's Slow Walkin' Talk, while the other features music that would later be re-worked by Robert and appear on the 1st album by Matching Mole!

The bulk of the material - the two long suites - were later re-recorded by the Soft Machine; Rivmic Melodies later became the basis of side one on Volume II (1969) and Moon In June showed up as Robert's showcase on Third (1970). The two side-long epics are particularly worth noting how they present, even in this very early stage of his career, Wyatt's seamless integration of song fragments and instrumental passages within a unified whole, his stream-of-consciousness, often self-referential lyrics interspersed with witty asides (soon to become a defining characteristic of the 'Canterbury scene'), matched by Wyatt's equally idiosyncratic singing.
These tracks serve as a template for the post-psychedelic Soft Machine's career as founders of European jazz/rock and the entire release is a precursor to Robert's post-band, solo career...

... oh fuck, don't do that to me, I thought we'd lost another one!

same!

I know! It's unavoidable, but I had to revive, sorry!
The whole album is streamable on that bandcamp page.
I haven't yet done any comparative listening, but Jimi sounds great, ditto guest Softs, and this pulled all of them and me right along through recombinant artpoprock mosaic momentum, breadcrumbs of sound and vision and life lived jumping out often enough: "She's learning to hate, but it's already too late, for meeee," she's pulling him along too.
(Isn't there some guitar in this "Moon In June," or is that something from the keys?)

lol same fear here

thanks for the writeup, that one's on my list to get but it's a long list.

Now for all the streamable tracks from Cuneiform's live Matching Mole and Wyatt-era Soft Machine finds on bandcamp. I may be some tyme.

starting with live 1967 Soft Machine set:
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/middle-earth-masters
Notes:
Sample tracks are satisfying and tantalizing, in equal measure. Start with subset of mellow urgency, incl. wages of pleasure: boy sends the invite, but doesn't get the memo: "She pulled out a gun, screaming 'You're Dreaming," but wouldn't it be nice---closer to Velvets than Floyd w such lyrics, Ayers' rhythm guitar & bass, the subtle, prismatic pressure of Ratledge's sunshine sustain---RW mainly offering otminimal harmonies and drums---until he rakes his tonsils across the top of "Hope For Happiness," raw as Ayers' guitar was on "Bossa Nova Express," and now Ratledge leads the splay though free postboogie, differently-morphous: not dated atall, but, at 13:19, maybe a little too much of a good thing, at least for my more Wyattcentric purposes---oh but then "You Really Got Me"---I mean, "We Did It Again"---lopes and crackles right along for 5:48, perfect.

Who is this Otis Wheeler at the start of the thread with his wrong & badly expressed opinions? It's probably a good thing I wasn't on ILX in 2001 as I just know I would have been furious with various posters.

old ILM was wrong about nearly everything, I blame the UK Livejournal crew mostly

Phew! Total panic there for a moment.

I knew that was gonna happen, so sorry!
xxxpost, speaking of crackling, just now I thought a tree was starting to fall across the driveway---windy as hell out there today---but then it sounded like Wyatt doing something with sticks---also right up by my ears (I'm wearing 'phones): just some of the fun with stereo on "Spaced One," from a bunch of manipulated instrumentals used for a multi-media show:
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/spaced
...recorded in early/mid 1969 by the "classic" Soft Machine trio line-up of Hugh Hopper [bass], Mike Ratledge [electric piano/organ] and Robert Wyatt [drums]..These recordings feature the band at their most radical, and while they would never again use the studio in such an extreme fashion, the work done here definitely influenced later works such as Third and Hugh's 1984.
That opener is by far the longest, and other than little sticks and pokes, mostly organ drone with less bass bobbing. "Spaced Two" starts like a para-proto-Can-Velvets groove: just a little keyboard ripple with kickdrum and closed high-hat maybe, oh it's a loop, and here's another, 'bout to drip from the ceiling, but layers quickly accrue, with maybe realtime variants, or more illusions (Eno says the mind seeks out variety in sameness), then, almost 5 minutes in, several things go backwards, some of them creating an anxious, courteous,persistent pitch, an old butler, drumstick slicing way behind him---nice, one for the Beatles fans.
(Spaced Three: carousel melting backwards in Sgt. Pepper Park, but don't hear Wyatt so fuck it--except points for being shortest track.)
Spaced Six: Awright! Keys, bass, full drum kit wheeling around, greeted by glitch riffs---RW providing solos/bursts as accompaniment to/as negative space and vice versa (accompaniment to/as himself? Might as well). Chopping blocks and going Latin for a second, tapes abused and done. This is the RWrelevant keeper for relatively rational cherrypicking, but I might possibly buy the whole thing (DAMMIT)

some soft machine ephemera using the spaced material: beyond image from the people responsible for their light show at that time

This was mentioned briefly on last year's rolling jazz thread and it's brilliant; best thing I heard in 2019: Hütte & Guests Play the Music of Robert Wyatt https://whyplayjazz.bandcamp.com/album/h-tte-guests-play-the-music-of-robert-wyatt

Thanks! Totally missed that on RJ 2019.
Soft Machine's Backwards starts with the quartet live in May 1970: 18 minutes, 39 seconds, none wasted, jumps right into 7:38 "Moon in June," jumps right into septet "Facelift," from Nov. '69: 8:36, which, with the following (non-freebie-sample)4:05 "Hibou Anemone and Bear," is, along with 20 minutes on the BBC, all the septet recordings, or so the notes here say. All of this is sharp, interlocking, flexible parts, with Wyatt rattling and chopping right through the middle, always responsively. Also 'preciate Hopper's fuzz bass and guitar appeal of Ratledge's keys at times.
Ends with Wyatt's xpost '68 "Moon In June" demo + '69 splice.
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/backwards

[Noisette is the third in our Soft Machine series, recorded January 4th, 1970 at the same concert as "Facelift" on Third, by the short-lived quintet formation of the group: Elton Dean & Lyn Dobson-reeds, Hugh Hopper-bass, Mike Ratledge-keyboards & Robert Wyatt-drums & vocals. Noisette features the rest of the concert, & showcases a band in transition from their earlier psychedelic/ progressive sound towards the jazz rock sound of Third & Fourth. It features the quintet performing versions of material from their 1st two albums as well as material not available on their studio albums. Mastered directly off of the 30 year old 15ips master tapes, this release boasts superb live sound for the time period.

Well there's some haze, or gauze, but the instruments quickly push through and find enough room for definition. Ratledge's intro is pretty and brief, then he and Wyatt pitch right in, bass is amiably full, reeds squawk and peck at the edges of other sounds, not too much, just keeping 'em on their toes--was thinking reeds were getting thinner than nec., then Hopper belches a bit of fuzz, returning the "look alive!" favor. Later a bit of flute, later still saxes scurry up the Ratledge lattice, suggesting a parody of guitar sounds sometimes--title track is 37 seconds, not one wasted, whole thing seeming like a suite, then finale--finally, one with Robert vocals! It has all these little sections, players bursting through the walls, just as the whole set has these little quick jumps at the end of each song. Sections are what some people haaate about prog, but these are entertaining enough to justify their existence, incl. coexistence.
Only thing: Even though this still sounds sharp, fresh, it's most noteworthy for those qualities, rather than heights and depths of the jazzing--the rocking rocks on, w/o getting corny, smartly melding to the jazz--=and I do miss the voice sometimes on pre-finale workouts, despite the (never-abused) roominess for his drumming, and will once again be glad for him to move on to greener pastures, options-wise. But before that, will continue with these fun Soft Machine sample tracks. This page has 6 out of album's 10:
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/noisette

Grides presents the most famous version of the band (Elton Dean, Hugh Hopper, Mike Ratledge, Robert Wyatt) recorded live at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on October 25, 1970, in a high-quality, previously unreleased recording, just a few months after the release of Third and at the peak of their popularity. It showcases them in transition between releases, with the band performing 3 of the four works from Third, as well as some of the earliest recordings of material from the upcomming Fourth, including some very different arrangements to what would eventually end up on that release. Especially in contrast to Noisette, the instruments jump right out, and stay comfortably close to my ears on headphones. finally, I can really hear what Hopper's doing all through the set"some steady twists and turns, like bass balloon sculpture---but he's not trying to be Jaco or Stanley--also, just the right, concentrated doses of fuzz, other distortion--ditto Ratledge, who plays mostly mid- and lower-range, full, warm, but yowly when excited; Wyatt's more spare than previous sets in this series, mainly punctuating, cueing, also stirring and chopping noodles when nec. (not that often). Dean's bundling of acrid shards provides effective contrast with meatitudes of others, but I don't miss him when he's not playing.
Sometimes this seems more relaxed than prev. shows in the series, and "Esther's Nose Job" goes on a little too long, though good ending, and we get a reprise of my favorite tune here, if you can call it that, the slightly spooky "Slightly All The Time," this time with a burst of "Noisette."
Bandcamp page lets us hear about half the tracks; I'll prob buy it and do some cherrypicking, as with most of these sets.
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/grides

CD edition of Grides incl. DVD of 3.23.71 quartet set at Radio Bremen, which can also be had as a sep. (audio-only) digital album, for 5 bucks. Good idea: it's a 20:17 fistful of well-recorded balloon farm heat and cool networking, like the earlier Grides show, but fitting my attention span better. (Dean even melds with the others, without losing his skronk.) Most exciting passage: Wyatt's voice does something I've never heard before, like layers of duck or geese quavering in strict tempo---rows at a shooting gallery, with a distracting effect---?
Whole thing's here, apparently:
Set-list:
- Neo-Caliban Grides

- Out-Bloody-Rageous

- Robert Wyatt's Vocal Improvisation

- Eamonn Andrews

- All White
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-radio-bremen-march-23-1971-from-grides-dvd

(And can even hear Wyatt's kick-drum[?] and toms here, sometimes.)

The previously unreleased show captured on Virtually, recorded March 23, 1971, presents the classic quartet Softs during their final European tour & just 4 months before their dissolution...versions of all the tracks from Fourth, most of Third and much more...special note must be made of Robert's drumming, as he plays with more gusto on this show than most from this period. Right at the beginning, as they jump into "Teeth," his interplay with the keys is right up front: dual lead lines, even though (except for the bass, which is always played and recorded splendidly here), the overall sound quality of this track isn't quite up to the rest---though it sure is on the next one, the title song, and most of the rest.
But the sound is also too good to listen around Dean as much as I'd like; he and the prev. reliable Ratledge and too many tracks get tiresome, despite the rhythm section's best efforts, and abrupt cut-offs (obvious edits, not realtime-sounding jumps, like on some previous sets in this series).
Of these six sample tracks, out of ten on the album, think I'll prob just get "Virtually"---should listen to the whole thing somewhere else maybe, but suspect I'm getting tired of this whole approach/that it was time for RW to move on. I'm ready for Cuneiform's live Matching Mole sets.
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/virtually

there's an FB group for him and a few neighbors and friends of his post there regularly. someone walked by his house yesterday and waved to him, he was on the porch.

He’s still doing stuff albeit officially retired. He curated an hour of music for a new online Palestinian radio station a few days ago.

He and Alfie also have a book coming out in September - lyrics and drawings I think

Actually a Hopper song, but this thread is more active so I'll put it here. Weyes Blood did a nice cover of "A Certain Kind" a few years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9YQKhIateQ&list=RDIr3_z9KCmnw&index=50

Oh Well, it's searchable.

Posting vids works better for me via Firefox, not the private window, just the basiic. Anyway, found it from your link, sounds good, thanks! Soft Machine Vol One version on same page. Thanks also to akim and Jeff W for updates, sure wish I could walk by his house and wave, oh well will check the book. I need to check more Hopper; I mainly know him from Wilde Flowers, Soft Machine, and the Material cover of "Memories." Where should I start with his other bands? Also, is there a book that covers the Canterbury crew from early to fairly recent years?

When I was compiling early Canterbury stuff, this was the main source for the really early years, like pre-65.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canterburied_Sounds,_Vol._1%E2%80%934

It's an odd grab-bag of stuff, some of it not very good at all, still worth a listen though.

The Hopper and Elton Dean albums are good. I also like the one he did with Caveman Shoestore, calling themselves Caveman Hughscore.

man I tried again with that one recently after owning it for many years, and altho there are some real high points I just cannot hang with the main Caveman guy's stream-of-consciousness lyrics

Yeah, it's an acquired taste. I appreciate the music over the lyrics. As a progger from way back I've learned to tune out silly lyrics.

Smoke Signals compiles all previously unreleased performances - selected & sequenced by Robert Wyatt biographer Mike King - from the band's most intense gigging period. The set list is mostly drawn from Little Red Record, but the way the band performed the pieces live is quite different from the heavily overdubbed versions found on the studio disc.
Yeah, Matching Mole is Jack B. Nimble here--gotta be, or Wyatt might roll right over the others. No busywork in the v. compatible bandcamp sample tracks though: put of 10, we get "Smoke Rings" (double bass with a pickup, and sometimes a bow??), "Brandy as in Benjii" (after Benjii the dog movie star?), "March Ides II," (my fave), and "Smoke Signal," which has good thick fuzzy drones--guitar, bass, both?---and liquid electric piano floating in a glass---thee good jazz rock, or jazzy rock, before fusion got so complicated. Refreshing! Guess I did binge on Soft Machine. No vocals in this foursome, alas.
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/smoke-signals

Wii have to try Canterburied Sounds, thanks!

personally for me his peak period is the stuff he put out in the late '70s - "hopper tunity box", "monster band", and "two rainbows daily" with alan gowen. "two rainbows daily" in particular is just spectacular, a really underheard gem.

for later stuff i very much enjoy the "soft mountain" release, a record with hopper and elton dean that's very much in the spirit of the fourth soft machine record, with hoppy kamiyama and tatsuya yoshida on keys and drums.

i wasn't at all a fan of "1984", which i remember as just being these strange tape loops without much in the way of melody. i might like it more today if i gave it another listen.

I cannot imagine Tatsuya Yoshida playing anything like Soft Machine 4

sorry, fifth - there's definitely more phil howard than robert wyatt in his playing!

I know it’s seen as this super minor entry in his catalogue but the little piano, voice and drum sketches of A Short Break are going down really well right now.

still get a scare when this thread is bumped

DO NOT POST IN THIS THREAD

Early ILM, getting it all wrong to be contrarian, yet again...

from the Soft Machine's SPACED thread: no lime compensates us for above video removed:

bummer about the disappeared video, seems to have vanished completely. anyway, it's available as an extra on this* which is where i first came across it.

― no lime tangier, Saturday, August 22, 2020 10:29 PM
*https://shop.bfi.org.uk/separation-dual-format-edition.html

This is from a late '07 profile that I wrote for a collegetown alt-weekly, prob emergency filler when some Star suddenly cancelled an interview and/or show, so the editor wasn't too picky---first part was the usual sort of bio, but I still like this about the musical journey:

...Rock Bottom, Wyatt’s 1974 debut solo album, doesn’t directly address his accident, but its dazzling ballad, “Sea Song,” confidently greets “...a seasonal beast, like the starfish that drifts in with the tide. So until your blood runs to meet the next full moon, your madness fits in nicely with my own...we’re not alone.” Yet in “Last Straw,” he’s “buried deep in the sand.” By 1975’s Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard, he’s a little piece of pork, singing a “Soup Song”: “Now there’s no hope I’m getting out of here, I can feel I’m going soft!” But at least he can wish the soup-eater a tummy ache. On “Team Spirit,” he’s a happier pigskin, taunting the football player who’s kicking him, but also urges, “Use me to go to hell for leather and back,” because they give each other meaning.

Wyatt had recently married lyricist-graphic artist Alfreda Benge, and as he later acknowledged, “Life began to make sense.” She supported and challenged him. In the early 80s, he recorded Elis Costello and Clive Langer’s “Shipbuilding,” about a worker whose ancient trade and town’s prosperity are finally revived by the UK government’s (shady) Falklands War, to which the shipbuilder’s son is shipped off. (“But I’ll be home by Christmas.”) Wyatt also covered Peter Gabriel’s “Biko,” an elegiac, then galvanizing account of and response to South African activist Steve Biko’s death, while being held by the Apartheid regime‘s police---and Nile Rodgers’ “At Last I Am Free,” a ballad that accounts, note by note, for every step toward and through strength and freedom.

“Biko” is in the Wyatt collection Mid-Eighties, which also contains his 1985 Old Rottenhat, where connections between the personal and political could get ranty, and there are some cranky moments in the middle of the new album, Comicopera. But it begins with a couple’s questions and answers for each other, settling and shifting.They make love, while beautiful music lures other characters into making war.The beauty tries to grow out of that, as Wyatt, at the height of his powers as a multi-instrumentalist and arranger, leads jazz and rock players, singers, and listeners through Spanish and Italian words and melodies, like sunshine spilled through bullet holes.

And here's an excerpt from another ancient altweeky piece of mine, more re Comicopera.

from "Speculation, Notes On Three Songs Of The Year (07)":

Robert Wyatt's "Cancion de Julieta": built on, travels on an upright
bass riff, which carefully adjusts itself, then tilts forward, like a
rocking horse that almost gets stuck on a surreal extension of a bent
(fifth?) some blues note or I should say blu-u-ues note, groaning a
little, deliberately distended, before the last note, before
the rocking horse pilgrim tilts back into place. And Wyatt sings the
same melisma, much higher, like a little old man with a hole in his
head and the air pushing out and in, which is true of course, like a
little old man in a poem or a play, under the radar or trying to be
that way, in his mask (from Comicopera, and Wyatt explains he means
that album's title in the oldest school sense, the other side of
tragedy, but useful, a working piece of uniform), his parody, with the
well-timed well-pulled tear in his blues, giving just enough pause to
the listener (and even a sympathetic listener can stop listening if
the music seems too familiar, like this track never does; I keep
listening to hear what happens next, even though I "basically" or
schematically know, but it's the feeling of the listening experience
that matters here, like it always should). Also, it's not just a mask
etc in the defensive sense, or defensive in the wait for 'em to come
at you sense; the little old rocking horse rider isn't just finding
away to keep his place, he's somehow pushing forward, each repetition
of the basic riff brings some other sounds too, which suggest he's
breaking into something, pushing forward, into wreckage, the hull of a
galleon maybe (kind of an underwater moonlit quality). The bass player
is also using his bow, and overdubbing violins, scrabbling at the
push, in the push. (Wyatt also plays some kind of keyboard,
percussion, pocket trumpet, all in the arc and pull and push of the
sway of the note). "Un mar de sue-eh-eh, no. Un mar de tierra blanca,"
so not just aquatic and doesn't just sound aquatic, but like he's
entering the water, rocking back and forth and farward. Just another
sleepwalker? They can do a lot. Leading where all listeners might be
led toward making their own connections, if they want, to any possible
deeper waters. Either way, the song will keep going (not too earnest,
no time for that). It's just the damndest track, is all, first listen
every listen.

“Biko” is in the Wyatt collection Mid-Eighties, which also contains his 1985 Old Rottenhat, where connections between the personal and political could get ranty, and there are some cranky moments in the middle of the new album, Comicopera.

you say all this like it's a bad thing somehow, but IMO these are some of the strongest moments in his catalog, are extremely emotional and human, and light years away from being "ranty" which tbh sounds pretty blithe and privileged as an alleged dismissal.

Regardless of the lyrics, I think Old Rottenhat is his strongest album musically, and it's aged phenomenally. Gharbzadegi is one of the few 8-minute songs that's far too short; I could ride that cyclical piano groove all day

maybe "ranty" is a poor way to say what I think I meant, almost 15 years ago, but seems to have been for contrast w the choices and performances of "Biko" and "At Last I Am Free"---and "Shipbuilding," for that matter, though, though the first two are peaks of eloquence.
But I can still change my archived post of it, so maybe I'll just cut out that whole sentence, mainly in there as transition (not strictly nec., more for the school paper approach). It's just my perspective at the time, meant as an intro,not presented there or here as all-time in-depth consideration, but some of the more compelling tracks, personally and then also politically, developmentally.

Okay, did that. I'll get back to Old Rottenhat and some others later on.

I just got the full 4 volume Dada INsanity which Ithink is all Robert Wyatt era Soft Machine. Oly had disc 3 before i think which is US tour from 68.

Have a few of his solo lps around in my bedroom several of which I got cheap IN FOPP a few years ago. I know I love Rock Bottom and the Drury Lane set from around the time, got both of those from elsewhere. Really like Ruth is Stranger tahn Richard and need to familiarise myself with others better.

Dada Insanity looks great

Old Rottenhat is top shelf. I love it as much as Rock Bottom. There's an interview where he said he heard one of his old tunes getting played on Voice of America and he thought 'hmm, the only way to get them to stop doing that would be to start writing lyrics they can't ignore'

favorite Old Rottenhat era tape is Radio Experiment Rome Feburary 1981. Had the bootleg a long time before the CD. In-studio improvs modest but perfect. The track 'Holy War' is an early version of 'Speechless' played backwards.

The recordings with Henry Cow in 1975 are pretty good too. I think there was a 3cd set of them one set each from London, Italy and somewhere.
Were out at one point as Freedom.

If you want songs that touch your mind as well as your heart, these are the best,” says Brian Eno regarding Robert Wyatt and Alfie Benge’s recently released Side By Side, a collection of lyrics, poems, writings, and drawings from the Wyatt and painter, songwriter, Alfie Benge, longtime collaborators and partners.

Along with the release of the book, the ever-reliable Domino has begun a reissue campaign of his solo work, beginning with His Greatest Misses, a non-chronological survey of his decades-spanning oeuvre. Originally released in Japan and available now for the first time on vinyl, it’s a non-chronological look at the sonic inventor’s work between 1974—2003.

And as if all that isn’t enough, Wyatt season continues with brand new music: the forthcoming Artlessly Falling by MacArthur Genius Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl. On the new album, he joins the guitarist and composer for three angular but wide-open songs. Like his collaborations Eno, Carla Bley, Björk, Paul Weller, members of Pink Floyd, and many others on the vanguard of rock and the avant-garde, his contributions on Artlessly Falling feel singular, his voice conveying emotionality, beauty, and bewildered wonder.

That’s all on display in The Free Will and Testament of Robert Wyatt, a playlist featuring Wyatt favorites and deep cuts selected by Aquarium Drunkard founder Justin Gage. From his majestic cover of Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding” to pioneering work with the prog/jazz fusion combo Soft Machine to late period classics like the Benge/Wyatt-penned “Just As You Are” from 2007’s Comicopera, these songs align mind and heart. As Eno says, “English music has produced some fascinating personalities but few are as unusual as Robert Wyatt.” Unusual, yes. Wonderfully so.
https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2020/10/22/robert-wyatt-playlist/ (links to Spotify)

Replying to
@aquadrunkard
Some Robert Wyatt Rarities / Radio Shuttleworth, BBC May 23, 2000 (the entire show + 2 songs edited out as separate tracks)

https://we.tl/t-oRaXvVZQLk (WeTransfer, downloaded quickly, haven't had time to listen yet)

Sorry, thanks to this guy! Observations of Deviance AntiFascist
@AtBestIsKorny
Observations of Deviance / a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities. KXCI radio DJ
Tucson, AZkxci.org/programs/obser…Joined November 2011
3,025 Following
3,542 Followers
Followed by Milford Graves Full Mantis, Sunwatchers, and 46 others you follow Although looks like I muted him for some reason, only saw the above via ilxor tylerw's tweet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU2GRJmIZKk

Franklin Bruno
@humanfranklin

“I am a real minimalist, because I don’t do much. I know some minimalists who call themselves minimalist but they do loads of minimalism. That is cheating.” -- Robert Wyatt.
3:25 PM · Nov 28, 2020

He's good on that Code Girl album--sounds old, but vivid, to lingering impression after tracks are over--- and alb is all good, by far the best Halvorson set I've heard so far, maybe because she's an accompanist here, to singers and instrumental "chamber" (but non-antiseptic) jazz combo & soloists.
Seems like this might pertain:
Long before the modern British jazz explosion brought us Sons of Kemet, Nubya Garcia, and the like, their forebears filtered rock, funk, electronics, international influences, and the avant-garde through an open-ended but idiosyncratically English mindset. The roots of U.K. progressive jazz reach all the way back to ‘50s modernists like Joe Harriott and Tubby Hayes. A decade later, the countercultural boom brought mavericks like Elton Dean, Keith Tippett, and Alan Wakeman, who enlarged their audiences by working with simpatico proggy legends such as King Crimson and Soft Machine, along the way.
https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/british-jazz-list

i was a little cooler on the album overall, maybe it needs a few more spins to grow on me, but agree that Wyatt is fantastic on it

It's a great setting for him and he sounds perfect on it even if I am not as high on as I was the first Code Girl record, but agreed I need some more time with it

I dunno what it is about "Worship" but that song can never receive enough praise. It is my calm zen.

Shleep is so damn good, can't believe I shlept on it for so long

oh god yeah, the title track is basically an Eno tune

Pretty much every song they’ve worked on together is a career highlight for both men.

Cuckooland is probably the one I go back to most often these days, it's probably not his best album but there are a few songs on there I dearly love.

I can’t quite explain it but there’s something about the digital keyboard sound I love on that record. Karen Mantler is a beast.

listening to this now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osxAOZEGyV8

Soft Machine - "Out-Bloody-Rageous" from 'Facelift France and Holland' (Cuneiform Records)

...It is the earliest footage of the band to be commercially released and also the only video footage known to exist of the quintet line-up that was active from January to March 1970. The broadcast contains the only professionally-recorded performance of “Out-Bloody- Rageous” with Lyn Dobson on second sax and it also is the only professionally-recorded alternative performance by the quintet of “Facelift” (the original appearing as the opening track on Third).

Facelift France and Holland marks the first official release of the entire show in both audio and video format. Footage of the concert was previously released in 2008 on DVD, but we have gone through the original footage once again to improve video quality as well as remove or lessen soundtrack issues including fake applause and hard edits.

In addition to the March, 1970 material presented here on CD and DVD in splendid stereo sound and looking better than it ever has before, Disc 3 presents a previously unreleased soundboard performance at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw from January 17, 1970.

"...With the Softs flying high sans safety net and previewing material from their upcoming album Third, the audience in raptures, Robert Wyatt looking like the younger brother of Brian Jones and the sight of Orangina bottles decorating the top of the amps, this is a hugely evocative period piece made all the more vivid by the warm hues of the colour film stock. They sure don't make 'em like this any more." – Grahame Bent, Record Collector

Elton Dean – Alto sax, saxello
Lyn Dobson – Soprano and tenor sax, flute, harmonica, vocals
Hugh Hopper – Bass
Mike Ratledge – Hohner Pianet, Lowrey Holiday Deluxe organ
Robert Wyatt – Drums, vocals

CD One: Recorded at Théâtre de la Musique, Paris, France, March 2, 1970. Licensed from I.N.A.
CD Two Recorded at Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, January 17, 1970.

I'm only into them because of him, but that was pretty refreshing overall.
here's the 7 minute trailer, also sounding good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UobaL1aCdUM

Robert/s upfront right away!

Spotify has an expanded Virtually. 6-17-71 performances now up from 11 to 16, followed by 10-19-71: 25 total. At bottom:
February 11, 2022

© 2022 Soft Machine

℗ 2022 Lo-Light Records Haven't seen any other info yet---yall know it?

I will always have time for more '68-'70 Soft Machine in my life, even if it gets released in Greatful Dead proportions.

I've been wavering on that Facelift France and Holland release, worth getting?

A guy I know saw Robert Wyatt in Louth last week, took a picture of him. I think he was sitting outside a Greggs.

I was reading the comments on one of the yt links above (2nd, I think) and a guy said he walked past Robert's place once and saw the door was open, peeked in and Robert invited him in and they chatted for a good while. Someone else said they mailed him a letter and Robert replied with a hand-written letter.

what is going on with Rock Bottom, where every chord feels like it's a quarter tone off or something? its like the mellotron effect. is there a term for that?
this album is such a trip. haven't listened to it in years and certain parts are etched in my brain

The sound it's building on is summed up nicely in Bob Stanley's "English Weather" compilation (which of course features Robert as part of Matching Mole) but Rock Bottom is also its own thing of course.

(xp) I don't know if you mean there's mellotron on the album because there isn't afaict.

oddly enough wyatt himself has supplied* the word (or a word) for this effect = desafinado**

*in an 80s interview, i ?think? in ref to the excellence of the raincoats (tho it's possible i subsequently supplied this in my head as a good example)

**meaning the deliberate pitch bending or detuning of notes and melodies, as made popular in 1959 by the brazilian jobim/gilberto hit (which was an ironic embrace of the term bcz ppl were saying that bossa nova was music for ppl who couldn't sing). tuning that veers away from classical piano tuning is of course present all across all kinds of folk and popular musics, so the term has plenty places it can be used beyond bossa nova

i am prepared to argue strongly that wyatt's (and soft machine's) taste for this effect derives from their experiments with tape loops (which often introduce tuning glitches as a likeable effect you'd want to repeat) as well as mike ratledge's sometimes wayward organ (same argument)*** -- and of course tuning effects are also a feature of the wing of minimalism that isn't reich and glass

***and mellotrons are organs made of tape loops! so it all fits

"as made popular in 1959" -- i mean this made the word popular, i don't think the song itself does any pitch-bending (tho the argument critics were making was that bossa nova's whispery vocal style wasn't proper singing i guess)

You could "bend" the notes on a Hammond organ by switching it off and on again - I'm sure the same was true for the Lowrey organ Mike Ratledge used in Soft Machine. Didn't Wyatt use some cheap (probably) Italian organ on this and subsequent albums?

google says yes: a riviera that alfreda benge bought for him in veinice to doodle around on when they were staying in julie christie's villa as don't look now was being shot (benge was asst editor to roeg, something i did not know until three minutes ago)

asst to roeg's editor is probably more precise but even so

There are some v. interesting experiments with tape loops etc. on the Canterburied Sounds compilations, though Daevid Allen is of course the lead experimenter (Ratledge is an odd figure, always central to the project right up to 1976 and responsible for a good deal of the sound, but never seeming to express his own personality / ideas)

some time this year (i hope) i have a big long essay coming out in a collection abt terry riley which does a little digging into exactly this topic (riley and tape loops, plus who was listening and where they took it all) (it could have done with more on daevid allen tbh but it was already much too long and i was finding useful interviews with him abt that topic hard to source)

(xp) I don't know if you mean there's mellotron on the album because there isn't afaict.

― Maggot Bairn (Tom D.), Thursday, February 2, 2023 5:38 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I brought up the mellotron because to me the signature element is that the tapes get worn out quickly which gives them that distended, detuned sound. which wound up becoming a sought after thing in its own right - I find it very amusing that there's a site (Planet Mellotron) which is dedicated to determining which albums use the real thing and which are sampled. not just that someone would catalogue it but that apparently hundreds of bands are sampling this giant, unwieldy machine that doesn't even really work. I am pretty sure the thing wasn't designed to ruin the tapes but it sure makes an interesting sound. Anyway Rock Bottom has that same detuned sound which you don't often hear out of those kinds of organs. I feel like the album itself is supposed to exist half in this world and half in the spiritual realm and playing these chords which seem kind of unearthly...they're like slightly off, sticking a thumb in your brain...is what really drives that home for me

tbh I think the notes Robert Wyatt plays have something to do with it! He does tend to play unusual scales or else flirts with dissonance, he's always done that.

i mean, he sings that way too

I find it very amusing that there's a site (Planet Mellotron) which is dedicated to determining which albums use the real thing and which are sampled

Run by my brother!

i mean, he sings that way too

― the sex lives of quoll-ish girls (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 2 February 2023 15:06 (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

desafinado!

(xp) Wow!

really? I love that site. I've discovered so much through there. right now it feels like the last bastion of the great personal review sites. next time you see him can you play "The Call" by Backstreet Boys and ask if there's a mellotron on that track? I always suspected there was.

by the way he seems to think there actually IS a mellotron on Rock Bottom - the choirs on Sea Song and some strings during Alife/Alifib.

Matt #2's brother doesn't seem too sure though! I assume the photograph was from the recording sessions for "Rock Bottom" because he did play one on the first Matching Mole album.

Will ask and report back (Backstreet Boys only though)

It's that "I should've said no, someone's waiting for me" bit. very much sounds like a mellotron to me.

half in the spiritual realm

like the *decay* behind wine is what I meant to write!!

Not to derail the thread too much from Bob Wyatt, but to answer next time you see him can you play "The Call" by Backstreet Boys and ask if there's a mellotron on that track? I always suspected there was. - apparently it's a generic string sample. Amusing that we made him play it though, that's even funnier than when I insist on inflicting Perfume on the poor guy.

In all honesty the only records Wyatt plays on that I like are the first 3 Soft Machine LPs. I do feel hugely guilty about my indifference towards his solo career though if that makes up for it.

i wish i remembered more abt wyatt's discussion of desafinado! who did the interview and when, for example (80s from memory but that might be wrong) -- at the time none of the wider context stuck with me, just only that word -- bcz it seemed useful (he's always been good on the politics of the clash between official music stylings, and unofficial, so i can see why this appleaed to him as a move. in the 80s i knew nothing at all about bossa nova, so if he mentioned it it didn't register.

obviously there's a nice cover of insensatez on cucklooland, and you can easily hear how his own vocal style gels with jobim's (more than gilberto's: gilberto is a pretty exact note-placer, jobim is a lot more, well, let's say conversational haha) ... not sure if it "influenced" him even w/o getting into my usual rage against that word, just as likely he sang like this anyway in the come-as-you-are style of 60s pop-making and afterwards discovered there was brazilzian sanction for it with good politics attached

(on the other hand it was around and he was a jazz head -- stan getz etc -- so maybe he was always deeply versed and used it as permission from the outset) (he must have talked abt all this somewhere but i'm evidently googling the wrong words)

Yeah, there was a conversational/direct address realness to his singing, even when getting louder and more quavery, on the earliest Wildeflowers tapes I've heard, and he could have already heard bossa nova then, of course,whether or not any difference (otm re Jobim's vocalizing seeming even more relevant than Gilberto's). Obv. he's gotten into that kind of instrumental groove from time to time, like with the Enotron and Ladytron, also somewhat Miles-Gil-type versions of "My Funny Valentine" etc.

He sang in Spanish on Soft Machine Vol 2!

that's bcz of this tho (brazilians sing in portuguese):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wswhUGb1k6c

He sang in Spanish on Phil Manzanera's first solo LP too (a bit later, to be sure).

he lived in majorca for a while in the early 60s

I think it was me who first posted that clip itt! Anwyay I think the Soft Machine track shows influences from outside US/UK early in his career.

they were always skipping back and forth to paris iirc

however i continue to maintain none of this constitutes proof that he heard joão gilberto pre-wilde flowers and thought "i'm also going to sing like that"

tho he might have done

That's how Daevid Allen ended up getting stuck in Paris and forming Gong. There's an interview with Wyatt in French on Youtube where he speaks French with a distinct Robert Wyatt accent but seems pretty fluent.

(xp)

Kevin Ayers of course moved to Spain in 1970, as described by Robert on As Long As He Lies Perfectly Still

Well Ibiza anyway

& of course there are a fair few Spanish language tracks on Nothing Can Stop Us / EPs box

A friend used to have that EPs box and I remember the booklet (written by RW) - he described the synthesiser used on The Animals Film, he said it sounded like a wasp, nothing like a mellotron of course.

mark I'm not thinking of him as nec. being i-word etc. but just, like all yall are saying, the Iberian/Med and maybe Brazilian sounds of that era were in the air around musichead R and fellow travelers.

encouraging some of their mellow-meldier inclinations

I feel like the album itself is supposed to exist half in this world and half in the spiritual realm

OTM

i mean, he sings that way too

he is the best singer in the world.

My comment was praise, just to be clear

I know, good comment.

i do love his voice, the chat about desafinado gives it some interesting context

this is my favourite

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Huwy0Vq5-Ak

Oh jeez NV you got me weeping at 3am here. Yeah his voice on that kills me.

There was some thread several months ago where a few ppl said Robert Wyatt's voice was a deal breaker, that it's too goofy, or too twee or something. Yeah, the desafinado thing, or dissonance, or whatever it is that he does, the emotional impact of it can be devastating. I can't think of any other singer who achieves that kind of vulnerability off the top of my head, nothing goofy about it.

Was kinda imagining this with wyatt's regional accent\inflection.
dora

There was some thread several months ago where a few ppl said Robert Wyatt's voice was a deal breaker, that it's too goofy, or too twee or something.

It put me off for years, ngl. When I was about 15 and had just discovered John Peel he was playing "Pigs" a lot; me and my friend Ian used to find it funny/annoying, it became our in-joke. We'd walk round the village pointing at sheds, vans, pillar-boxes etc, saying: In there? What? Pigs? On a day like this? Huddled up in there? and so on. As hilarious as you can imagine, but I think RW would have quite appreciated this reaction.

It was Shleep that got me really into him, but even them I was still getting cross about trackes such as Duchess, which I thought was whimsical waste of time. I love it now.

Re. the Mellotron, this would appear to be a photo from the Rock Bottom sessions, as it is Robert sitting in front of a Mellotron M400 with Nick Mason, who produced the record: https://www.facebook.com/mellotronfactory/photos/a.975313009206468/3614788971925512/?type=3

It’s not 100% clear to me which choir sound he’s playing on Sea Song as it’s overdubbed in both channels and maybe pitched up, but it sounds like he may be playing the 8 voice choir sound there.

Quite a few BYG albums now reissued and streaming on Bandcamp---I started with Banana Moon, because RW is in the core band with Daevid Allen and Archie Legget, ready for excellent guests. "Stoned Innocent Frankenstein" could be the title track, considering whole set's seemingly off-handed pop-rock flair through the crusty bits*, with attentive dynamics def. incl. Wyatt's drumming and harmonies.
He sings lead on "Memories," which could be a ringer, but fits with other songs' sincerity ("Get Me Outta Here," o yes), and the voice is distant, but persistent, also unmistakable, while the playing is bluesier than his otm "Rock Bottom" B-side arrangement, but sympathetically so. Here's the best audio of the B that I've heard, on Richard Sinclair's Bandcamp:
https://richardsinclairsongs.bandcamp.com/track/memories

And before I forget, here's the 2023 Banana Moon:
https://bygrecords.bandcamp.com/album/banana-moon (Gong's reissued Magick Brother is sounding pretty good on BYG BC too)

*wiki:

In 2003, David Bowie included it in a list of 25 of his favourite albums, "Confessions of a Vinyl Junkie", saying that "it's possible, just possibly maybe, that strands of the embryonic glam style started here."[7]

From Robert Wyatt's son, on FB... 😢♥️ pic.twitter.com/ZQRk4JEF8M

— David Johnston-Smith (@djsarchivist) February 7, 2024

Awful news

:(

:(

that's really too bad. was just listening to his latest one (Comicopera) the other day and just marveling at the guy's career, the way he just popped in and out at will and delivered music that sounded completely out of time and place but were all very much Robert Wyatt. he seems like such a sweet guy. I hope he's not suffering.

for the overwhelming majority of his life, he has sustained an unquestionably heroic existence, in terms of what he has advocated and in how he has persisted in his daily life and his creative output. When he does go, hopefully there will be some glimmer in his consciousness beforehand that his life had been well lived.

A friend of mine booked a summer outdoor music series in NYC in the 2000s: one time he told me that he had talked to robert and had nearly convinced him to travel to NYC and DO A FUCKING SHOW. He claimed that Robert was set to do it but that Alfie's mom was herself near death and he didn't want to commit to something like that in Alfie's time of need. I found this very hard to fathom, as I don't believe, other than ToTP in 1975 (which is mimed, right?) that he ever played live after the accident; or did he appear at one of the meltdown festivals? And I don't think he ever traveled outside of Western Europe; I think he and Alfie lived in Spain in the late 80/90s. It was really really hard for me to believe that he would agree to come to america and play live for some fairly low profile, but also not at all DIY, not at all left wing politics affiliated summer music series. I would have been a pig in shit if he did. tho.

robert played a few concerts in the early days after the accident... only one under his own name, at drury lane in 1974, but a couple as a major performer - hatfield and the north at the roundhouse in 1974 and a couple of shows with henry cow in 1975. he's also done a few in-studio performances for television broadcast under his own name. other than that mostly just guest performances - with david gilmour at "meltdown", with paul weller a couple years back. sad to hear of robert's progressive memory loss, glad that he's being cared for. i didn't know him at all, but what i know of him, of... not just his music, but his _personality_, the stories other people have told of him, they've been really influential on me. he seems like an admirable person. as much as admiring someone i don't know can... lead to disappointment, i do think it's fair to say that i admire him.

He also came on for a couple of numbers, singing and playing pocket trumpet, with Charlie Haden, Carla Bley and a version of the Liberation Music Orchestra at Ornette Coleman's Meltdown Festival in London, in 2011. Even then his voice was audibly diminished, but still poignant and distinctive. Might have been his last live appearance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5OJN5bwLRM

Thanks, not seen that clip before

i get a little emotional thinking about him, he really touches me a in a way few musicians do.

but there was something so special and inspiring about how he went from being just this MONSTER drummer, a real physical force on that instrument and then have all that taken away from him, and then transformed himself as an artist to make music that made that sense of physical frailty such a core and touching part of what it was

i don't know if i said that very well but i hope you know what i mean

totally, thank you

Friend of mine managed to end up backstage at a Patti Smith concert (in the Southbank probably?) Verlaine might have been there and Gillespie almost certainly was and various other luminaries. He said everyone there were complete arseholes and then he noticed a guy sitting (he thought) in a corner, pint of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, covered in ash. He went over to talk to him and it was Robert Wyatt and he was like, "What do you make of all this?" and he was basically the only genuine person in the room.

amazing posts, ums and veronica moser

oh! I also interviewed him! having talked with him and Scott Walker, that shit was major for me.

and then transformed himself as an artist to make music that made that sense of physical frailty such a core and touching part of what it was

I've always thought of Rock Bottom as one of the very few albums that sounds exactly the way the artist imagined it in their head, idk how to describe this exactly but it's not something I get from a whole lot of albums

very sad news. It's a horrible way to go - it takes everything away from a person.

He did a gig in Brighton in support of Jeremy Corbyn in 2016, w/Weller and Danny Thompson. It was widely reported in advance, but I've never read a review. There are bits on Youtube.

Ugh!

His son's post puts the best light on it, reassuring himself and others w/o overselling---I know from experience w relatives that progressive memory loss does have its stages, and hopefully he can still listen to his own music, or from his collection (response to music can often be among the last things to go, if it goes at all). Good that he still recognizes friends and family, although as long as he enjoys them, doesn't matter if he's got their names etc. Good son, good that he's got one, didn't know that. Does he have other kids?

I think he had his son very young. He's pictured on the gatefold of Gong's "Camembert Electrique"!

So sorry to hear this.

And glad for any chance to post my favorite recording of all time again, which I mention above some years ago, regarding his performing....1975 with Henry Cow in their Slapp Happy days, on the CD/lp it's combined with Gloria Gloom, blending into this, Wyatt joining the band(s) for a cover of his Little Red Riding Hood Hits the Road, giving us Robert in harmony with Dagmar Krause.

Just glorious stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48ikl7FCuYo

the last two minutes of that, chills every time.

Not live but this 80s single gives us Wyatt and Tracy Thorn and Claudia Figueroa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHCSMT1Q1OY

omg thanx Dan! Keep 'em coming people.

and then transformed himself as an artist to make music that made that sense of physical frailty such a core and touching part of what it was

sad news ... was watching this recently, really terrific.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyrK3hA9318

opened this thread with a little trepidation. God bless him. Still the greatest living englishman

He said he was retiring to take care of Alfie, acknowledging her care of him for so long. I wonder how she's doing, is she even still alive?

oh yes: https://twitter.com/duduschka

sad news ... was watching this recently, really terrific.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyrK3hA9318

― tylerw, Wednesday, February 7, 2024 1:07 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

he's wearing the album cover from Ryuichi Sakamoto's Esperanto ten years before it was even released. talk about being ahead of your time.

jammed this slammer at a dj night last week. it sounds so good really loud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bGv13da2ik

This performance has always been one of my favorites, French TV from 1967. Wish there were more of it.

https://my.mail.ru/mail/elfn/video/3039/3185.html

Russian site but it seems OK. There's a shorter version on youtube (and this one was on yt but I can't find it now).

Blessings to him.

huh, i thought there was more of that dim dam dom '67 video but i don't seem to have any

i did turn up this that seems to be from the same session.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP8zmGLYbmI

gotta be more out there, the french tv archives kept everything

f'rinstance, here's one i haven't seen anywhere before (disregard the title, it's a bit of "esther's nose job"!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5SpwQOKd6M

(re: "Little Red Riding HOod Hit The Road" w/Henry Cow):

the last two minutes of that, chills every time.

― dan selzer

those whole concerts... there are tapes, they're fantastic. the 36 minute "beautiful as the moon-gloria gloom-ruins" medley, the entirety of "side richard" from "ruth is stranger than richard", "living in the heart of the beast"... i don't think there are full professional recordings, but there is a recording from radio of "living in the heart of the beast" from one of the paris gigs. wyatt and krause singing together on the rousing outro, so good!

one of the things i do a lot of, is i listen to and read about other people to understand myself better, and i've done this a lot with wyatt's stuff, for good or for ill.

it's interesting, because i used to read people talking about robert wyatt having a sad voice... "the saddest voice in the world", i think ryuichi sakamoto once described it... and it's one of those things that confused me a lot, i didn't understand why people described his voice as "sad". maybe it's not! i've grown to think of it that way. i think of him as being incredibly kind, incredibly compassionate, and also having this deep, kind of profound sadness about him.

i wrote a piece a year or so back about wyatt and his departure from soft machine, and i found this quote from him from "The Best of NME 1970-1974", published in 2018:

"I was very, very unhappy. I mean, it had to happen, but I had taken the Soft Machine for granted as a little family. It had formed from friendships that dated back to infancy, from 10 or 11 years old. You can fall out with your family, but you can't divorce them. So, when Soft Machine ejected me from that family, I had the most enormous collapse in self-confidence from which I've never really recovered, to be honest. And I always think they were right, looking back on it, to throw me out. I was too drunk, they were more grown up, more sophisticated, everything. But nevertheless, it felt like being exiled from a country, to somewhere where nobody spoke your language. I was very disorientated, and nervous, and anxious."

but like dow says it's something that always seems to have been in his voice, that sadness

and then of course the accident, and he hasn't been able to take care of himself for the past fifty years, and i guess, when one is disabled and one can't take care of oneself, it's easy to feel... to not have a lot of self-confidence.

i've heard so much of his stuff but the things of his that i relate most strongly to are "shleep", that whole album with songs like "was a friend", about the whole soft machine thing, half-smiling, willing hands, and then "september the ninth" with alfie's beautiful poem:

Woman wishing for wings,
(Too large a lump to pass for bird)

i've loved that song for decades and now that song hits me in ways that weren't intended when benge wrote the words. it sounded like... the record came out when i was 21, and it sounded to me "mature" but not _boring_, at an age where "mature" and "boring" mostly seemed like synonyms. the kind of maturity i hoped i would grow into. i don't know if i've grown into maturity, but that album is one that... my understanding of it has certainly deepened as i've grown older. there aren't a lot of records that, i guess, that can ever mean as much to me as that record, given the time i've spent with it.

the other thing of his that really hits me hard is his performance of john greaves' "the song". it has that old-style diction that uses "man" to mean "woman", but that bit:

"man is the union of divinity and dust (of inanity and lust)"

it's not his words, but his voice. the way "sometimes i feel very sad" aren't brian wilson's words, but they're his voice. it's the voice that gives those words meaning, to me.

Thanks, I relate to all of that, although your experience goes deeper--wish I'd been listening to him at 21!
As for live, yall keep an eye on Cunieform's Bandcamp posts, and maybe elsewhere on BC, as well as YouTube, and the skies.

That Dim Dam Dom clip you posted is the second half of the Russian one I posted. There are clearly edits in the clips, maybe they were so wild even the French didn't think they were worth keeping.

The Daevid Allen clip upthread suggests that would not have been a concern of French TV in the 60s.

i love schleep for the funny mental explorations and the love songs. i've been a little obsessed with 'i'm a believer.' i put on schleep once at a bookstore i worked at in an old west tourist town and the owner hated it.

listening to Comicopera, now surely his last solo album...what a beautiful album to cap his career.

Comicopera was my favorite album of 2007; it remains so.

The Daevid Allen clip upthread suggests that would not have been a concern of French TV in the 60s.

― The British Boy of Film Classification (Tom D.)

i'd honestly like to know more about french pop music television in the late 1960s... when i look at clips there are names of all these different shows, "Dim Dam Dom, "Tous En Scene", and then in the 70s you have "RockEnStock" and "Pop 2" and later "Melody" with Genesis and King Crimson... and then late in the decade the main show is "Chorus". all these shows and I can't keep track of them all. They showed a _lot_ of pop music, it seems like, on a _lot_ of different shows. I was looking up Soft Machine clips the other day and somebody mentioned that "Pop 2" was started by someone who'd run one of the earlier shows, but that show was cancelled for political reasons. And in the Anglosphere you just get to see the clips, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, nobody says anything about the shows themselves, their history, what they were _like_... anyway INA preserves them all and has put a lot of them online. Often paywalled but it doesn't stop it from getting out. And in fact the video stuff is far more widely accessible than the French radio stuff. There are lots of French radio broadcasts that are just unknown and unheard in good quality. And yeah, INA does seem to have kept everything, they seem to have a _very_ good archival policy. You can see not just the broadcast sections but unbroadcast rehearsal outtakes, in many cases. Just like in Germany, the Beat Club show would broadcast maybe four minutes of a Dead '72 show but the whole set is on audio, at least, and often the whole set is on video. The archival policy is very, very different to that in the UK, which barely showed anything and immediately wiped it all.

The other thing that I am aware of personally is June of 1968. Which seems to have been a significant event, and I don't know how that affected the music TV shows, but God, it must have, right?

this one will never not slay me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Huwy0Vq5-Ak

Thanks, I relate to all of that, although your experience goes deeper--wish I'd been listening to him at 21!

― dow

ahhh, well, there was a lot i missed out on by spending my late teens and early 20s focused entirely on "classic rock" and "prog rock", but it's good to know i didn't miss everything. wyatt wasn't really "prog rock" or "classic rock", but he was adjacent enough that i heard him relatively early on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEEX3uRJyo4

I don't think Cuckooland is one of his most loved albums, but I love it. Forest is a powerful Romani holocaust song and has really beautiful lyrics by Alfreda. It makes me well up every time.

The other thing that I am aware of personally is June of 1968. Which seems to have been a significant event, and I don't know how that affected the music TV shows, but God, it must have, right?

You mean May? Yes, the French are good at archiving stuff (cf. the BBC).

Yes, Paris in May, Moon in June

l

I don't think Cuckooland is one of his most loved albums, but I love it. Forest is a powerful Romani holocaust song and has really beautiful lyrics by Alfreda. It makes me well up every time.

Thanks, I relate to all of that, although your experience goes deeper--wish I'd been listening to him at 21!
― dow

It doesn't seem like this has been posted before, but I loved it. One hour doc from 1998, Italian made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z5zy6MaFtI

missed this. heartbreaking

Friend of mine managed to end up backstage at a Patti Smith concert (in the Southbank probably?) Verlaine might have been there and Gillespie almost certainly was and various other luminaries. He said everyone there were complete arseholes and then he noticed a guy sitting (he thought) in a corner, pint of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, covered in ash. He went over to talk to him and it was Robert Wyatt and he was like, "What do you make of all this?" and he was basically the only genuine person in the room.

^exactly as you would expect

Robert Wyatt is the best <3
Wish him all the love

this sux :(

Patti Smith, Verlaine weren't genuine enough, or weren't in the room? Oh well.
Just came across this pitch to Whiney G., for long-gone Paper Thin Walls, which was text x streaming, quite the thing in '07:

re: mixtape possibilities for year-end special issue coverage
Wed, 31 Oct 2007

Ends up being surprisingly hard to pick the order of preference. But
in terms of the vibe, the degree to which I think I know how to
describe it adequately(at least as I begin writing this), the musical
excellence on first listen (the chances of it grabbing the jaded
webears right off, or at least during first listen, cos I doubt most
things get more than one chance at most, in terms of attention to the
whole playing time), I guess first choice is Robert Wyatt's "Cancion
de Julieta." It's built on, travels on an upright bass riff, which
carefully adjusts itself, then tilts forward, like a rocking horse
that almost gets stuck on a surreal extention of a bent (fifth?) some
blues note or I should say blooooues note, groaning a little,
deliberately distended, before the last note, before the rocking horse
pilgrim tilts back into place. And Wyatt sings the same note, same
phrase, much higher like a little old man with a hole in his head and
the air pushing out and in, which is true of course, like a little old
man in a poem or a play, under the radar o trying to be that way, in
his mask (from Comicopera, and Wyatt explains he means it in the very
old school sense, the other side of tragedy, but useful, a working
piece of uniform), his parody, with the well-timed well-pulled tear in
his blues, giving just enough pause to the listener (and even a
sympathetic listener can stop listening if the music seems too
familiar, like this track never does; I keep listening to hear what
happens next, even though I "basically" or schematically know, but
it's the feeling of the listening experience that matters here, like
it always should). Also, it's not just a mask etc in the defensive
sense, or defensive in the wait for 'em to come at you sense; the
little old rocking horse rider isn't just finding away to keep his
place, he's somehow pushing forward, each repetition of the basic riff
brings some other sounds too, which suggest he's breaking into
something, pushing forward, into wreckage, the hull of a galleon maybe
(kind of an underwater moonlit quality). The bass player is also using
his bow, and overdubbing violins, scrabbling at the push, in the
push.(Wyatt also plays some kind of keyboard, percussion, pocket
trumpet, all in the arc and pull and push of the sway of the note).
"Un mar de sue-eh-eh, no. Un mar de tierra blanca," so not just
aquatic and doesn't just sound aquatic, but like he's entering the
water, rocking back and forth and forward. Sleepwalker? They can do a
lot. Not exactly sure all I'd say about this, but something where
listeners might be led toward making their own connections, if they
want, to any possible deeper waters. It's just the damndest track, is
all, first listen every listen. When you ask for these, you'll mention
the need for the artist to answer a few questions, right? I'm little
insecure about Wyatt doing this, but judging by the amount and variety
and quality of interviews, documentary material etc online, he's
fairly into doing media, or anyway he does it.

Even though it's not that far from some of my ravings that he did publish.

what a selfish and clueless reason to bump this thread, words fail me

Trying to describe one the most amazing tracks I've ever heard? Meant as a tribute to RW, not myself. should have let the music do the talking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUBFqj6h6zw

well i think what you wrote is sweet dow.

fair enough, I'm just cranky, ignore me

no prob, thanks yall. That's all I got in the stash about Wyatt, and any new takes will be shorter, at least.

https://thebluemoment.com/2024/07/01/on-visiting-a-friend/

:)

Do love him mid 70s Rock Bottom, Drury Lane and with Henry Cow.
& the stage before where he was with Matching Mole and the stage before that with Soft Machine.

May like him a bit later too. Think I may have picked up a few more titles in FOPP a few years back.

But Matching Mole are so great.

The biography from about 10 years ago was quite good.Different Every Time

harrumphing a bit that williams thinks the band is called "the soft machine"

first alb is the soft machine by the band "soft machine" IMO; second is the soft machine: volume two, also by soft machine

any printed artefact to the contrary is a typo caused by drugs and the hippie slackness endemic to the times qed

The biography from about 10 years ago was quite good.Different Every Time

'k, dow expressed interest in reading this piece i wrote in december 2022... link should be active for about one month. :)

https://pastebin.com/eJnVVVPE

Thanks! several of his and your comments are startling glimpses of the truth-go-round, new 'uns for me.
Listening to all those unearthed, bandcamped live Softs sets upthread, plus considering the way their studio albums were going, with all those industrious instrumental studies, I was glad he left (however it happened), and regained breathing room to sing, with Matching Mole and others. Even though his thoughts went floating back and around, like his sound.

happy 80th anniversary to Robert Wyatt! all the love.

much love!

Indeedio!