Different Every Time – the Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt [book review]

This review was recently published as part of Bedcrumbshow newsletter (issue 002), follow them on substack to get updates from our music & radio community

“How long can I pretend that music’s more relevant than fighting for a socialist world?”
-Robert Wyatt (from Matching Mole’s “Gloria Gloom”)

In this thorough biography on the influential singer and musician Robert Wyatt, author Marcus O’Dair avoids the usual hyper-individualized narrative, choosing instead to illuminate the community and global context surrounding Wyatt’s “improvised life”. Although he could be a playful, affable, and whimsical personality, Wyatt experienced many waves of heavy depression (even suicide attempts) throughout his life. These depressions seemed to stem not from some atomized personal drama, but from a philosophical resistance to the state of the world, which was driven by an overwhelming sensitivity to the global suffering and violence caused by colonialism, capitalism and imperialism. Between the 1960s to the 2000’s, Wyatt’s life and work stood witness to the ups and downs of the Cold War, from the peak of Maoism to the fall of the Soviet Union. From the limited vantage of his wheelchair in England, Wyatt constantly questioned his role as an English, paraplegic artist within the global struggles for liberation. He pushed through the oversaturated narratives of Western propaganda to learn about African independence movements, CIA-backed fascist coups in South America, imperialist invasions from Vietnam to Iraq, and apartheids in South Africa and Occupied-Palestine (he refuses to grant even verbal legitimacy to the settler-colony of Isr*el). Finding that music wasn’t as politically effective as he wanted, Wyatt repeatedly took steps back from his music in order to focus on the internationalist causes of the Communist Party of Great Britain (at least until they became liberal “revisionists” in his eyes). During his longest attempted retreat from 1975-1985, the humble singer would repeatedly get coaxed into collaboration by a wide circle of friends and admirers; no matter how often he tried to leave music, the music refused to leave him.

The breadth of Wyatt’s musical universe is almost unbelievable, he had an unpretentious, pluralistic love for music that extended from 50’s R&B and pop to jazz, avant-garde and global folk traditions. He loved to show pop music to his “high-brow” acquaintances, but also bust out the jazz and experimental music for his friends with more mainstream tastes (there was actually a trend called “Wyatting” where people would play obscure music on pub jukeboxes, though he disavowed the pretentious trend). Over the years he collaborated with British music icons (Syd Barrett, Brian Eno, Elvis Costello), jazz composers (Carla Bley, Charlie Haden, Mary Halvorson) and experimental pop artists (Björk, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Anja Garbarek). As a young man, he once played drums in a William Burroughs stage production; he also tells the story of sitting in with The Jazz Messengers at a British jazz club while Art Blakey was taking a break. His high school band The Wilde Flowers would go on to spawn The Soft Machine, Gong, Caravan, etc—an entire web of progressive bands inspired by jazz, dadaism, pop and the avant-garde, retrospectively known as the “Canterbury Scene”. His first successful group, The Soft Machine, became a staple of London’s psychedelic zeitgeist, performing at the UFO club with a young Pink Floyd and serving as the opening band for The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s first US Tour in 1968. After getting kicked out of Soft Machine in 1971 (they wanted to ditch Wyatt’s eccentric “muddy mouth” vocals, eclectic tastes, and playful lyricism to pursue serious jazz fusion), Wyatt began the short-lived Marxist prog band Matching Mole, a tongue-in-cheek pun on the French translation of “soft machine” (machine molle).

Up until this point, Wyatt was torn between drumming in bands and being a singer-composer, but a drunken fall from a third story balcony put him in a wheel chair and made the decision for him. Starting with his 1974 masterpiece Rock Bottom, he would use multi-layered vocals and “any instrument that required only the top half of the body” to construct imaginative sound worlds that expand the horizons of what it means to be a “singer/songwriter”, often in collaboration with his indispensable life and creative partner Alfreda Benge. In addition to being Wyatt’s manager, wife and caretaker, Alfie painted album covers, wrote lyrics and was a constant force of encouragement in Robert’s life. Another close friend and collaborator was Mongezi Feza of The Blue Notes, who had moved to England to escape oppression in South Africa. The trumpeter’s perspective and experience with apartheid was a huge influence on Wyatt’s understanding of colonialism. From Feza’s premature death from pneumonia in 1975 until the fall of apartheid in 1994, Wyatt would dedicate much of his activism and music to anti-colonial and anti-apartheid causes. In addition to criticizing and highlighting injustices that get swept under the rug, Wyatt sang tributes to Che Guevara, striking miners, and other resistance movements (including recording with the SWAPO party in support of Namibia’s liberation movements), as well as dedicating recordings to victims of bombings and invasions in Iraq, Japan, Palestine and Lebanon (“We’re still here, under the olive trees / When will you see, it’s where we belong?”). In a century defined by imperialism and the constant sabotage of liberation movements, the de-colonial victory in South Africa felt like a rare beacon of light shining through the ominous shroud of the modern world.

Unfortunately the darkness loomed into the new millennium, but Wyatt continued to divert his modest spotlight to others whenever he could. Given the chance to curate a festival in 2001, Wyatt stood opposed to increasing Islamophobia and decided to feature the Palestinian singer Amal Markus, as well as presenting performances with refugees from Somalia, Kazakhstan and elsewhere. A few years later, the BBC invited Wyatt (now considered a legacy act) to edit his own radio show; instead of focusing on music, “the things I wanted to get in were things about Gaza today and the recent overthrow of democracy, the return to a kind of banana republic status in Honduras, going against what are generally very exciting political movements in South America”. As I write this in 2024, genocides rage in Palestine, Sudan and the Congo, and the feelings of apocalyptic despair are increasingly pervasive. I consider the utility (or lack thereof) of biographies on British musicians at a time like this, yet I can’t help but feel a deep resonance with Robert Wyatt who, despite his position in the center of the imperial core, remains committed to bearing stubborn witness to the West’s atrocities and encouraging the rest of humanity’s growing resistance to Western hegemony, incidentally contributing soundtracks for the long fight toward global liberation along the way.

Selected Robert Wyatt Quotes

“Amateur means somebody who does something for love, and I can’t think of a better reason for doing anything”

“Anybody who is in rock has to be interested in politics, you really haven’t got the choice. I get impatient with people who tell you to leave politics out of it. You wake up every morning and you get politics shoved down your face of the right-wing kind, the BBC and Fleet Street and everything else. If you’ve got any pride at all you’ve got to resist it and work out your own vision of what’s going on”

“All this is done in a watery microcosm. We start our life underwater and our first development is underwater – before we are called a human. And it strikes me that maybe some kind of art actually taps into that, which is not available by conscious, rational means. You know, people think art transcends daily life. It may do the opposite. It feels like it’s more about re-finding the animal inside the sophisticated human. That is more like my idea of what artists maybe do”

“I’m having to invent a way of doing things without any particular reference to any way of doing things that I could have learned from someone else.”

“The great thing about being on the left in England is you’re left in no doubt about every single possible thing that’s gone wrong in your name. There’s nothing you cannot know about what’s wrong with Communism. The danger is that people here remain in blissful ignorance about what the West have done”