Different Every Time: The Authorized Biography of Robert Wyatt

by Marcus O'Dair

Overview

Robert Wyatt started out as the drummer and singer for Soft Machine, who shared a residency at Middle Earth with Pink Floyd and toured America with the Jimi Hendrix Experience. He brought a jazz mindset to the 1960’s rock scene, having honed his drumming skills in a shed at the end of Robert Graves’ garden in Mallorica, Spain.

Wyatt's life took an abrupt turn in 1973, when he fell from a fourth-floor window at a party and was paralyzed from the waist down. He reinvented himself as a singer and composer with the extraordinary album Rock Bottom, which he followed with an idiosyncratic string of records that uniquely combine the personal and political.

Along the way, Robert has worked with the likes of Brian Eno, Bjork, Jerry Dammers, Charlie Haden, David Gilmour, Paul Weller and Hot Chip. Marcus O’Dair has talked to all of them—indeed anyone who has shaped, or been shaped by Wyatt over five decades. Different Every Time is the first biography of Robert Wyatt, and it was written with his full participation. It includes illustrations by Alfreda Benge and photographs from Robert’s personal archive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619026766
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	09/01/2015
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	464
File size:	37 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Marcus O’Dair has written on music for The Guardian, The Independent, Financial Times and Jazzwise, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio. He co-leads the Popular Music course at Middlesex University and is one half of Grasscut, who have released two acclaimed albums and toured across Europe. He lives in London with his wife, Charlotte and their toddler, Iris.

Editorial Reviews

“English music has produced some fascinating personalities, but few are as unusual as Robert Wyatt. This excellent book captures his gentle, generous and intelligent personality, and is incidentally a very good history of the music scene in England from the 1960’s onward.” –Brian Eno

“Wyatt is one of the greats of English music.” –Geoff Travis, Rough Trade

“If you don’t believe avant-garde political music and be both playful and polemical, heartfelt and heartbreaking, you need Robert Wyatt in your life.” –NME

From the Publisher

2015-06-16
A British music journalist (Guardian, Jazzwise, and others) debuts with an account of the troubled but richly musical life of the legendary drummer, composer, and lyricist—now 70—who has blended jazz, rock, and many other influences into works that both startle and entertain. O'Dair provides a favorable view of the multitalented Wyatt, though the author does not neglect his subject's struggles with his libido (his first marriage imploded because of it), depression, and alcohol (which began when he toured with Jimi Hendrix), a substance-abuse battle that damaged his personal relationships. Eventually, Wyatt sobered up. The majority of the book is a discussion of Wyatt's music. O'Dair divides the book into two "sides" (like a record), and after some introductory pages about Wyatt's boyhood (which included a family friendship with poet Robert Graves), he launches into the artist's musical evolution. Adept on more than one instrument, Wyatt was a superb drummer, but his drumming (at least with the full kit) ended in 1973 when he went out a window at a party and suffered a spinal injury that has placed him in a wheelchair ever since. We learn lots of lush details about Wyatt's involvement in the Soft Machine, his legendary group, in Matching Mole, and his countless appearances on the albums of others (a discography appears in the backmatter). O'Dair shows us how Wyatt was not too fond of live performances—one affecting photo shows him, microphone in hand, singing backstage while others play in the light. We also see a musician whom others were drawn to and a man who was an avowed communist, a position he dropped after Tiananmen Square and other barbarities—though he remains a committed lefty. A light, admiring, illuminating text that will appeal to groupies, general readers, and most others in between.

Kirkus Reviews