Fifty Years Of Rock Bottom

Tiggerlion on Rock Bottom by Robert Wyatt released 26/7/1974

Robert Wyatt was a loose-limbed drummer in Soft Machine, part of the Canterbury Set, a band that managed to morph Progressive Rock with Jazz. He moved on to form Matching Mole and then a solo career. He started to write songs for his second album in Venice in 1973 where his partner, Alfreda Benge, was working as an assistant editor on Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Its waters flow through the lyrics and the music. On the 1st June, back in London, an inebriated Wyatt fell from a bathroom window at a party, breaking his back and paralysing himself from the waist down. During his rehabilitation, he had plenty of time to contemplate his life and rethink the music. He describes his catastrophic injury as the beginning of his maturity. He was grateful to be able to do anything and now that he found he had to rely more on his voice and a keyboard, he developed his skills at manipulating both very quickly. Alfie, an ever-present at his side, gently suggested there needed to be more space in his music. Just breathe. Musically, he felt unfettered. He was free to dream. He worked as if in a trance at a steady pace. Eight months later, he was in a recording studio.

Soft Machine, Gong, Henry Cow, Matching Mole and Kevin Ayers’s band, The Whole World, answered the call for help in making the album. Nevertheless, the primary instruments are Wyatt’s multilayered vocals and keyboards. Wyatt’s voice is one of flawed beauty, a cracked Ming vase, a Van Gogh painting of dead flowers, a Mozart concerto with a dissonant chord or a Rolls Royce engine that occasionally misfires. If you choose to listen closely enough, all you will hear is the flaw. But, sit back a little, and you will hear it as its strength, the blemish that makes it vulnerable, makes it human, adds an element of jeopardy, an ability to surprise and the capacity to cause your heart to lurch. The keyboard playing is deceptive, every layer subtly different, weaving and coiling around each other, intermingled with the vocal lines. This was the technique he refined in his hospital bed and the one that gives Rock Bottom its tranquil sound threatened with disquiet.

Sea Song is the prime example. It has a melody as rich as a Pavé Cobble, matured slowly by the keyboards until it becomes one of which Schubert could be proud. A hand drum keeps time. Richard Sinclair mesmerises with his bass. Wyatt sings calmly, comfortable in his middle range, as if in a dream. The words are in plain English, the most coherent and easily understood of the whole album. Sea Song appears to be a straightforward love song until you notice that he likens the subject of his desire to a whale and attributes her moodiness to her period. Even in the dark, non-PC seventies, Wyatt seems to be asking for trouble. How’s he going to talk his way out of this, one wonders. “Your lunacy fits nicely with my own”…”we aren’t alone” and the song opens up, like an anemone, transforming into a Jazz/Prog hybrid, a different beast altogether, leaping an octave, the keyboards celestial and the wordless falsetto radiant. It’s in this ecstatic coda when Wyatt is uncannily expressive, capturing the turmoil and joy of being head-over-heels in love. It’s enchanting.

A Last Straw continues the aquatic feel, but its ebbs and flows almost swing, modulated by Laurie Allen on drums and Hugh Hopper’s bass. The rhythm section sparkles, adding splashes of pleasure to the dense keyboards. There is a delicious broken piano solo near the start. Wyatt’s vocal is delivered with a wry smile, the words all jumbled up. “Please don’t wait for the paperweight” doesn’t makes sense. Perhaps the title is a clue: the straw that broke the camel’s back? But there is no hint of that in the performance which is relaxed and carefree. “Touch us when we collapse, into the water we will go.” Before we can unravel the meaning, the voice breaks into an uninhibited scat, imitating a muted trumpet. The floor toms clatter. The keyboards climb a crooked scale and a cavalcade of bugels erupt.

Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road is fraught. There has been a calamity, distressing Wyatt acutely. James’s drum, a battery and Delfina’s tray make a racket like an African tribe having collective palpitations. Sinclair’s bass pops and hops as though there are ants in his pants. The multitude of trumpets are in a state of panic. Mongezi Feza is the trumpeter, a South African Jazz musician whose influences include Clifford Brown and Don Cherry. As Wyatt’s confused meltdown slams into reverse in a backward vocal, Feza plays a cathartic solo, a guest appearance that steals the show. It seems Wyatt is upset about hurting Alfie and promises to do better, but as the music settles, the picture is blurred by Ivor Cutler’s grandiloquent Glaswegian tones placing Wyatt lying in the road tripping up the cars, “busting the tyres all day.” Feza and Sinclair bounce off into the distance. It’s in the very last gasps of side one that the life-changing event has occurred.

Alifib begins with the regular breathing of a man lying in a hospital bed. Hugh Hopper’s bass meanders beautifully through the keyboard chords like a mind wandering half asleep. The effect is serene, oneiric. Eventually, Wyatt comes to and groggily begins to sing: “Not nit. Not nit. No not nit. Nit folly bololey.” Characters from Wind In The Willows make an appearance such as Burlybunch the water mole. He’s using one of Chaucer’s tricks, distorting words so they sound like others, undermining or doubling the meaning. The breathing rhythm forms the name, Alifie. He’s longing for his lover, or ‘larder’. As the track blends into Alifie, the mood darkens, Gary Windo’s baritone clarinet and saxophone gather a storm. Wyatt becomes more and more frustrated. The saxophone skronks like an angry bird. The keyboards become increasingly insistent. It takes Alfie herself to cool things down, annoyed but affectionate: “You soppy old custard.”

Little Robin Hood Hits The Road is a strident march. All is not well. The water moles have drowned and are being eaten by bugs. Mike Oldfield provides a brooding guitar solo, following the lead vocal line. “Can’t you see them?” desperately repeated over and over threatens to descend the song into chaos. Allen, back on drums, clings onto the beat by his fingernails. Ivor Cutler’s baritone concertina and harmonium take over. Fred Frith’s viola dances bizarrely while Cutler, in words written by Wyatt, describes a temper tantrum in some detail. After he’s smashed up the television and a phone, a wicked cackle brings the album to a close.

Rock Bottom is a highly intimate album, telling one person’s real life story. It addresses difficult questions without finding any easy answers. The six songs come in pairs. Sea Song and A Last Straw describe a blossoming relationship. Alifib and Alifie are effectively a medley and the Hit The Road songs mirror each other. It reaches down into the depths and floats up to the peaks of life and love. It addresses the resilience of human beings which can only be sustained by the affection and kindness of others. Robert Wyatt hit Rock Bottom in order to reach his very best. He drew dazzling performances from wonderful musicians. Richard Sinclair, Laurie Allen, Hugh Hopper, Mongezi Feza, Fred Frith, Mike Oldfield and Ivor Cutler have never been better. Who knew that Nick Mason was capable of such an intricate, sensitive production? However, the star performer is Wyatt himself, who found a way to express the full range of his experience with remarkable dexterity, both vocally with words, sometimes nonsensical, and with no words at all and by immersing himself in the fluidity of his beautiful keyboard melodies.

On the 8th September 1974, Robert Wyatt & Friends performed live at The Theatre Royal Drury Lane. All six songs from Rock Bottom were played by a full band: Hopper bass, Allen drums, Oldfield guitar, Feza trumpet, Windo clarinet and sax, Frith viola, plus Dave Stewart and Julie Tippetts keyboards. Even Cutler made a cameo appearance and Nick Mason contributed. As you would expect, the band performance loses some of the lightness but brings out the trauma more. Alfreda’s emergence from the sea, for example, is quite horrific. Nevertheless, the songs remain proud and strong and the musicians’ improvisations are often superb.

Cover versions are rare. The Unthanks covered a number of Wyatt songs but only Sea Song from Rock Bottom. They do so beautifully, keeping it very simple, just piano, the equivalent of James’s drum and harmonium. They sing in hushed tones, their Norfolk accent enhancing the melancholy even during the wordless coda when they are joined by exultant violins. The live version recorded in The Union Chapel is more effective than Rachel’s studio version on her Bairns LP. Tears For Fears version of the same song is probably best glossed over. Northern Sea Radio Orchestra covered the whole album with vocals by Annie Barbazza. Their arrangements impose some order to these unruly songs, thereby emphasising the emotional roller-coaster contained within them.

There are parallels between Robert Wyatt and Alfreda Benge and Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, albeit separated by a decade and the Atlantic. Alfie was both muse and collaborator. It’s her subtly intriguing pencil drawing that adorns the cover, of children playing on a shore with strange fauna flourishing beneath the water surface. As the decades rolled by, she became more actively involved in composing the material, just as Kathleen did with Tom. Rock Bottom and Swordfishtrombones mark a drastic change, a moment of self-discovery when an artist makes vital discoveries and finds their true voice, one that sets them apart and makes them special. Wyatt and Waits are distinctive individuals, forging their own eccentric byway on the periphery of popular music with more than simple encouragement from their spouse in a lifelong partnership. On the day the album was released, Robert Wyatt and Alfreda Benge married. His surprise and joy in a heart-on-the-sleeve cover of The Monkees’ I’m A Believer, broke into the singles charts two months later and earned him a Top Of The Pops appearance, proud in his wheelchair.

Rock Bottom is by no means an easy listen but it richly rewards perseverance. Despite the tragedy that overshadows it, there isn’t a morsel of self pity. Its melancholy is balanced by its humour. It explores unusual aspects of life, the dark corners where the nightmares lurk, as much as the windows where the sun shines in. It is born out of suffering. Its subject matter is enduring romantic love, the immeasurable value of true friends and making the best of the hand you have been dealt. It makes you believe in the healing power of music. Rock Bottom is so exquisitely beautiful, it’s almost painful. It stands alone in the pantheon of Rock, unlike any other, utterly of itself and completely timeless. It was an odd little ball when it was released, an obscure, avant-garde, art rock, jazz prog album. However, it has matured over the years speaking even more eloquently of life, love and loyalty as time goes by, the things that really matter. It is a lesson for us all.

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