Mojo - The Music Magazine

The godfather of righteous jazz-pop lullaby takes MOJO’s Danny Eccleston through his recently reissued back catalogue.

ALL WISDOM IS HARD-WON, and Robert Wyatt’s has been won harder than most. A ’60s teenage jazzprog tearaway with The Soft Machine, his drumming career ended in 1973 when a fall from a third storey window placed him in a wheelchair. Turning to singing and songwriting, he discovered a unique, deliciously wounded vocal style and a wistful, misty way of writing that has produced solo records of unparalleled wondrousness, records that make Thom Yorke, Damon Albarn and Paul Weller reel with awe. But even if you’re deaf to the charms of his music, a Wyatt interview is worth dallying over if only for its pearls of self-deprecating wit (“I reached immaturity early”) and barrage of mots justes (wait for the part where he compares being a musician to being the pope, “or a rapist”). This one is no different.

Today, he’s assented to take MOJO for a quick skip through his back catalogue (re-released last month on Domino). With plenty of Wyatt input, the albums and EPs have been remastered for (among other things) lovely vinyl. But what can he bear to listen to again, what was his Top Of The Pops moment like, and what really happened between him and Virgin in 1975? The truth is in here.

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Listening to all your old records, how did that make you feel?
It’s like Ronnie Scott used to say: “You’ve made a happy man feel very old” (laughs). It’s sort of nice, like a souvenir or finding old diaries. I’ve had a crap year with things that have gone wrong. There was some stuff with Monica Vasconcelos and a bit of harmony for Billy Bragg, but on the whole, in terms of my own creativity, it’s been a lean period. The reissues give the illusion that I still do stuff. So the timing is perfect really (laughs): something happening that’s already happened…

Some of the records must feel pretty alien to the Robert Wyatt of 2008?
Mostly I recognise the guy. I reached immaturity early and I’ve kind of been there ever since. I do get that ‘alien’ thing when I listen to the ’60s records, though: who is that little cleverdick teenager? Why doesn’t someone give him a smack ’round the chops? It’s a little disconcerting when you’re thinking that about yourself. But it’s all recognisably me, just something I did last Tuesday rather than last Thursday.

Something like Rock Bottom, I imagine the rawness of it might be difficult to go back to…
On the contrary, I wish I could go back to it. When I think about how automatic and how impulsive it was back then… it was done with a kind of recklessness, which is why it probably still has a “fresh paint” appeal to people. I was more or less making it up on the spot. There’s a guitar solo on the second track, A Last Straw, a slide guitar which sounds scandalously random – I should do that kind of thing more often. Everything was what was to hand – including the words. It just seemed simpler then.

If the Robert Wyatt recording career were a novel and these were all chapters… what’s the plot arc?
Hmmmm. Good question. You kind of see me drifting from a very social way of working to more and more solitude physically in the studio and also in terms of withdrawal from the Anglo-American mainstream and how it functions. And then getting lonely and finding people to do stuff with and getting all social at the end.

One of the obvious things is that you’re relatively prolific to begin with, then that falls away, then it comes back.
Yeah, I agree with that. You get labelled as something – like a musician or pope or rapist or whatever profession you’re in – but it’s not something you’re doing every day, all the time. The rest of the time I’m having a life – trying to get paid or finding a wheelchair that works or trying to have some fun. Then there are the distractions – like spending six months in Spain listening to flamenco, or going to Kurdish political meetings or just losing myself in carnival. I wouldn’t say the records are the main events of my life; they’re more like the accidental off-shoots of my life. It’s not that I’m sitting doing nothing like a monk; it’s just that there’s lots to having a life apart from making records.

Were there records that you weren’t necessarily looking forward to revisiting? Or others that surprised you in a good way?
Bits and pieces of things, yeah. I was surprised by the Theatre Royal Drury Lane recording from ’74, when I still did live gigs. It really lifts off in a way that surprised me in retrospect – largely thanks to those terrific musicians spurring each other on: Laurie Allan on drums, Hugh Hopper, Dave Stewart – not *that Dave Stewart – Mike Oldfield on guitar… just a lovely bunch of coconuts. I’d heard bits and pieces of bootlegs of that concert which were utterly dire, recorded from the middle of the hall and just sort of scrappy and meandering. But with a bit of tidying up and a brilliant engineer in Jamie Johnson I think we made it quite presentable and kept the atmosphere. That was quite a nice surprise.

It’s still an odd collection of individuals and an out-there sound. Was that show improvised or did it take weeks of rehearsals?
They worked really hard. I think Dave Stewart wrote charts and they rehearsed long hours. And I think there’s no substitute for that. But when I’m looking for musicians I don’t look for who plays the best technically; I’m looking for unmistakable characters and individuals. Old records I like, like Charles Mingus’s and Duke Ellington’s, I like them because every player is an individual that I can identify.

Back to the Wyatt novel: was leaving Virgin (in 1975) a turning point?
What’s the opposite of a meeting of minds? That’s what it was. In the end they wanted me to work in a way that I found I couldn’t. Don’t forget, I was only a drummer – I hadn’t planned to be doing this songwriting stuff as a main thing. I wasn’t sure I could give them any guarantees, so I tried to be honourable, not take a weekly wage or anything: “Just forget me!” After Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard I went off and did some other stuff, just not under my own name… I sang on a record by the trumpeter Michael Mantler called The Hapless Child [ECM, 1975 – based on tales by American gothic illustrator Edward Gorey] with a fantastic rhythm section: Carla Bley, Jack DeJohnette, Steve Swallow, Terje Rypdal on guitar. So I was doing other things but at Virgin I was kind of stuck.

Virgin had a system which later they would call Thatcherism, where the more you work with somebody the more it cost you. The deal was you had to use their studio, and it cost you a lot, and then they published your material, from which they took a big percentage and then you had to guarantee to make another record, and when you did that the costs would be taken off any profit you’d made from the previous one. So the more you did the more debt you seemed to accrue to Virgin. It worked well for those whose sales had one or two more noughts than me. Mike Oldfield did well. But in my case, maybe because I wasn’t doing gigs, it wasn’t adding up to a living.

I was sort of rescued by Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis – I was introduced by Vivian Goldman, a very nice journalist. He has a much more cottage industry way of working. But Virgin were very upset and said Robert cannot make LPs for anybody else, so Jeff suggested that we just make singles. They didn’t have to be pop songs – just little records we could put out. And so that’s what we did with Geoff. In retrospect, the ’70s were all about me waiting for record companies like Rough Trade to come into being. I like [Virgin’s] Richard Branson, we got on fine; it was just their way of working wasn’t suitable. But they were hurt when I left and I don’t know why because I didn’t make them money. I think it was because they couldn’t call the shots.

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For Part 2 of our Robert Wyatt interview, click here…