Disc of the day
Heaven 17 - Penthouse And Pavement
From Sheffield, synth pop and funk to stick it to Thatcher. Currently being played live!
Features Disc of the day
Robert Wyatt
Rock Bottom
(Virgin, 1974; reissued on Hannibal/Rykodisc)
The former Soft Machine drummer’s finest work – immediately post-wheelchair-confinement – from 1974.
In 1972, Robert Wyatt was living in Venice while friends of his made the film Don’t Look Now. He wrote some songs, completed them after a spine-severing four-storey fall wiped out 1973 – and released them as Rock Bottom on the day he married Alfreda Benge (still his wife, the heavens be praised). These are quiet, precarious songs, made brittle by Wyatt’s strange, clogged falsetto and touched by experimental jazz, Spanish and Near Eastern influences. A piano feels its way, a cranky viola and hot-tempered trumpet interject, enhancing an ambience that is half-lovestruck and half-terrified (and partly narrated by hermetic Scots poet Ivor Cutler). Rock Bottom scores over Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (the more self-consciously surrealistic and conventionally jazz-structured follow-up) in the way Wyatt seems to be inventing the whole idea of music as he goes along. Forced by his paraplegia to quit the drums and turn his broken back on rock’n’roll, that’s almost exactly what he was doing.
Danny Eccleston
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 07/05/2008
Further Listening
Robert Wyatt – Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (Virgin, 1975)
Kevin Ayers – Whatevershebringswesing (Harvest, 1972)
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One of the most beautiful all-time albums. Timeless and wonderful.
Posted by carneham at 8:28 PM GMT 11/05/2008 Report Abuse
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