From Uncut’s March 2020 issue (Take 272). As Robert Wyatt celebrated his 75th birthday, he invited Uncut round for a chat. Over carrot cake, we heard tales of the Soft Machine, Pink Floyd and Wyatt’s own wide-ranging musical appetites. But will he ever make new music again..? “Occasionally, I hit the piano and go, ‘Ah, that would be good. I must remember that’…”
The tea is made, the carrot cake is ready to be sliced and Robert Wyatt has just slid his electric wheelchair under the edge of the dining table, when he realises he’s forgotten the cake knife. Uncut offers to fetch it from the kitchen.
“No, it’s alright,” Wyatt says, reversing his chair. “I can get it without standing up, mate.”
He returns with a huge knife – “It’s a bit Agatha Christie” – and proceeds to slice the cake. “It’s great, I can sit anywhere in town,” he adds, detailing one of the advantages of being wheelchair-bound, “while everyone else has to sit on a bench. It’s a bit toytown round here, like one of those imaginary places in train sets, but that’s no bad thing.”
The town in question is Louth in the Lincolnshire Wolds, where Wyatt and his wife Alfreda Benge have lived for over 30 years. Their house, situated right in the hilly centre, is deceptively large, its ground floor stretching back through room after room. The space facing the street is Wyatt’s music room, complete with a baby grand piano and woven Tunisian wall hangings, while other areas are decorated with prints and paintings by the likes of Oblique Strategies co-creator Peter Schmidt. While Wyatt might have retired from making his own records after 2007’s Comicopera, music still plays a huge part in he and Benge’s lives: indeed, when Uncut arrives, Who Is In Love?, by Iranian singer Shahrem Nazeri and composer Amir Pourkhheleji, is blasting through the large dining room stereo.
“A friend of mine just came back from the Iranian film festival,” Wyatt explains, adjusting his yellow and pink glasses. “Apart from being irritated that she couldn’t wear her designer clothes there, she brought back some records for me. What I really like is Iranian singing, it’s just beautiful, so I’ve been playing this.”
On January 28, Robert Wyatt turns 75. It’s a milestone he didn’t expect to reach. To discover how retirement is treating one of our musical national treasures, Uncut has travelled to Lincolnshire for an afternoon with the singer, songwriter and musician; during our time in Louth, Wyatt regales us with tales of Soft Machine and The Wilde Flowers, of Daevid Allen, Kevin Ayers, Nico, Nick Mason and Brian Eno, of hanging out with Robert Graves in Majorca, and of his own shape-shifting musical passions. He explains how he and his wife’s health problems are inevitably changing their lives, but also why putting together a forthcoming book of their lyrics for Faber has revitalised them.
“It’s a great thing that’s happened in terms of tidying up who we are, me and Alfie. They gave us a couple of months to sort it out, with Alfie’s stuff too – we’re doing it together. Alfie keeps diaries which is lucky, but we had to remember the situations in which certain records were made, which was a good exercise for elderly forgetful people. The timing was fantastic – just as we were finishing the book, Alfie started to get seriously ill to the point where we couldn’t have carried on doing it. She’s being taken care of, having operations and scans, and she will be for months. We’ll see how that goes.”
Sleeping upstairs is Wyatt’s son Sam. He’s a nurse at a nearby hospital, and often stops in at their house to rest after night shifts. It’s been more than helpful, considering their health issues, to have him there, and Wyatt seems to take huge pleasure in spending time with him.
“By the time he was 19 and he’d delivered his first baby, I thought, ‘He’s already done something much more important than I will ever do in my life.’ I wasn’t there for him as a dad, but he doesn’t seem to be resentful at all. It’s great having him here because, well, he’s a nurse, but he’s also very kind and very clever. You can’t look anywhere in the house without seeing something he fixed.
“One of the things that changes as you get older is the past,” Wyatt adds, pondering life as he approaches his 75th birthday, free of alcohol or cigarettes but as lucid, frank, modest and wryly funny as ever. “It’s like you’re born in a village at the bottom of a valley and it’s all you know. Then your life is spent climbing up this mountain and you’re looking back down, and you see your village is just one of many villages. Then you see there’s a whole landscape and you see the horizon – you can still see your little village, you know where it is, but you’re seeing it from this strange height. It just looks so different. That was one of the weirdest things about putting these lyrics together for the book. ‘Did I really write that?’”
Cutting another slice of cake, Wyatt gestures to Uncut’s recording gear. “Are you sure you’re getting this? John Walters came up and recorded me for the BBC once, and none of it came out. I don’t mind, I can just do it again. But the alarming thing is I always seem to say something quite different to the previous time.”
FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT MARCH 2020/TAKE 272 IN THE ARCHIVE
