16.5.10

Robert Wyatt - Rock Bottom


1974 cover

1998 cover
A1 - Sea Song
A2 - A Last Straw
A3 - Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road
B1 - Alifib
B2 - Alife
B3 - Little Red Robin Hood Hit The Road

... On 1 June 1973, during an alcohol-fueled party for Gong's Gilli Smyth and June Campbell Cramer (also known as Lady June) at the latter's Maida Vale home, an inebriated Wyatt fell from a third floor window. He was paralysed from the waist down and subsequently uses a wheelchair. On 4 November that year, Pink Floyd performed two benefit concerts, in one day, at London's Rainbow Theatre, supported by Soft Machine, and compered by John Peel. The concerts raised a reported £10,000 for Wyatt.
The injury led Wyatt to abandon the Matching Mole project, and his rock drumming (though he would continue to play drums and percussion in more of a "jazz" fashion, without the use of his feet). He promptly embarked on a solo career, and with musician friends (including Mike Oldfield, Ivor Cutler and Henry Cow guitarist Fred Frith), he released his solo album
Rock Bottom.
 - Wikipedia

[Robert Wyatt]'s private persona erupted on Rock Bottom (1974), one of rock music's supreme masterpieces, a veritable transfiguration of both rock and jazz. Its pieces straddle the unlikely border between an intense religious hymn and a childish nursery rhyme. Along that imaginary line, Wyatt carved a deep trench of emotional outpouring, where happiness, sorrow, faith and resignation found a metaphysical unity. The astounding originality of that masterpiece, and its well-crafted flow of consciousness, were never matched by Wyatt's later releases.
 - Piero Scaruffi

Robert Wyatt - Rock Bottom



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