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GONZO WEEKLY #116: Jon meets Markus
Robert Wyatt started out as the drummer and singer for Soft Machine, who shared a residency at Middle Earth with Pink Floyd and toured America with Jimi Hendrix. He brought a Bohemian and jazz outlook to the ‘60s rock scene, having honed his drumming skills in a shed at the end of Robert Graves' garden in Mallorca.
His life took an abrupt turn after he fell from a fourth-floor window at a party and was paralysed from the waist down. He reinvented himself as a singer and composer with the extraordinary album Rock Bottom that has brought him a loyal following not just in Britain but in France, Italy and Germany. For about a decade he was a member of the Communist party, and in the early eighties his solo work was increasingly political.
October last year saw the release of Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt by Marcus O'Dair. In promotion of the book Wyatt appeared at the Wire's "Off the Page" festival in Bristol on 26 September, and at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 23 November. A companion compilation album, Different Every Time - Ex Machina / Benign Dictatorships was released on 18 November 2014. A month later Wyatt announced that he has stopped making music. “I thought, train drivers retire when they’re 65, so I will, as well,” Wyatt, now 69, told Uncut.
“I would say I’ve stopped, it’s a better word than retired. Fifty years in the saddle, it’s not nothing. It’s completely unplanned, my life, and it’s just reached this particular point.
Other things have happened – I’m more taken up by politics, to be honest, than music at the moment. Music tags along behind it. There is a pride in [stopping], I don’t want it to go off.”
Different Every Time is one of the best music biographies that I have read in years. So I telephoned up the author for a chat.
