This, frankly, is an honour. The man on the end of the phone is paralysed from the waist down and confined to wheelchair. Robert Wyatt has been since July 1, 1973, when he fell - pissed - from the 3rd floor window of June Campbell Kramer’s Maida Vale home. June was better known as Lady June, a member of French avant psych/progsters, Gong, headed by Australian Daevid Allen. Despite that life-changing event, Wyatt, already revered as a member of the seminal English jazz/prog fusion outfit, Soft Machine, and by then fronting the largely instrumental, Matching Mole, didn’t give up and over the next three decades carried on to become one of England’s most celebrated songwriters, singers, and composers. His music is a rich eclectic mix of any or all of the following: electronics, jazz, light opera, chamber music, cabaret, classical and pop. His version of Elvis Costello’s beautiful, Shipbuilding, remains the definitive version; his take on Peter Gabriel’s marvellous Biko is on par with the original; and he numbers amongst his regular co-conspirators Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera (Roxy Music, 801), and Paul Weller, all of whom appear on his critically-celebrated new album Comicopera.

He has worked with Henry Cow, Hatfield & The North, Carla Bley, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Scritti Politti, The Raincoats, Ben Watt, Mike Oldfield, Fred Frith, Ultramarine, David Gilmour, Bjork, Steve Nieve, Max Richter, to name just a few.

Robert Wyatt even has a verb named after him - Wyatting. It began appearing in blogs and the music press as a way of describing the practice of playing weird tracks on a jukebox to annoy fellow pub-goers. The name was coined by a 36 year-old London teacher, Carl Neville, because one of the top LPs for this effect was Wyatt’s 1991 album, Dondestan, which comprises his arrangements of poems by his wife Alfreda [Alfie] Benge. She has also provided the vibrant cover art for each of his records since 1973 and also writes lyrics for him. They are virtually inseparable.

“Aah, yes, you’ve heard of Wyatting, then,” he chuckles. “I’m honoured, absolutely, although I do think I’m annoying enough in my own right. But to be a verb … that’s something.”


He is a splendid man to talk to. Intelligent and committed, Wyatt has strong political beliefs - he’s a card-carrying Communist and Comicopera jabs strongly at war and its futility, amid a host of other topics.

So as you read this picture a broad 62-year-old man with a mop of silver hair swept back onto his shoulders and thick bushy white beard working its way down towards his chest. If he wasn’t a musician, he’d be a splendid wizard.

It’s early in the morning in England but that doesn’t worry him. “Oh, the older you get, the earlier you get up,” he says rather cheerfully. Robert Wyatt isn’t always cheerful but before the question slips out, he continues: “I’ve been well, and I’m unjustifiably cheerful. It’s taken me by surprise. I felt that once you hit the 60s you live on memories; you get engulfed in them. So I thought I’d better do something. So I did this - Comicopera - and it’s a fantastic sense of relief. It’s the nearest a man can get to having a baby, only my stomach hasn’t got smaller - too much drinking … ”

Yes, despite that tumble, three decades ago, our Robert can still be a bit of a piss pot. No matter though, when his life is dotted with masterpieces such as Soft Machine’s first three albums (the third of which contains one of his finest songs, Moon In June), O Caroline and God Song from the Matching Mole records, his debut 1974 solo set, Rock Bottom, as definitive a work as there is, the equally devastating Nothing Can Stop Us, and a string of classic mid-1980s ballads.

He admits to being happiest working with this eclectic bunch of musicians and creative spirits that has come in and out of his life for the past 30 years- “Alfie [who is, of course, the one constant], Phil, Brian, Anja [Garbarek, the singer], this bunch of people,a few special guests” - and sees in them an odd purpose other than making astonishing and challenging music. “I seem to be able to get together people who wouldn’t normally work together,” he says. “In a group, it’s a recipe for disaster usually, but when it’s an illusory group - and they don’t have to meet because I stitch them all together - then nobody is going to say ‘I didn’t get to express myself’ because they are working musicians who are doing it within that context. And, most importantly, they are confident enough to take their position in the song.”

Significantly, they are all vastly imaginative people with fine track records of independently challenging music in their own rights. Of course, in a group such as Soft Machine which was filled with a similar sweep of creative giants it’s “magical but also nightmarish,” Robert says. “You are just bound to split. It’s nobody’s fault what goes on. Everybody has a trajectory and is trying to develop a voice of their own. The Softs were like that, so many different ideas, everybody going a different way. It’s the same with a film. A group of people gets together for that one film. It’s the human way of doing it. Bring together a bunch of people with a passion for doing this one thing together, developing it together and helping each other achieve it, and then when it’s done go your separate ways. After that you might work with a couple here or a couple there but never all together again. You know, I think I’m getting the hang of it now.”

As for those politics, Comicopera closes lyrically with Wyatt singing in Spanish and Italian as a form of protest. “It’s to do with feeling completely alienated from Anglo-American culture at this point,” he says in the press release for the record. “Just sort of being silent as an English-speaking person, because of this fucking war. The last thing I sing in English is ‘You’ve planted all your everlasting hatred in my heart’.” Elsewhere, songs such as Mob Rule, A Beautiful War, and Out Of The Blue bring a broad perspective to the whole notion of war, examining it from several perspectives, while the album closes with a tribute to the South American revolutionary, Che Guevara, by Cuban composer Carlos Puebla.

“My politics do come out in my music,” he says. “I’m not an evangelist but I sing political songs, not because I think it will make a difference but because that’s what I’m thinking in the instant. I don’t try to write about politics, it’s just what comes to the surface. What hits me between the eyes is that we are constantly catering to some so-called moral purpose of some people in power - and if that wasn’t happening with my tax money I might let it go. But everytime I see the media we seem to be dropping bombs on somebody. I think having bombs dropped on you from a great height is terrifying. And it distracts me from what I’d like to be - a completely hedonistic, fun-loving, drunk. You see, I just can’t ignore it … ”

Thank heavens, he can’t.