English as a foreign language - New Musical Express 14th December, 1985

"REALLY, I'D say Costello and Langer were the ones who helped get my name known to the biggest audience. 'Shipbuilding' - that was the one that did it."
     'Shipbuilding' is craftsmanship par excellence, the perfect, seamless grafting of political content and songwriting style. The song's deftly executed overview including the irony of working class labour caught up in the imperialist wheels of industry, is imbued with a sad, knowing stoicism and the tenor of Costello's finest lyric fits Wyatt like a glove. Like 'At Last I Am Free' before it, the song became Robert Wyatt's.
     Over the past few years, Wyatt's musical involvements have ensured a high profile: one third of the vocal frontline of Working Week's inspired 'Vencermos' debut; a meeting with Ben Watt on the latter's 'Summer Into Winter' EP; the 'Trade Union' outing featuring Bengali musicians Dishari; 'The Age Of Self' miners single, also featuring The Grimethorpe Colliery Brass band; and, finally, the celebrated Jerry Dammers-produced SWAPO song, 'The Wind Of Change'.

CULTURAL AMNESIA: the process of selection that allows nations to rewrite their past, highlighting the good, erasing the bad. If Communist countries blatantly rewrite their history to fit a post-revolutionary ethos, the West is, as always, more subtle, more undercover. Chomsky is continually pinpointing this slow, erosive fradulence, as Robert eleborates:
      "The liberal and right-wing tradition here, and in the US, the big We, they have a kind of smug consensus which you can see in their self-image in the history books. This consensus gets its moral strenght, as far as I can see, from the fact that everyone else who tries an alternative seems to mess it up. Yet the argument for Western democracy seems to rest on expedience. I'm looking at what it means to be expedient all the time: it's expedient to boast about one thing and forget about something else.
     "It still happens all the time: take Western governments' involvement in the Pacific, which never gets publicised. That's why I wrote 'East Timor'. Indonesia, with the West's backing, decided to take East Timor and when the people reisted there was genocide on a massive scale. We need the Pacific for a source of constant cheap labour but we don't hear about the people who are still fighting out there. Now people say they are not interested in all these foreign problems, but our taxes are financing this sort of thing - you can't have it both ways. The song also concerns the very fact that nobody has heard about East Timor. Subtle stuff."
     'The Age Of Self' confronts a different, no less pervasive form of amnesia: the constant accusation that the Left is too tied to the past, too fond of its heritage to be a relevant force today: "they say the working class is dead, we're all consumers now".
     "Yeah, well, I'm all for progress on the Left but you don't do it by disowning your past, by saying you're ashamed of the unions and that. Telling the press we're really with-it now, we're not boring old Lefties - always eager to accommodate them. See, one of the things the Right have going is the continuation of their own romantic myth. It's quite a legitimate stance, actually. I think the Left should be like a family where the feeling you have for each other transcends all the pretty differences, and that strengthens all of you. It shouldn't be: let's move forward and discard the industrial workers. I think mutual affection is more in order..."
     Is that why you turned out to the Red Wedge launch?
"Yeah. People seemed surprised, but the musicians asked for a bit of moral support and I came along. It's good for the Labour front benchers to meet people like that, though I didn't really qualify: I'm not a Labour Party supporter and I'm definitely not a youth!"

"WORDS TAKE THE PLACE OF MEANING"

LANGUAGE, ITS open-endedness and malleability, is something that has always tickled Robert's fancy but, where he once used to play on words, he now draws attention to more sinister types of word-play. 'Vandalusia' simply recites a few well-worn phrases; terms that have slipped into the English language as colonial archetypes and, through constant mindless usage, have become separated from their original, usually quite illuminating, meaning.
     One of Robert's choices, "beyond the pale", stems from Norman times when the English "owned" one part of Ireland around Dublin which they christened The Pale, originally meaning 'Boundary'. Now "beyond the pale" has established itself as a phrase meaning "uncivilised" and "outside the limits of decency". Interesting?
     "My preoccupation is to try and reclaim meanings from used words and see how they function and it's very interesting indeed. Words resonate and grow and get hi-jacked by one side or the other, but now there's a distinctly unbalanced analysis of language. Everyone is so careful not to use left-wing swear words like 'fascist' carelessly, but the establishment use all kinds of words so carelessly. 'Extremist' and 'terrorist' are two that spring to mind. In the White House or the State Department a terrorist is anyone who believes in having good schools and hospitals and decides to do something about it. The media have to deneutralise words, steal their meaning as part of a process of self-justification for our method of democracy."

ALFIE - OR Alfreda Benge - has been the single most significant force in Robert Wyatt's life: his wife, his inspiration, his record-cover illustrator and the main catalyst for his politicisation. In many ways, the album's semantic preoccupations concern her also.
     "The phrase 'old rottenhat' is a West London one which she picked up in her childhood. Now, she spoke German up until she was seven, so she actually remembers hearing English as a foreign language and German wasn't a very fashionable language round here in the late '40s (laughs).
     "Alfie really made me look at the borders and dotted lines with which we surround ourselves and which take on some great spiritual meaning. I learnt a lot from her and her family about politics and music."
     The name Michael Bettany is one now synonomous with betrayal but, amidst the stoked-up outrage that the media contrived, the individual's true plight, as ever, became buried: a self-made civil servant who worked his way up through the corridors of power only to reach the rarified suffocation of Whitehall.
     "I think his real crime wasn't trying to give secrets to the enemy but the fact that he challenged the official ideology of Englishness and realigned his loyalties. Now he's classed as a traitor: this vague notion of Englishness suddenly becomes very specific when it comes to crossing the line. But the actual pathos of his situation... he was looking for a way of breaking this dead end - having worked his way up to the top - and when he went to the enemy, they were actually double agents.
     "He'd gone as far as he could go to reach a world outside his own and all he reached was another layer of suffocation, a more sophisticated structure of confinement. A perfect subject for a short story.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BLUES

OLD ROTTENHAT gathers all the strands of thought that Robert Wyatt tries to make sense of and, amidst all the theory and analysis, a music emerges that is the very antithesis of constrictive formalism. A loose, bendy, floating music that playfully raises all the right questions and asks you to look beyond the boundaries. He seems to have absorbed so much music of the early 20th century, taking in the European avant-garde jazz movement along the way, slipping on his international hat and finally allowing whatever takes his fancy to enter his consciousness. We talk about English lovers-rock reggae, soul, Soviet Jazz and the "the sheer courage of Ornette Coleman", who "fought against everything including the place that other musicians had set aside for what they understood as avant-garde. Ornette broke all the rules good and proper and he came back to a good danceable beat!"
     When asked for current preferences, Wyatt talks enthusaistically about Artery, a group attached to The Morning Star, about Harry Gold And His Pieces Of Eight - a veteran of the "pre-war trad-swing style" - about Coleridge Good, one of the last of the "Jamaican Jazz musicians who came over here just before all the dance music arrived".
     His current favourite tune is Canadian folk singer Bruce Cockburn's excellent 'If I Had A Rocket Launcher', which Wyatt played, much to the consternation of the producer ("a little politics goes a long way, don't you think?), on Gary Crowley's Capital radio spot.
     Yes, he's heard about Tears For Fears being big fans and rushed out and bought a copy of the single which included a cover of 'Sea Song' from 'Rock Bottom' on the B-side. "Oh, I was so impressed, it's a great feeling hearing one of your songs done well." The mind cannot help but boggle.
     And this music of yours, Mr. Wyatt, how would you describe it? I've heard it called folk?
     "Oh, I think that would be claiming too much for it. I honestly don't know what you'd call it, but it sure ain't rock'n'roll. I try to make completely normal records but they must come out funny... I haven't got that much control especially over this voice but, let's see... I actually do get very sad about the political climate - not in an abstract way but how it affects people... I am capable of much more energetic music, but I do tend to get brought down and it gets turned into a kind of English blues. Yeah! That's what I'd call it - English blues.
     That'll do fine.