A tribute to Robert Wyatt, written and recorded for remote participation in a 2025 birthday celebration for the Great Man, organized by Sukhdev Sandhu at NYU
Another great Englishman Mark E. Smith once said “I hated The Soft Machine and that kind of thing. Rock was ruined when the students took it over”.
Having been a student once, and middle class through and through, it falls to me to mount a defence of the bourgeois contribution to rock
Let’s start with Canterbury, in the south of England – where Soft Machine formed and where other groups directly related to them or influenced by them also hailed from, resulting in what was known as the Canterbury Scene or the Canterbury Sound - an incestuous cluster of post-psychedelic jazz rock outfits who were sometimes endearingly whimsical and sometimes forbiddingly abstruse and often both at the same time
With its superfluity of universities and colleges, Canterbury has the highest ratio of students to native residents of any town in the UK. Think of all the academia-related jobs and ancillary work that institutions like that support (book shops, theatres, cafes, etc) and how that changes the make-up and vibe of a place.
Now in talking of the middle class contribution to rock, I’m not really talking about bank managers or entrepreneurs, but a particular kind of non-business oriented bourgeoisie - the professions, public servants, non profits. People like Robert Wyatt's tolerant, encouraging mother, Honor Wyatt, a journalist and radio presenter - a free thinker sort- who made her home an open house for Wyatt and his friends. Later on, when she moved to South London, her small house was home to the entire Soft Machine and their girlfriends. “I don’t how we all fitted in there,” Wyatt told me. “But we did and we made our racket and my mum was fine about it.”
What’s striking about Soft Machine and the other Canterbury groups like Caravan and Hatfield and the North is their relationship to American black music. Unlike other British groups of the Sixties such as the Stones or Yardbirds, they’re not trying to swagger like Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf. Although Soft Machine were obsessed with jazz, they don’t attempt to be supercool like Miles Davis.
Almost alone in the British sixties scene, they don’t even sing in a fake American accent
Wyatt was one of the very first British singers of the rock era to sound English.
The other main ones are Kevin Ayers, also in Soft Machine, and Syd Barrett, from Pink Floyd, the band that Soft Machine played alongside at psychedelic clubs like UFO, and a band also spawned from another genteel university town, Cambridge.
Wyatt has described his style as “it sounded like me talking, only with notes.”
So one thing I find endearing about the Canterbury groups is that they not pretending to be anything other than what they are: nice middle-class South of England boys, educated and well-brought-up. They fit a new archetype of masculinity that I call "soft male" – this is the first generation of British boys to be molded by permissive child-rearing practices (picking up the baby when it's crying rather letting the infant cry out). The first generation to grow up without the stiff upper lip implanted at birth – nor did they experience being toughened up by national service in the Army, that ended around 1961.
Their backgrounds might be genteel but they themselves tend to sound socially indeterminate - a syndrome I call middleclasslessness – if you listen to Robert Wyatt speak, it’s mumbly and slightly faltering, softened by self-deprecation. In other words, it’s evacuated of the confidence and entitlement that rings out clearly in the voices of the truly posh.
This late Sixties, early Seventies breed of English musician are not without faults, a self-indulgence, a reluctance to grow up – there might be the odd bit of sexism in the mix.
But these young men are finding ways to play the music they love (jazz, rhythm and blues, rock) but also be themselves. Hence the urge to complicate things with time signatures shifts and distorted textures ... but also the puerile humor, the Anglo-surrealist whimsy, elements that parallel the Goons and Monty Python. An odd combo of sophistication and regression.
Take a song by Hatfield and the North in which Robert Wyatt does guest vocals. It’s called "Big Jobs No. 2 (By Poo and The Wee Wees)". You hear the singing and you think, ah there’s Wyatt – but actually it’s Hatfield's Richard Sinclair singing, but he sounds like a dead ringer for Robert – I call it Wyatt-ese, and it is the natural singing and speaking tone of many of these groups. A bit further into "Big Jobs" Wyatt does appear - but doing a little bit of guest scat. No pun intended. He’s scat singing, sublimely.
This is one of Wyatt’s great inventions – an instrumentalization of the voice. In Matching Mole, the group he formed after his acrimonious expulsion from Soft Machine, he does this the songs “Instant Kitty” and “Instant Pussy” – the titles are whimsical, perhaps even lewd, but the abstract vocalese is astonishing, comparable to things that singers like Tim Buckley was doing on Starsailor. Wyatt told me that he was inspired by Roland Kirk’s playing.
On his solo tune “Muddy Mouse (c)/Muddy Mouth” Wyatt vocally mimics the sound of a muted trumpet to exquisite effect.
On the later song “Born Again Cretin” – a hilarious satire of right-wing thinking – the main Wyatt vocal is backed by a sort of bullfrog barbershop quartet of multi-tracked Wyatts wordlessly wheezing and gasping in rhythmic accompaniment. Like so much Wyatt music, it is simultaneously whimsically absurd yet utterly ecstatic.
For his regular singing, when he had a lyric, the model was Dionne Warwick – a very un-rock’n’roll model to have. He has said that he generally found women singers inspiring, they are who wanted to emulate.
Both modes are heard on what might be his great single work, “Sea Song”, the opening track of his 1974 masterpiece Rock Bottom – which starts as an eerie serenade to a mermaid, then spirals off into mystical flights of wordless falsetto
Rock Bottom came out after the break-up of Matching Mole. Wyatt had started to form a new group involving Francis Monkman of Curved Air and various Canterbury-aligned musicians, and Virgin Record wanted to sign the group. But then, during a party at the mansion-block flat of socialite and Virgin recording artist Lady June, Wyatt tumbled out of the window of the bathroom. The accident left him paralyzed below the waist, unable to play drums again or participate in a touring rock band. So instead of signing the planned Canterbury supergroup, Virgin released a solo album by Wyatt: Rock Bottom, a heartbreakingly poignant allegory of Wyatt’s emotional regression and gradual self-rebuilding during his recovery from the accident, couched in a blurry oceanic sound that recalls Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way and Jimi Hendrix’s “1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be).”
Rock Bottom is dealing with some heavy, heavy stuff but it still has the trademark Wyatt whimsy.
Even Wyatt's lovesongs are skewered by irony. In the wonderfully sentimental 'O Caroline', Wyatt warns his sweetheart "if you call this sentimental crap you'll make me mad", while 'Calyx' is full of oddly phrased praise: "close inspection reveals you're in perfect nick".
On the follow up to Rock Bottom, titled Ruth is Stranger Than Richard, 'Soup Song' is sung from the point of view of one of its reluctant ingredients, a slice of bacon.
Another Canterbury Scene hallmark that Wyatt probably invented is the meta-song, a song that addresses its own circumstances of recording or composition, or talks about the lifestyle of the musician.
In a version of Soft Machine’s 'Moon In June', Wyatt extemporises about the joys of doing a radio session for the BBC's Top Gear show.
The opening line of the first verse of Matching Mole’s “Signed Curtain” is
“This is the first verse”
And in fact it’s also the second, third, fourth and fifth line of that first verse.
The next line?
“This is the chorus / Or perhaps it’s a bridge”
It closes with the lines “It only means that I lost faith in this song / 'Cause it won't help me reach you”
“O Caroline” similarly starts not with the lover but with the action in the studio – David on piano, Robert on the drums, “we try to make the music /We'll try to have some fun”. Then it gets romantic :“But I just can't help thinking that if you were / Here with me /I'd get all my thoughts in focus and play /More excitingly”
But after that there was a lull, Wyatt stopped making music for several years. And a strange thing happened – his earlier music had been resolutely apolitical but strangely he did become a believer – a born again Communist, a dedicated reader of the Morning Star newspaper. And when he was coaxed back into the studio to record a series of singles for the label Rough Trade, many of them expressed his newly hardline beliefs and commitment.
He did the song “Trade Union” with Dishari Shilpee Gosth - a Bangladeshi band of musicians from the East End of London; he covered the World War 2 pro-Soviet song “Stalin Wasn’t Stalling”; he brought out a political subtext to the Chic ballad “At Last I Am Free”.
He sang “Strange Fruit” and “Guantanamera” and Violeta Parra’s “Arauco”.
Best of all though was his version of the black humorously anti-authoritarian ditty by his friend Ivor Cutler, “Grass”, plays the role of guru imparting wisdom to an acolyte, the power relation underlined by lines like “while we talk I'll hit your head with a nail to make you understand me / I have something important to say."
Around this time he also recorded a moody instrumental soundtrack to The Animals Film, a documentary about human exploitation and cruelty towards animals, with narration by his friend Julie Christie.
Not long after the Rough Trade singles series ended, Clive Langer and Elvis Costello wrote the song “Shipbuilding”, an oblique protest against the Falkland War, and invited Wyatt to record it. That gave him his second hit single.
Wyatt has said that his attraction to Communism was its internationalism - which is why he found the imperialist nostalgia of Thatcher’s escapade in the South Atlantic deplorable.
He describes himself as a xenophile – someone who resists the British suspicion of Johnny Foreigner.
I’m sure he was aghast at Brexit and is horrified about the nativism and authoritarian nationalism resurgent all across the globe.
He’s the kind of singer that people in the UK call a national treasure – but he’d probably hate that partly because he’d rather be an international treasure, but mainly because he is self-effacing and genuinely humble.
Me and the Great Man (and Alfie) at the Hay Festival 2007, where I did an onstage interview with.
What a lovely man.
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