The first Robert Wyatt album I ever heard was his 1974 masterpiece ‘Rock Bottom’ which was recommended to me in the mid-90s. It struck me as pretty far out at the time, unaccustomed as my ears were to anything avant-garde or jazz related. I soon became addicted, however, to its strange watery sounds, Robert’s falsetto voice and the ornate beauty of his lyrics. In fact I didn’t listen to anything else for three months.

It was like discovering a whole other world of music. I was well excited when ‘Shleep’ was released in 1997 in the midst of my obsession. In some ways it is hard to believe that there is such a massive amount of time it and ‘Rock Bottom’. I checked out all his other work but in my opinion these two, his first and his latest seem to be magically linked to each other. His voice is the same, his lyrics have the obsession with water and wildlife, his natural surroundings and more generally it has the same strange evocative otherworldliness. They are his two masterpieces.

It is particularly notable for how well it is played and recorded. To someone who spends most of their time listening to production line lo-fi alternative rock it is a revelation to hear something as intricate and delicate as this. Wyatt’s percussion and bass playing is stunning and the vocal tracks are so intense and unpredicatable that it takes half a dozen listens before you can even get a handle on what is going on. There is some brilliant footage in the film ‘Little Red Riding Hood hit the road’ where you can see them in the studio recording the album – Eno, Manzanera and Wyatt totally on-fire picking out melodies like wizards in a recording studio.

There’s quite a large amount of gentle English country humour thrown in. ‘A Sunday in Madrid’ is made up of his father in law’s eccentric observations on a day trip in the city. ‘Free Will and Testament’ is pretty much a musical arrangement of some metaphysical head-scratching and ‘Heaps of Sheep’ is based around months of insomia when Robert would wander round his house pissed off having William Blake style visions.

My most abiding memory of listening to this album was in 1999 waking up on a Thames canal boat at 7am with this on my walkman – unable to sleep-in because of the tides and the noisy birds. For the first time in my life I think I understood what the Romatic Poetry thing is all about. I mean — how’s about this for a Wordsworth-esque lyric?

“Over an ocean away,
like salmon, turning back for Naryan
to the delta with the weeds tumbling down.
Glide over sand, around the rocks back through
the wavering weeds, and the turds in the way,
riverswell,
on the route along over gravel to the weirs of the tributaries
against the icy waterflow to Maryan.” 

Just from the way he sings the word ‘tributaries’ you can tell what a complete genius he is. ‘Shleep’ is a great starting point for anyone new to RW and also to old hands who didn’t get this for one reason or another. 

Duckbreath

**His entire back catalogue is flawless except for ‘End of An Ear’ which is prob. for avant pros only.