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 Robert Wyatt : Whistling in the dark
- New Sounds New Styles - June 1982
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Robert Wyatt, 36-year-old singer, composer, musician, communist, aficionado of Robbie Vincent's Radio London Soul Show and veteran of seemingly numberiess sessions, groups and albums, smiles sadly.
"I can't handle managers, agents, roadies... If I was a drummer I'd probably have all that. Rock hinges on business, lawyers, art departments, agents arguing with Melody Maker about whether you get the right or left-hand side of the page for the advert which must coincide with the tour which has to end in London as opposed to Scunthorpe because..."
He sighs "It's all very distant and far away from me now."
We're talking over the kitchen table of the cluttered Twickenham flat (" a bubble outside time and space") that he's been more or less confined to since the accident in the early '70s robbing him of the use of his legs.
Before that unhappy incident - the reckless drunken decision to exit a party via a drainpipe four storeys up - Wyatt was drummer with the original Soft Machine, did a bit of work with jazz musicians, and formed his own group Matching Mole.
But the accident put a stop to his drumming, and since then he's been largely freelance, making only a couple of solo albums (including his best : 'Rock Bottom') apart from occasionally contributing percussion, piano and voice to a variety of different people's musics. He's worked with Eno, Phil Manzanera, Carla Bley and Scritti Politti to name the better-known.
Some two years ago Geoff Travis of Rough Trade approached him suggesting he break a five-year solo silence and record some songs. Songs. That was all Wyatt could think of : specific songs, none of them his, all shortish, all unrelated but interesting in themselves, all suitable, it seemed, for singles.
Over a period of a few months in late '79 and early '80, Wyatt took this eclectic selection into the studio, and altered them, as he says, "not to revitalize them, but just so I could feel comfortable with them". Eight of the ten or so tracks that were recorded were released as a series of four singles over the following 18 months. Then recently, they were compiled on an album 'Nothing Can Stop Us'.
The recordings were an exercise in reclamation: "more of a priority for me than innovation, these days." Wyatt plucked songs out of context because they were good songs, because they were good political songs, because he wanted to draw attention to them. 'Nothing Can Stop Us' contains a much more diverse choice than, say, that other current cover version album,
BEFs 'Music of Quality and Distinction'.
There's 'Arauco' by Chilean songwriter Violetta Parra, Chic's inexplicably optimistic 'At Last I Am Free', a patriotic American '40s acapella number 'Stalin Wasn't Stallin", Ivor Cutler's nasty little tale of domestic cruelty 'Grass', 'Strange Fruit' about the black lynchings tn the deep American south of the '30s. Each has its own context and history; placed together they form a kind of jig-saw, incomplete but indicating connections, suggesting rather than affirming, asking questions rather than providing answers.
"I suppose," Wyatt muses, "there's an element of double-bluff in it. Subtlety can become obvious. So I'm playing games with obvious statements. Playing with the obvious because in a way it's the least obvious thing to do."
Like doing a version of 'The Red Flag' for instance.
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"It's a very sad song. It's not a song about dreams fulfilled, it's a song about whistling in the dark to keep your spirits up. It is now, anyway."
Whistling in the dark to keep your spirits up. That phrase stuck in my head for a few days after the interview. Sitting in front of the typewriter not being able to write the bloody thing. Listening to politicians trying to whip us up into jingoistic fury over a few islands the Argentinians have had a claim on since the British expelled their governor back in 1833. Watching Gil Scott-Heron play a set so compassionate and optimistic that I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Whistling in the dark to keep your spirits up. At the moment that's all an oppositional culture can be. Perhaps it's all it should be.
Confined to his wheelchair, Robert Wyatt perhaps has to do a little more whistling than most of us. A typical day is focused around eating and the radio. He used to spend hours listening to distant stations on the short wave band but now listens mainly to programmes like Black London and Robbie Vincent's Soul Show. He has a consuming passion for black American music, all those "endless, uninterviewed studio groups working out great riffs. "
"It sounds like a stupid joke, but I really like dance music. I've never danced, in fact It's like the title of that Ornette Coleman album, 'Dancing in My Head'.'"
And then he cites an anecdote about a journalist being surprised that Coleman - a jazz improviser - should like disco music. "Why?" asked the incredulous hack. Coleman replied: "It's our revenge."
Wyatt doesn't drink, doesn't eat meat, can't get out much and doesn't like "the blockbusters at the local cinema" anyway.
"I spend a fantastic amount of time - I don't know how I do it really - just sitting there trying to work it all out."
He reads. Black revolutionary and existentialist Franz Fanon is his favourite writer, the Morning Star his paper. He goes out to see foreign films sometimes. "All these Indian and African film-makers whose names I can't remember."
"The rest of the time, I'm just sort of quietly panicking. Like everyone else I suppose."
At one point I asked which of his own albums was Wvatt's favourite.
"That's difficult. At the moment... I'll have to say 'The Animals Film' because it's still full of fresh challenges. But that probably won't be true in six months time."
Earlier Wyatt had commented: "I suppose I'm the exact opposite of Edith Piaf. I regret everything!"
'The Animals Film' is a soundtrack - just released by Rough Trade - for Victor Schonfeld's movie systematically detailing everything from minor cruelty to domestic pets through to the worst excesses of the meat industry. Having been shown an unedited version, Wyatt then spent all last summer composing the music to fit them. Taken out of context, the music is more "ambient" than immediate, but it's an eerily effective ambience, playing with the gentle, haunted mood that's so characteristic of Wyatt's music.
And next?
"I don't know. I only really tend to respond to being nudged into things."
In the mid-70s Wyatt did a lot of work with Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera on great, forgotten albums like Eno's 'Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy', Manzanera's 'Diamond Head' and Wyatt's 'Ruth is Stranger than Richard'. Now, he's lost touch with that nexus of musicians, is isolated from the circles they move in.
He and Eno, apparently, used to do more talking than working. Both having passable falsetto voices, they joked about hiring themselves out as a "girlie chorus". They also used to exchange and formulate theories, some of which, he tells me in a piece of "sheer boastfulness", he's since seen turn up on interviews with David Bowie. (And musically in Eno's work with Talking Heads.)
Just as I'm leaving, clutching an album he's given me and a book he's lent me, Robert Wyatt comes out with this:
"I think I'd really like to be one of those ageing jazz musicians playing out the end of their careers, just doing the occasional gig at somewhere like the Pizza Express."
And then:
"I have to be allowed a certain indulgent escapism, it's necessary to my survival."
Necessary to everybody's, surely?
"Yeah, I suppose I'm in a caricature of the situation everyone's in."
And one more fragment of the percussionist's discourse. It says on the back of 'Nothing Can Stop Us':
"You may notice some technical inadequacies in some of my performance - a hesitant beat here, a dodgy note there - these are of course entirely deliberate and reproduced as examples of my almost painful sincerity."
David Rimmer
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