'I actually try to make perfectly normal records, but it's only when they're finished that I listen back to them and say to myself, that's not very normal at all, is it,' Robert Wyatt tells Tony Clayton-Lea
Silver-haired foxes don't come any wilier than Robert Wyatt. The 62-year-old is rightly viewed as the Godfather of Quirky English Avant Garde Pop, an unwieldy title - which explains why the majority of people under the age of 35 have never heard of him. If they have, it's because Wyatt occasionally appears in one of those novelty Top 100 television shows beloved of Channel 4, typically the one that features the most unusual one- or two-hit wonders.
In what must be a first, Wyatt - who was paralysed from the waist down following an accident in 1972 - appeared on Top of the Pops in 1974, singing an askew version of the Monkees' I'm a Believerwhile sitting in his wheelchair. The kids, it would be fair to say, didn't have a clue where to look or what to do. Wyatt's other hit was with another cover version, albeit one that was written specifically with him in mind - Elvis Costello's Shipbuilding, which dented the UK Top 40 in 1983. Aside from these two wonderfully distinct pop music aberrations, Wyatt has spent most of his time inventing and hybridising wholly individualistic music that regularly acts as both comfort and confrontation.
Album releases are scheduled according to Wyatt's own requirements; they might not be as rare as hens' teeth but they're close to it. Each album, also, marches to the beat of Wyatt's idiosyncratic drum; if they represent anything in the pantheon of strange and interesting rock music it's that we all need to occasionally look beyond the creatively mediocre to discover there's more to life than hip-hop bump'n'grind and flawlessly executed pop.
Today, Wyatt is in flying form - pernickety, funny, questioning, sweet and very, well, English. His daughter-in-law, he says, comes from north of Dublin. "Her daughters are being brought up as little Catholics, which has surprised older members of the family."
What an odd and endearing thing to say. Is it something of a cliché to describe Wyatt as quintessentially English? His bespoke vocalising with 1960s British art-rock band, Soft Machine, hit the same nail on the head as that of Syd Barrett in nascent Pink Floyd music, while his lyrics share with Sir John Betjeman a cool observational and humorous slant. "They always stick those words together, don't they?" he begins to answer the "quintessentially" and "English" question.
He's not quite on a rant, but he's getting there. "I'm not sure what they mean. Are people living in Ireland 'quintessentially Irish'? I've got to be English because that's where I pay my taxes and it's what it says on my passport. I don't think we're better than anyone else, and most times so-called nationality just happens to be a flag of convenience for administrative purposes. Nationalism is a bit dodgy, don't you think? I suppose for oppressed people it's useful. But for the English we're the oppressive ones, so it isn't particularly a badge of honour for me."
Wyatt wears his politics on his sleeve. He's often referred to as a committed Marxist, yet latterly he has tended to underplay his party leanings in favour of a musicianship that is equally driven by passion. His new album, Comicopera- his first since 2003's Cuckooland- is something of a triumph: it's a triptych that references pop music (but not as we know it), Italian swing, jazz, a peculiarly British sensibility, Brazilian rhythms and Latin tempos. It's a cornucopia of delights that sits comfortably with the words "interesting" and "intriguing".
"The thing is, I get bored quickly," says Wyatt of the varying styles he employs. "I like cultural biodiversity, so that's part of it. I actually try to make perfectly normal records, but it's only when they're finished that I listen back to them and say to myself, that's not very normal at all, is it, Robert? I try and do normal songs with proper words and sing them in tune and get nice instruments on them, but then I sit back a bit and let the instrumentalists have their moment. It's important to let people's character come forward. I don't like the idea of anonymous backing to a vocalist. My favourite records are those where you're conscious of the different people playing. Jazz people do that. In jazz, it's all about the instrumentalists - who is on trumpet, who is on drums, who is on tenor sax? And whoever that person is, it will alter the character of the piece."
DOES IT CONCERN him that he operates under the radar in terms of the mainstream? Wyatt belongs to a line of British experimentalists that care little for obviously commercial success, yet he is also aware that not to publicise a new record might mean coverage in just the usual niche publications. Not a good idea, surely?
"I come from a 1950s thing, where there was a culture of secret underground societies - poets and other nutters. These people had a private language of their own, it wasn't about displaying themselves in public. And it's not elitist - anyone can join in if they want to. I suppose it's vanity - I'm not going to go out on the streets and urge people to buy my records. Bradford Marsalis once said that he'd rather have an audience of 100 people that were actually listening than 1,000 that weren't paying attention.
"And besides, I just wouldn't like the pressure of any kind of mainstream success. I got near to it in the 1970s with I'm a Believer, and I found it to be quite counterproductive - you get all these expectations and pressures on you to make a certain kind of record. All the machinery of record company money swings into place and swallows you up. And I just thought, you know what, I'm too posh for all this, I'm going to go back to my little corner . . ." where he reads the New Statesmanbut not the Sun, from which a request for an interview to plug the new record was turned down.
"I don't want to be in the firing line of those people. It's an unfair reason, I suppose, because I talk to all kinds of people that work for organisations that don't represent the world in the way I think it should be represented. But I have a sort of deep anxiety of the Murdochisation of everything. It's like the Pope - such an amount of power without any accountability is a kind of dictatorship, and that worries me. And when he [ Murdoch] hangs around people like Tony Blair I get seriously worried.
"Blair may well be seen as a helpful person from an Irish point of view, but from an English point of view he's a bit of an embarrassment. His friends are, too, whether it's Rupert Murdoch, Berlusconi or the president of the United States, whose name escapes me."
Wyatt starts to become a bit rattled here, aware that the "Murdoch thing" might be perceived as silly to get so worked up about. "I'm not sure if this is worth talking about, to be honest. I haven't really worked it all out in my head, so let's abandon it, shall we? Simply said, in relation to operating below the radar, if I can make a living below the radar then that's where I'll live. I make enough money to make a living; I eat three meals a day and have enough money to feed the house in winter."
THE CONVERSATION VEERS back towards Comicopera, which like many of Wyatt's records manages to sound utterly contemporary despite having no affiliations whatsoever with the here and now. Is this a conscious decision?
"The nearest a male musician comes to having babies is making a record. I tend to be most defensive about the least successful ones, the little mutants that pop out - although I'm happy for the others that came out strong and fair and were seen to be such. The records are different things at different times, and as much as you try to get them right all the time, sometimes that doesn't happen.
"Over 10 years ago I had a nervous breakdown, and I went to anxiety management for some counselling. They said what was wrong with me was a fear of failure - that the moment I got something wrong, I considered myself a complete failure and wanted to kill myself. That was exactly the case, and once you learn that you can't get everything right - that you make mistakes and so does everybody else - then it's fine. It's inverted arrogance to think you can get everything right, anyway, and once you can learn to live with that then just go with the flow. And the flow is what the records sound like."
It is unlikely that Irish audiences will ever get to see Wyatt on an Irish stage. He might come over, he says, but only in order to visit his extended family. Gigging and touring are simply not on the agenda.
"They're too much hassle for what you get out of them," he proffers. "I'm just a bundle of fear on stage now. I've tried to do things recently [ he was a special guest at a David Gilmour concert last year; more recently, he sat in at a jazz gig close to his home in Lincolnshire], but in terms of people coming along specifically to see me, well, I just couldn't guarantee a performance to make it worth their while. I'd just get too nervous, I think; and besides, you have to keep playing more or less the same tunes over and over again. I'd rather try to get it right just once on a record and then move on to something else."
Robert Wyatt's Comicopera is released on Domino Records
