WYATT CITY BLUES

ROBERT WYATT talks to Jonathan Wingate about hard times, Soft Machine and life in the leftfield

The Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto once said that Robert Wyatt had “the saddest voice in the world”. Yet although he has spent most of his career making records that have brought him little commercial success, Wyatt is one of our most fascinating and influential avant-garde artists, a unique innovator who has continued to blur the musical boundaries throughout a career that stretches back over 40 years.

Robert Wyatt emerged as part of the ‘Canterbury Scene’ and started his career as the drummer and sometime singer with progressive jazzers Soft Machine, who took their name from the William Burroughs novel of the same name. They released their debut album in 1968 and spent most of the year touring with the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Although he had released his first solo set in 1970, a year before the band’s instrumental Fourth album, Wyatt had no intention of leaving the group. Having dominated the first two Soft Machine LPs, he found himself being left on the sidelines by the time it came to making their next two. After five years, Wyatt was fired from the band for reasons he still doesn’t understand.

He wasted no time and formed the short-lived outfit Matching Mole, who made two albums before disbanding. While writing what was to become his classic Rock Bottom LP, Robert Wyatt’s life took a traumatic …

by Jonathan Wingate
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