A big chunk of Robert Wyatt’s back catalogue re-released on Domino – a marriage made in Wire-reading, BBC4-viewing, Peel session collectors’ heaven. The Soft Machine founder, best known to the layman for his poignant reading of Elvis Costello’s Falklands storm warning ‘Shipbuilding’ (included among these re-releases, on one of no less than five EPs), is the quintessential English eccentric, one whose influence can be found in places as various as Radiohead’s Amnesiac and the High Llamas’ airy mini-symphonies.
Indeed, last year he was awarded the dubious pleasure of becoming ‘verbed’ when 36-year-old English London schoolteacher Carl Neville coined the phrase ‘Wyatting’: the practise of playing an unsettling tune on the jukebox in order to annoy the plain punters.
Despite this, the music is as easeful as breathing. From the prescient Ah-Um meets Meddle moves of Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (1975) to the world music inflected Nothing Can Stop Us (1982) to the 1974 live Theatre Royal Drury Lane set, to the abstract agit-prop of Old Rottenhat (1986), right up to more recent works such as Cuckooland and last year’s Comicopera, it’s apparent that Wyatt may be one of the few functioning musicians to have truly integrated jazz and savant pop. His practise of casting musicians according to personality rather than technique (Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera, Nick Mason, Dave Gilmour, Mike Oldfield, Paul Weller) derives from big band masters like Ellington and Mingus, utilising the grammar of jazz without ever sounding archly arty or ‘experimental’.
The secret ingredient is a disarming lightness of touch. His sophisticated, eclectic arrangements are always offset by a keen ear for a simple melody line and are softened by the plaintive tone of the voice. The effect is like an Anglocentric Brian Wilson weaned on Gil Evans rather than California pop. These are quirky songs of innocence and experience, part Lewis Carroll, part paranoid Barrett, containing stately, weighty lyrical statements.
At once outsider artist and British institution, it’s good to have Robert Wyatt back on the radar. But, as is evident from his influence and imperviousness to fashion, he never really went away.