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Robert Wyatt’s Back Pages - Mojo (web) - 17/12/2008
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The godfather of righteous
jazz-pop lullaby takes MOJO’s Danny Eccleston through his recently reissued back catalogue.
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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.
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.
The collected Eps are an amazing listen. Can you tell us about the spoken word piece, Pigs (In There)?
How it came about?
It’s more or less a totally improvised thing. My sister-in-law at the time lived in the country and had got used to the way it operated; I was a townie, I didn’t look at fields as they didn’t have any girls in them. I was shocked to find it was like a open air factory.
A lot of your music comes from a political place. Can you see political pop returning as the recession bites?
I don’t know. I don’t think there’s a particular onus on musicians to be political. You have to be able to do something constructive – like benefits for the miners’ strike, which were primarily a way of raising money. Artists don’t create political climates on their own – they respond to people – and things simply aren’t as bad as they were. People are more aware of cruelty to animals, and Fair Trade – remember how deeply radical that used to seem – and also colour prejudice has pretty much disappeared from the mainstream. Those battles have been won. Although racism isn’t dead, racists don’t rule the world anymore. So, despite the fact they still want the left destroyed, the important things that some of us were trying to do have been successful.
Back to our Wyatt novel – another interesting chapter is “The Hit Singles” (I’m A Believer, 1974; Shipbuilding, 1983). What was that like… being a pop singer?
Well, most of what I do is pop music. I mean, I’m not Shostakovich or indeed Charles Mingus, so I can’t do that stuff. If you cut a song down to two minutes-odd, not too many long solos, have a recognisable kind of beat, you’ve got a sort of pop song. What I don’t like is the competitive aspect of the pop world, the charts and that, getting to Number 1 or Number 4, it doesn’t interest me, I’m too posh [laughs]. I do like making little records, three or four minutes long. But I never went out of my way to do it. I’m A Believer was the suggestion of Simon Draper at Virgin and Shipbuilding happened because I received the cassette in the post from Clive Langer and Elvis Costello, who wrote asking if I’d do it and I said, Yeah! In a way, I’d have liked to have done more proper pop records, but I don’t seem to have gone that way. I think it’s just my dislike of competition; it’s not really ideological, I just find it silly. I don’t go around saying that it’s Mingus at Number 10 and Miles Davis at Number 9...
Dondestan (1991) is another landmark album. It’s the point you start co-writing with your wife, Alfie [Alfreda Benge].
Alfie would always be writing poetic stuff down, and I would just incorporate these things into a record. Of course, she didn’t offer them, I just nicked them. It was a clause in the marriage contract: “To have and to hold, and to allow full use of any songs I may write…” [laughs] Sometimes she’d disapprove, like when I wrote [Dondestan track] Shrinkrap or stuff about not being able to get to sleep. She thought that was trivial and not worth Mostly though, she was happy, except on Catholic Architecture, which she said I had made sound too religious and angelic – not good for a deeply anti-religious song!
Why did you remake it [as Dondestan Revisited] in 1998?
Well, the original stuff was done in a studio around here [The Chapel Studios, Lincolnshire] with a severely limited budget, due to the fact that I don’t sell like a rock star or rock musician at all. I spent most of the time actually recording, rather than the mixing and the editing, which is in fact the most enjoyable element of making a record – you know, putting everything together and getting the best sound out of everything. So years later that’s exactly what I did; I just wanted to spend a bit of extra time in the studio with the original recordings, with a bit of editing and nip and tuck, mainly because it had been nagging at me at the back of my head that it was still a sketch of a record that I hadn’t quite made.
You recently collaborated with [French electronica artist] Bertrand Burgalat, on a single called This Summer Night. How did that come about?
He’d already asked Alfie to write some lyrics on a previous record; in fact there’s a brilliant video of one of her songs that she did with him called Spring Isn’t Fair. More recently, he asked again and sent her some demos, which she couldn’t work out the melody to, as they were sort of atmospheric backing tracks, so she asked if he minded if I nailed down a tune on them, to help with lyric writing. So I ended up writing a tune and sang it with her lyrics on the demo, which we sent to him, and when he heard it he asked if I would mind actually singing it on the record. I agreed, but on the proviso that he did a bit of singing on it as well! Johnny Bradshaw at Domino heard it and thought we should bang it out as a single when we did all the re-releases as a bonus track; then Hot Chip offered to do a re-mix of it, so it’s become an unlikely, unsolicited, spontaneous moment. What I really liked was that Alfie warned Bertrand that she didn’t do love songs… looking at me bitterly from the corner of her eye, [laughs] but then she writes this song about a one-night-stand on a beach with a gay ’70s disco feel, and there I was singing it! Life’s full of little surprises and that’s what makes it fun.
So do you think there might be more from Disco Bob in the future?
Well, Alfie does say that she wishes that I would do more tunes that you can dance to. So if Alfie has anything to do with it, I suppose that yes is the answer to your question!
So if the reissue campaign has been your project for 2008, what is there for 09? Another Wyatt album?
Well, I don’t like to predict things, nor can I, but I really like doing stuff with [Israeli sax player] Gilad Atzmon, who has recently made a great strings record with Ros Stephen – the violin player from Tango Siempre – which starts off like Charlie Parker with strings and then goes off all over the place. We’ve been in touch a lot and get on well, so I hope to follow the relationship up, but I’ve got no idea how it would end up.
Tango. Gilad Atzmon. Strings. You. Sounds like a good place to be…
(Laughs) Well, it does give me a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside, but I’ve never been one to let people know ahead of time what’s going on in my head, because I’m sort of superstitious. My lips are sealed!
Interview by Danny Eccleston
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