Who is ROBERT and WYATT matters - Pulse! N° 170 - May 1998


WHO IS ROBERT AND WYATT MATTERS

AVANT-POP'S ELDER STATESMAN ON HEGEMONY, HENDRIX AND HEAPS OF SHEEP

BY BILL FORMAN
PHOTOGRAPH BY GUIDO HARARI


Given free will, Robert Wyatt would prefer to live his life as part of a dance rather than as if there were some great weight on his shoulders. "Most people think they ought to stop being trivial and get serious, but I'm trying to get light from heavy," says Wyatt in the wake of Shleep (Thirsty Bar), the Soft Machine founder's most congenial and collaborative album in many years, featuring contributions from Brian Eno, Paul Weller and other friends, old and new. "When you let it, life can be so heavy, gravity becomes too great, and you can hardly function. And I think the thing is to somehow become some kind of gas and float above it."

Wyatt has surely had his run-ins with gravity: Both his touring and drumming career came to an abrupt end in 1973, when a fall from a third-story window left Wyatt paralyzed from the waist down. By that point, he had already quit his band Soft Machine and started another called Matching Mole (pidgin French for Soft Machine). Forced to abandon the custom Maplewood kit that Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell had given him after Hendrix and the Softs toured America together, Wyatt switched to keyboards and set about reconstructing himself as a solo artist.
Wyatt's voice, a plaintive countertenor he once likened to "Jimmy Sommerville on valium," has always been unconventional yet oddly accessible. His sad choirboy vocals float serenely through an ambient soundscape of understated keyboard and percussion, colored by the subdued improvisations of his avant-jazz friends. If the most blatant jazz-rock fusion acts combined an excess of technique with a paucity of ideas, Wyatt's approach was more fission, a contemplative yet compelling mix of free jazz, naive pop and English eccentricity.

A year after the accident, Wyatt recorded an altogether unlikely cover of the Neil Diamond-penned Monkees single "I'm a Believer," which became a hit and landed him on the BBC's Top of the Pops. Accompanied that evening by Pink Floyd's Nick Mason, Henry Cow's Fred Frith and future Police-man Andy Summers, Wyatt lipsynched his way through clenched teeth after a BBC producer insisted that his wheelchair was unsuitable for prime-time televiewing.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Wyatt's music grew simpler, more direct, and-with the 1975 death of his friend Mongezi Feza - intensely political. "When Mongezi died, I suddenly realized that apartheid was killing my closest friends, and that's when politics right across the world becomes just as personal as anything can be," says Wyatt of the exiled South African trumpeter featured on Wyatt's Rock Bottom and Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (two of the six Wyatt albums Thirsty Ear plans to reissue this year). "You can be theoretically anti-racist or anti-apartheid and say, "I don't think people should be allowed to have a kind of internaI slave population servicing their businesses" - which is what South Africa was, a kind of internaI colonization - and you can know that abstractly. But when you actually have South Africans who come here just so they can play music together and when, in their early thirties, they start dying because you find out they've been living on no food and too much gin from the gin palaces since they were about 9 years old, and even after coming to England, they would be so terrified every time they saw a policeman that they would nearly have a heart attack. Mongezi Feza died a quite unnecessary death of double pneumonia whilst he was in a psychiatric hospital, and he was really only in a psychiatric hospital because he just couldn't handle whether he was allowed to deal with white people or not. He was so confused about what the relationship now was. So then he died. I had actually planned to make a lot of records with him. I had thought I' d found my ideal partner."

Wyatt's songwriting reached its political apex with 1985's Old Rottenhat, a starkly beautiful album whose musings on the anti-imperialist theories of Noam Chomsky and the troubles in East Timor earned a mixed critical response. "WeIl, I'm really glad you heard [the album' s minimalist aesthetic] as clarity, because some people heard it as not much going on, which is missing what was going on, I think," says Wyatt. "I mean, there are some people who just don't like my politics, and I understand that, but sometimes they sidestep that by saying they don't like my style. I don't mind. You can't tell people what to listen to. You have to be grateful if they listen to anything you do, really."

It was also during the mid-'80s that Wyatt released a series of 7-inch cover singles on Rough Trade, including the Billie Holiday classic "Strange Fruit," an anthemic remake of Chic' s " At Last I Am Free," and the anti-war ballad "Shipbuilding," which Elvis Costello wrote for Wyatt so that he could hear it sung by the saddest voice in the world. "I think part of the job of a-can I use the word artist? - is not just to make objects, but to find the beauty in objects that already exist and to represent it. It's not that something has to be new or indeed perhaps that anything ever can be new, but somehow you must make it new. And that's really what I wanted to do with those songs."

As a vocal interpreter, Wyatt prefers the understated style of, say, Chet Baker over the melismatic maneuvers that have become de rigueur for contemporary jazz vocalists. "I've listened to singers who are kind of instrumentalists in denial," laughs Wyatt without naming names. "If they really think the voice is just an instrument, they're wrong. The fact is if somebody is going 'Oooda-da-deeda-dee-da,' you know it's a person doing it and there's no way it's like listening to a trumpet or a saxophone. We all tend to listen to voices quite differently, which perhaps goes back to childhood when we listened out for our mother's voice. So the human voice carries with it something that no other instrument does, and you just have to remember that when you're singing."

Wyatt says he someday hopes to record an album's worth of Gershwin-era covers: "You know, the Nazis' definition of degenerate music was mournful Jewish tunes sung by Negroes to sexual rhythms, or something like that. Now if I were an American, that's something I'd be really proud of. So I really would like to do some more of those mournful Jewish melodies. But if I'm getting ideas for my own tunes, they take precedence. Not because I think they're more important, but because if I don't do those, nobody else will."

Which brings us back to the long overdue Shleep, Wyatt's first full album in seven years. This time out, politics seems to have taken a backseat to semiotics, with Wyatt's crafty wordplay evoking the more enigmatic lyrical terrain of his early work. "I'm not by nature into either confessional personal songs, particularly, or polemics in songs, particularly ," says Wyatt. "Even when I was writing a lot of songs with overt political references, an awful lot of things I was thinking about didn't get into the songs. Songs aren't just sentences set to music. They have to come through [in] that hallucinatory form. They come from somewhere else.

"Actually, a number of Shleep's songs came from Wyatt's wife Alfrede Benge, whose poetry he is forever finding around their old wooden dacha deep in the English countryside. Thus the title cut, recorded over Alfie's mild objections, with its image of an insomniac's sheep-counting gone wrong:

"I couldn 't waste that, could I?" laughs Wyatt. "She thought it was a bit trivial, but it just made me laugh, and it made Brian Eno laugh, too. So we did it anyway. You know, she writes these things and then I find them and then that's what happens. When you're in the same house with somebody, you can't hide everything."

Wyatt has paid tribute to his wife on past recordings, most notably on the surreal " Alifib" and poignant "P.L.A. (Poor Little Alfie)." On Shleep, that tradition continues with "The Duchess," a loopy number in which Wyatt vows:

"We actually wrote 'The Duchess' together, but I got writing credit because she didn't want to be associated with such silliness," he says of his partner, who might have known better after so many years. "That's right," says Wyatt with a laugh, "it' s a bit late now, isn 't it?"