"I was trapped into being alive." The Guardian profiles Robert Wyatt and his partner Alfie. As someone who has tried to sing in the past, I enjoyed this passage:
"Wyatt is brutally modest about his voice. Described by Ryuichi Sakamoto as 'the saddest sound in the world', it is limber and beautiful - yet Wyatt once likened it to Jimmy Somerville on valium. 'There's no deliberate or conscious input into the way I sing,' he says. 'It's more like damage limitation.'"

I saw his new album Comicopera in a store a couple weeks ago, and I stupidly didn't buy it right then and there.

This one's for Super Robertson—Robert Wyatt singing "I'm a Believer" on Top of the Pops, a performance the BBC didn't air at the time (1974) because the sight of a paraplegic singing on television might have upset sensitive viewers...or something. Too bad about the prat doing the voiceover at the end. Seeing Wyatt blithely singing away while teenagers dance (not to mention Nick Mason on drums) more than makes up for it. Inspiring!

I first heard Wyatt's take on Neil Diamond's Monkees hit last year, after buying Solar Flares Burn For You, an odds and sods collection of Robert Wyatt material on Cuneiform Records. The album comprises two BBC Radio sessions from 1972 and 1974, a soundtrack for a short film (the title track), and three home recordings from 2002–2003, just to stop things from getting too nostalgic. The 1974 session is brilliant—Wyatt alone at a piano playing "Alifib" (shattering), and a more fleshed-out version of "Sea Song" from Rock Bottom, along with "Soup Song" and "I'm a Believer." The rest of the album is pretty inconsistent, from the abstract sounds of the title track to the silly "We Got an Arts Council Grant," to the cloying-yet-heartfelt "Little Child" (a song sung by Wyatt's childhood hero Danny Kaye), to the groovy loop-based jam "Twas Brillig" from 2002–2003. While they're inconsistent in terms of flowing together as a coherent album, each track is as defiantly eccentric and unique as its creator.

My Sunday rhythm-section teammate Christian Scum lent me a few Mojo mags last weekend, including the November 2005 issue which features a lengthy Wyatt interview. The inspiring quotes fly thick and fast: "I do have an intense greediness for stimuli. I get bored quickly. But I'm really scared of breaking the law. Pathetic, isn't it?" Or "I'd love to be a perfectionist. I always think I am until I hear the results, then I realise I'm not."

"The Mule is accustomed to the unordinary"
-Super Robertson

Robert Wyatt. That floaty, amorphous music drifting out of Super Robertson’s stereo last Saturday night sure sounded like a Robert Wyatt album. No, it couldn’t be. But it definitely sounded like Rock Bottom, an album I’d been living with for a few years and shared with no one but the belter—a peculiar, accidental-sounding record that was surely the result of a random combination of time, place and circumstance. I had convinced myself that nothing else in the world could sound like Rock Bottom.

I thought for a moment about asking what this music was. I liked it a lot—almost as much as the feast that Super and Cristina had laid out. But I decided to keep quiet to prevent a potentially awkward social moment. What if I piped up and got some blank stares in reply? I didn’t want to have to explain too much.

Someone else’s conversation tackled the subject. Rumours started circulating. It was Robert Wyatt. Super passed the jewel case around. Shleep. He’d heard some of it on the CBC one night. I said something about Super being my soul mate. Super said something about having been aware of that fact for a while now.

Later in the evening he danced like Ian Curtis for us, and I recalled that we’d discussed forming a Joy Division cover band a long time ago. I want to spend every Saturday night at Super Robertson’s.