Released - July 1974
Genre - Art Rock
Producer - Nick Mason
Selected Personnel - Robert Wyatt (Vocals/Keyboards/Percussion); Mike Oldfield (Guitar); Alfreda Benge (Vocals); Fred Frith (Viola); Hugh Hopper (Guitar); Richard Sinclair (Bass); Laurie Allan (Drums); Ivor Cutler (Vocals)
Standout Track - Sea Song
Despite his having no connection whatsoever with Robert Wyatt, I'm going to kick this one off with a quote by the great Tom Waits. When interviewed about his music and why he maintains such a shroud of mystery over his personal life and the stories from which the songs spring from, he has frequently retold an analogy about watching a terrible film with a friend, when that friend leans over and says "You know, this is a true story" - does it really improve the film? Broadly, I tend to agree with Waits' assertion that a piece of music (or, indeed, any kind of art) should exist primarily within the minds and imaginations of those hearing it rather than being reliant on its context. But there are numerous cases of music that, for me at least, has taken on a whole different meaning when read in context of the circumstances that engendered it. Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom is one of the most prominent of these. Judged purely on its own merits, there's a strong chance I wouldn't really like it. Even as a self-avowed fan of meandering prog and off-kilter art rock, the songs on this album are so formless, tuneless and wilfully bizarre that there's actually not a huge amount on it I find musically exciting.
But judged in context of Wyatt's circumstances at the time, it becomes something quite different, something far more uplifting, compelling and transformative. Up until 1973, Wyatt had been the drummer and co-lead vocalist of the Canterbury-based prog band the Soft Machine, who had carved out a similar niche for themselves as Pink Floyd in the late 60s as a key part of the underground psychedelic movement. In '73, Wyatt was beginning to prepare for launching himself as a solo artist and started working on the songs that would end up on Rock Bottom, when he fell out of a third-floor window at a party while drunk (allegedly to try and escape from the husband of a woman he was seeing at the time) and ended up paralysed from the waist down, confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. In the wake of this terrible accident, Wyatt continued to work on the album as he convalesced, all the while falling in love with his new partner, the poet Alfreda Benge, who he ultimately married the day of the album's release. As such, Rock Bottom becomes so much more than just a collection of meandering, tuneless slabs of music, but becomes an expression of all the precipices Wyatt was teetering on at the time - fear, despair, loss, love, hope - and becomes one of the most moving albums I've heard this year.
Everything about Rock Bottom screams weirdness, and I say that as somebody who's been listening to Tom Waits and prog rock for years - Wyatt's bleating, childlike voice is swathed in discordant, chiming, rolling piano and shimmering synths, all augmented by producer Nick Mason of Pink Floyd (Floyd had been close compatriots of Wyatt's for years, and after his fall put on a benefit concert with Soft Machine to raise money for him to help his recovery). Only the opening "Sea Song" has anything close to being identifiable as a melody, with everything else consisting of twisting, tangled phrases of jumbled music struggling to maintain impetus to a song's conclusion. Even lyrically, it very rarely achieves anything resembling lucidity, being largely a collection of nonsense sounds or word salads. That said, in the moments where Wyatt achieves enough clarity to say something coherent, it's stunningly beautiful. "Sea Song," a tribute to Alfreda, boasts the wonderful lyric "When you're drunk you're terrific, when you're drunk, I like you mostly late at night, you're quite alright, but I can't understand the different you in the morning when it's time to play at being human for a while, please smile!" and later the lovely "Your madness fits in nicely with my own, your lunacy fits neatly with my own, my very own." It's an astonishingly personal and evocative portrayal of the excitement and the confusion and the timidity and the fear of falling in love with somebody.
Elsewhere, such clarity is thrown out the window on pieces like "Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road," where a propulsive cacophany of churning piano and percussion accompanies a frenzied, swarm-of-bees buzzing of horns and brass along with Wyatt's bleating nonsense. "Alifib" and "Alifie" are companion pieces, with Wyatt reciting further nonsense sounds in the former ("I can't forsake you, or for-squeak you,") before a darker, more brooding mood is introduced on the second piece and Alfreda responds with her own litany of absurdities. Album closer "Little Red Robin Hood Hit The Road" sees none other than Mike Oldfield guesting with a multi-tracked electric guitar part before the song dissipates into nothing but a droning harmonium over which Ivor Cutler recites a nonsense poem in a staunch baritone. (Cutler's contributions to Rock Bottom so impressed the record companies that he was subsequently offered his own three album deal off the back of it).
This is certainly not an album for casual music fans who enjoy music principally for its catchiness or listenability. There are whole sections of Rock Bottom that are hard to identify as music in any traditional sense. But for those who get a kick out of the moment when an artist is willing to experiment with the format and elevate music back to the art form it should be, it's a fascinating insight into the mind of somebody who had had to confront total despair and abandonment before ultimately finding hope through new love. There's an incredibly powerful message and sentiment to be found within Rock Bottom, even if it takes delving through an inscrutable collection of bizarre weirdness to find it.
Track Listing:
All songs written by Robert Wyatt.
1. Sea Song
2. A Last Straw
3. Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road
4. Alifib
5. Alifie
6. Little Red Robin Hood Hit The Road
No comments:
Post a Comment