Jonathan Romney New music
Four months ago, Robert Wyatt became a grandfather at the age of 52, and it’s fair to say that the role suits him down to the ground. He has the right beard for the part, and he makes the kind of music you’d rather hope a grandfather would make – melancholic, quizzical and fired by a mischief that those greybeards-in-denial, the Rolling Stones, could only dream of.
Wyatt started out in the 1960s, drumming and singing with English psychedelia’s radical highbrows, Soft Machine, followed by his own group Matching Mole. Then, in 1973, he fell from a fourth-floor window and broke his back, and has been paraplegic ever since. He claims that was the making of him.
Since then, Wyatt has forged a unique, diverse solo career. It began with a bizarre moment as a chart artist, reworking the Monkees’ I’m a Believer, and took in a spell in the 1980s as purveyor of radical cover versions. Then there were extraordinary LPs such as 1974’s dense, harrowing Rock Bottom.
It’s been seven years since Dondestan, his last full-length record. But his new CD, Shleep, is rich, affecting and well worth the wait.
Operating, geographically and temperamentally, far off the music-business superhighway, Wyatt works at his own pace. ”When there’s fuss and bother, I stop functioning.”
The last few years have brought more than the usual amount of fuss. He recently fell out of his wheelchair, breaking both legs and losing a year’s working time.
Wyatt’s most consistent collaborator has been his wife Alfreda Benga, who is also his manager, sleeve artist and occasional lyric writer. Shleep features several of her poems.
Although he’s not one for the work ethic, Wyatt says that living with Alfie stirs him to action. ”If it weren’t for her, I’d probably concentrate on getting pissed and dissolute. My heroes are people like Artaud, who absolutely refuse to participate in any way in anything they’re meant to do.”
In an industry where rhetoric rules, there’s something remarkable about an artist who can produce work so traumatically raw and yet maintain a stance of amused distraction.
”I don’t have a particular thing about self-expression,” Wyatt says. ”it’s just that I sometimes hear things in my head that nobody else is going to play if I don’t. If it weren’t for that, I’d be quite happy listening to everyone else.”