The Music of the Cosmos

Just a mention of a new book today. I saw it on the net a couple of minutes ago, and know next to nothing about it.

But here are the facts:
Carole Bulewski: "The music of the cosmos" (KGHH Publishing 2018).

There are some videos on YouTube from a book launch right over here.
In one of them the author says the book is heavily influenced by the Canterbury music scene.
She also admits to being a big fan of Robert Wyatt, so what can possibly go wrong?

Philippe Gonin: Robert Wyatt Rock Bottom

A new book in French is out: Philippe Gonin "Robert Wyatt Rock Bottom" (Densité 2017).

Some of us may have to start brushing up our French!

Fix it, Leroy!

Hey, this seems like an interesting publication and happening!

"VOX Press will host a release party to celebrate the publication of Fix It, Leroy! Adventures in Misfit Music by local author David Shirley on Tuesday, February 28. The event, which is open to the public, will be held at High Point Coffee on the and will begin at 6 pm.

Shirley will read a brief selection from the book, which features interviews with and articles about a variety of offbeat, under-appreciated musicians, including Laurie Anderson, Pere Ubu, Robert Wyatt, The Fugs, Faust, Wadada Leo Smith, Arto Lindsay, Kristin Hersh, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Bill Fay, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Vashti Bunyan and 20 other brilliantly gifted but commercially neglected performers".

The Yodeling Anarcho-Syndicalists will perform songs by Robert Wyatt and others!



Added June 2017:

The article on Robert Wyatt, "After the fall: Robert Wyatt´s Dondestan (Revisisted)", appeared in Sound Collector Audio Review, Number 4, Winter/2003-2004.

Words take the place of meaning

Richard Elliot has written a chapter called "Words take the place of meaning: sound, sense and politics in the music of Robert Wyatt" in the book "The Singer-Songwriter in Europe.
Paradigms, Politics and Place" (Edited by Isabelle Marc, Stuart Green) (Routledge 2016).

See also a previous blog post on the book "Litpop: Writing and Popular Music", with Elliot´s chapter "You can’t just say “words”’: Literature and Nonsense in the Work of Robert Wyatt".

Different Every Time - Paperback

Just in case you still haven´t got Marcus O´Dair´s wonderful "Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt" (Serpent´s Tail): It is out in glorious paperback today (9 July 2015)!

Easy to carry in bags and suitcases for the holiday.

And yes, we have mentioned this book a couple of times before (here after reading it).

Epiphanies: Life-changing Encounters With Music

50 of the Wire´s Epiphanies essays have been collected in the anthology "Epiphanies: Life-changing Encounters With Music", edited by Tony Herrington (Strange Attractor, 2015).

Lots of interesting chapters, like:

"Clive Bell on Henry Cow’s chamber music"

"Cathal Coughlan on the war songs of Slapp Happy and Art Bears"

"Robert Wyatt on the genius of Ray Charles"

All of the chapters in The Wire Shop and in this piece in The Guardian.

LITPOP

A new book to read for Christmas? How about "Litpop: Writing and Popular Music", Edited by Rachel Carroll, Teesside University, UK and Adam Hansen, Northumbria University, UK (Farnham: Ashgate, December 2014).

One of the chapters is called "You can’t just say “words”’: Literature and Nonsense in the Work of Robert Wyatt", and is written by Richard Elliott.

You may read a PDF of the article on Wyatt (pre-publication draft).

From page 1: "Both solo work and collaborations have strengthened Wyatt’s connection to a variety of art worlds – literary, musical, visual, avant-garde – influenced by the linguistic turn of the twentieth century.
This chapter offers a selective assessment of such art worlds by examining connections between Wyatt’s work and a range of literary voices, particularly those associated with nursery rhyme, nonsense verse and absurdism. A further aim is to explore the role of sense and nonsense in popular music."

Soft Machine: Out-Bloody-Rageous: Revised

OK we have hardly got hold of (and read!) Marcus O´Dair´s Robert Wyatt biography, and here is Graham Bennet: "Soft Machine: Out-Bloody-Rageous: Revised and Updated Edition" (2014, first ed. 2005).

Read a message from Graham Bennett on "What´s Rattlin´". I was tipped by Sergio Amadori´s "Hibou Anemone & Bear" blog (still not possible to link to single posts).

Only as e-book this time. Buy from Smashwords or Amazon.

Remembered For A While

"Remebered for a while", a new book on Nick Drake by Cally Callomon and Gabrielle Drake, is out in a few days.

You may want the signature box edition (at 150 GBP) containing:
"- Hardback and quarter-bound in cloth, with a printed acetate cover
- An exclusive 10ʺ vinyl of an unreleased recording of five Nick Drake tracks from a 1969 BBC John Peel session: ‘Time Of No Reply’, ‘River Man’, ‘Three Hours’, ‘Bryter Layter’ and ‘Cello Song’
- A portfolio containing three photographs of Nick taken by Julian Lloyd in 1967. Each portfolio will have a numbered authentication certificate signed by Julian Lloyd
- Over 380 full-colour pages
- Each copy signed by Gabrielle Drake and Cally Callomon
- All the contents will be housed in a cloth-covered box".

Or you may want the hardcover, straight version.

Not a biography they say, but "rather, an attempt to cast a few shards of light on Nick Drake the poet, the musician, the singer, the friend, son and brother, who was also more than all of these".

Guitar amateurs may be happy to find this in the book:
"A short musical guide to each song's key and tuning to accompany the lyrics, together with an explanatory interpretation of Nick's guitar performance, the result of several years close study by singer-songwriter Chris Healey".

Robert Wyatt Biography

Folks, 30 October Marcus Odair´s Robert Wyatt biography on Serpent´s Tail is out there in old fashioned bookshops and on net shops for you all!

"Different every time. The authorized biography of Robert Wyatt" is a 400 page story (+ index, credits sources etc), containing most of what you want to know about Robert Wyatt. The story is told in a pretty linear (straightforward?) way, from the beginning to this day, which is fine with me, because it makes it easy to go back and read once more about certain periods and happenings.

You get all the well known (but important) stuff of course like family, Canterbury, touring USA with Jimi Hendrix, the bands and their famous members (Daevid Allen Trio, Wilde Flowers, Soft Machine, Matching Mole), the fall from Lady June´s window at a party in 1973 leaving Wyatt a paraplegic, the left wing politics, the magnificent solo albums and their guest musicians, and the guest spots on other people´s albums. Puh!

The book gets quite personal too, not hiding Wyatt´s problems with too much alcohol (but no illegal drugs!), not being confident about his musical abilities and depression. But thankfully the focus is more on all of his friends and, last but not least, his relationship with wife and collaborator Alfreda "Alfie" Benge.

The author links Wyatt´s personal life with the music and the Wyatt/Benge lyrics in a very fine way.

Great intro by Jonathan Coe, and nice chapter headings taken from track titles or parts of lyrics, and lots of photos (b&w), some of them bound to be new even for people who have followed Robert Wyatt for some time. Damn, I liked the one with Alfie and Warren Beatty from the the set of "McCabe and Mrs Miller"!

And of course, Robert Wyatt is a well spoken man! Here is one comment on his slow working rate:

"I am a real minimalist, because I don´t do very much. I know some minimalists who call themselves minimalists, but they do a lot of minimalism. That is cheating!".

Buy or borrow this book as soon as you can. Don´t steal it, that´s cheating!

An Audience with Robert Wyatt

Here is a short clip from "An Audience with Robert Wyatt: In Conversation with Marcus O’Dair" at the Off the Page festival in Bristol last week, to mark the publication "Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography Of Robert Wyatt" written by Marcus O´Dair (Serpent Tail 2014).

I´m hoping to see the full talk (with better sound) of course, and will start reading the book tonight! Looking forward to that.

Added later the same Sunday, another clip:

La filosofia di Robert Wyatt

Not only is Marcus O´Dair´s book "Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt" soon to be released, but here is a fresh Italian book too: "La filosofia di Robert Wyatt. Dadaismo e voce: unlimited" by Leonardo Vittorio Arena.

70 pages in Italian will be a tough read for me, but Google translate may of course lead to some kind of understanding.

Free Jazz and Improvisation on Vinyl

How about this? An old fashioned paper book by Johannes Rød called "Free jazz and improvisation on vinyl 1965 - 1985. A guide to 60 independent labels." (Rune Grammofon 2014), and believe it or not - it might be just what you need!

Johannes Rød writes in his intro that "The aim of this book is to present a selection of independent record companies and their record releases in the field of free jazz, abstract jazz, avant-garde jazz, free improvisation and instant composing. It is a book of lists, numbers and chronologies, as well as record designs and musicians" and "The selection of labels in this book is subjective, and it is important to stress that this project does not take encyclopedic approach".

There are also forewords by Rune Kristoffersen and Mats Gustafsson and a conversation between Rune Kristoffersen and Rob Young.

A lot of records to check out here, even if we can´t get them on vinyl (*digital ouch*), and of course it will make you go through your own collection to see what you have got already (some of mine below), rediscovering old gems! Anyway, you better be careful on eBay after reading this book.

At last a typical WyattAndStuff note:

Alfreda Benge made the cover to the first album on Rift Records: Frith/Kaiser/Cusak/Rowe/Chadbourne/Williams/Ljima "Guitar Solos 3" (1979).

Pamela Windo: Him Through Me

I finally got around to read Pamela Windo´s "Him through me. Making love and music in the Sixties & Seventies" (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014 - adaptation of original e.book from 2013).

This is the story of the careers and lives of Gary Windo (1941 - 1992) and Pamela Windo. We get the music, the musicians (a lot of regulars from this blog), the drugs, love in an "open" marriage and the struggle to make room to develop her own music while being a mother and a woman in an man´s, man´s musical world.

A touching and entertaining read!

Since this is "Robert Wyatt and Stuff" just remember that Gary Windo plays on Wyatt´s "Rock Bottom", "Ruth is Stranger than Richard" and "Theatre Royal Drury Lane..", and you will also find him on the collection "Flotsam Jetsam".

Robert Wyatt is on the Gary Windo albums "His Master´s Bones" (1996), "Anglo American" (2004) and "Steam Radio Tapes" (2013).

The book has discographies and concert lists for both artists.


A digression:

I heard Gary Windo live only once, as he played with the Carla Bley Band at Molde International Jazz Festival in 1978. I can´t remember much of the concert, but I remember this guy walking over to a friend of mine and me, while we were relaxing on the Island of Hjertøya near Molde, a popular place to swim.
That was Gary Windo and he was very interested in all the sheep shit laying around on the island. He ended up suggesting we started to produce "sheep shit jackets". That never happened unfortunately.

He also wanted to swim to Molde from the Hjertøya island, but was a bit worried about sharks! We assured him there were no sharks there, but begged him not to try because of the cold water and the distance (a couple of kilometers!), and he probably went back by boat.

Robert Wyatt At Off The Page Festival In September

The fourth edition of Off The Page, The Wire’s literary festival for sound and music, is happening in Bristol Friday 26 September to Sunday 28 September.

"The festival opens on the Friday night with a special audience with Robert Wyatt to coincide with the publication of his authorised biography by Marcus O'Dair".

Øivind Hånes: Robert Wyatt (1945-)

Norwegian author Øyvind Hånes reads his poem "Robert Wyatt (1945-)", with Tine Asmundsen playing the bass.

Since you probably won´t understand a word, check out more on the poem in a previous blogpost, and follow some links there.

Desibel spirit

In 2008 we had a blog post called "Rediscover the future now!", about Norwegian author Øivind Hånes´ Robert Wyatt tribute in the magazine "Kreativt Forum".

In his first collection of poems, "Desibel spirit" (Gyldendal 2013), Hånes has a poem dedicated to Robert Wyatt, and if you don´t speak Norwegian (might be a couple!) try to Google translate it (to get the meaning of the words at least). The literature magazine Vinduet published it right here!

My description from the old blog post still apply: "--he describes Wyatt's voice with images like the wind blowing through a hollow dead trunk in an area where no other vegetation exists, and cats walking on broken eggs".

Adrian Matejka: The Big Smoke

How about some poetry for once? Let me recommend Adrian Matejka´s "The Big Smoke" (Penguin 2013), a collection of poems about the boxer Jack Johnson (1878-1946), the first african american heavyweight champion (1908 - 1915)!

Matejka lets Johnson and some of his girlfriends/wives speak through the poems, describing Johnson´s life and boxing career, from fighting for pocket money as a young boy to championship and high life, with nice cars, champagne, operas and pretty white women. This happening in a racial segregated society, and bound to cause envy and riots.

I first heard of Jack Johnson as a young student in the seventies, when the film club in Bergen screened William Cayton´s "A tribute to Jack Johnson", with the fantastic Miles Davis soundtrack, and Miles´ "A tribute to Jack Johnson" is a perfect soundtrack while reading the book too!



The music on the video is not the original soundtrack released by Miles Davis. Read more on YouTube.

Marcus O´Dair: Different Every Time

And we are still waiting for the release of Marcus O´Dair´s Robert Wyatt biography "Different Every Time" (Serpent´s Tail 2014).

New publication date: 6 November 2014.

While you are waiting, listen to both Robert Wyatt and Marcus O´Dair on Grasscut´s "Richardson Road", from the album "Unearth" (2012).

Checking Amazon for the biography, I noticed a book I have missed this year, and just have to order too: Dave Thompson - "June 1st 1974: Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Nico, Eno, Mike Oldfield and Robert Wyatt: The Greatest Supergroup of the Seventies" (Create Space Independent Publishing Platform 2013).

Any views on that one out there?

1967

One of my standing searches for Robert Wyatt news on Google (Google 15 years today - hurrah!) suggested that I read David Stuart Ryan´s new book "1967" (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2013).

It´s a novel happening in England in the year 1967 of course, one chapter for each month, with the standard ingredients sex, drugs and rock & roll, matched with well known happenings, like the Rolling Stones drug bust and the Beatles meeting the Maharishi. You have read it all before I guess.

What caught my eye was taken from the chapter "September", where we are at The Roundhouse with Paul and Sylvie for The UFO Festival:

"Just after midnight came another assault on the senses from The Soft Machine, the drummer, Robert Wyatt, stripped to the waist as he worked himself up into a frenzy of powerful ecstatic rhythm that forced Sylvie and Paul to re-enact their mating dance all over again" - and later - "...she moved fluidly to the surging rhythm of the bass guitar, the lead guitar and the crashing drumming in the background as The Soft Machine played "Hope for Happiness" at full volume right next to them on the stage....".

According to both Michael King´s "Wrong Movements. A history of Robert Wyatt" (1994) and Graham Bennett´s "Soft Machine. Out-Bloody-Rageous" (2005) Soft Machine played this concert September 9 on the same bill as Pink Floyd, The Move and Denny Laine, while Ryan throws in Arthur Brown instead of Laine. For the show I guess?

Soft Machine shared a bill with The Crazy World of Arthur Brown" a couple of times in June this year.

Any old timers visiting, who were present at any of the shows mentioned here?