Rock Bottom

Rock Bottom is the second solo album by former Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt. It was released on 26 July 1974 by Virgin Records. The album was produced by Pink Floyd’s drummer Nick Mason, and was recorded following a 1973 accident which left Wyatt a paraplegic. He enlisted musicians including Ivor Cutler, Hugh Hopper, Richard Sinclair, Laurie Allan, Mike Oldfield and Fred Frith in the recording.

The band Matching Mole disbanded soon after the release of Little Red Record in 1972, and Wyatt began composing the material that later appeared on Rock Bottom. The album’s preparation was interrupted by an accident on the night of 1 June 1973. During a raucous party, at Vale Court, Hall Road, Maida Vale in London, an inebriated Wyatt fell from a fourth-floor bathroom window and was paralyzed from the waist down. Wyatt has used a wheelchair ever since. He later called the event the beginning of his maturity and in hospital he continued to work on the songs that would appear on Rock Bottom “in a trance”. “I was just relieved that I could do something from a wheelchair,” he said. “If anything, being a paraplegic helped me with the music because being in hospital left me free to dream, and to really think through the music.”

Within six months he was back at work in the recording studio and appeared on stage at London’s Rainbow Theatre with Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, who lent financial support by playing a benefit concert for him. Although the music itself is intense and often harrowing, and the lyrics to the songs are dense and obviously deeply personal, Wyatt has denied that the material was a direct result of the accident and the long period of recuperation. Indeed, much of the album had been written while in Venice in early 1973 prior to Wyatt’s accident, where his partner and future wife (the poet Alfreda Benge) was working as an assistant editor on Nicolas Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now.

Having written most of the songs while in Venice, before his fall, Wyatt went to record them a few months after his accident. By the time he and Alfreda “were stuck for somewhere to stay, and one of the people who helped was Delfina Entrecanales, who had a farm in Wiltshire around a village called Little Bedwyn”. Part of the album was recorded there. They brought a “recording van and parked it in a field behind and put cables through the windows, so it wasn’t really soundproofed – a few donkeys and tractors going by are on the tape”. (Delfina Canales is “the” Delfina who owned the “wineglasses”, “tray” and “small battery” included in the “Personnel” section below as played by Wyatt). The rest of the album was recorded at Virgin’s Manor studio at Shipton-on-Cherwell and CBS Studios in London.

Rock Bottom has been released with two different covers, both featuring artworks by Benge. The cover found on the original LP and several reissues is a pencil drawing of a scene at an ocean shore. The upper area of the cover, inspired by a Victorian-era book cover, depicts activity along the beach and off to the horizon, while the bottom third gives an underwater view of strange animal and plant life in the sea. Details include three teenage girls playing at the beach, a faraway steamer, seagulls and sandcastles. Benge intended the cover’s subdued style to strike a contrast with the dominant trend of fantastical progressive rock album art, best typified by Roger Dean’s science fiction-inspired artwork for Yes. At a time when “all the covers were getting more and more complicated, competing with each other for pizzazz”, Benge said, “the only way to counter that… was to be absolutely minimal and quiet.”

  1. At the beginning of May, 1975, Robert Wyatt played with Henry Cow in Paris. Soon after that he recorded a session for the French TV, with rare appearances of ‘Sea Song’ and ‘Alifib’.

  2. In this six part interview, Aymeric Leroy (of famed Calyx website, What’s Rattlin’ and other endless Canterbury publications) talks to Robert Wyatt about the making of Rock Bottom.

interview.

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Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt by Marcus O’Dair

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.

Biography.

If I recall correctly, there is no accurate knowledge of the whereabouts of the original Rock Bottom recording tapes. I thought (well, more kind of imagined) how lovely it would be if Nick Mason and Robert Wyatt entered the studio after 50 years, trying to figure out what the hell happened back then at Delfina’s Farm House 🙂

So instead, I started playing with various AI software, bloating very proudly how they can separate tracks, remove vocals etc. Maybe it’s the unique production of Rock Bottom that gave those apps a really hard time, but in the end, I got excellent results, removing 95%-100% of the vocals, what left me in awe. Firstly, from the capabilities of those apps, but most importantly: how amazing Rock Bottom sounds, when you hear all those hidden layers, current and undercurrent soundscapes that make this album even more wonderful, 50 years later.

album-art
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Bass Guitar: Richard Sinclair
Voice, Keyboards, Percussion [James’ Drum]: Robert Wyatt

Bass Guitar: Hugh Hopper
Drums: Laurie Allan
Voice, Keyboards, Guitar, Percussion [Delfina’s Wineglass]: Robert Wyatt

Bass Guitar: Richard Sinclair
Trumpet: Mongezi Feza
Voice: Ivor Cutler
Voice, Keyboards, Percussion [James’ Drum, Delfina’s Tray, Small Battery]: Robert Wyatt

Bass Guitar: Hugh Hopper
Voice, Keyboards: Robert Wyatt

Bass Clarinet, Alto Clarinet [Tenor]: Gary Windo
Bass Guitar: Hugh Hopper
Voice: Alfreda Benge
Voice, Keyboards, Percussion [James’ Drum]: Robert Wyatt

Bass Guitar: Richard Sinclair
Drums: Laurie Allan
Guitar: Mike Oldfield
Viola: Fred Frith
Voice, Concertina [Baritone]: Ivor Cutler
Voice, Keyboards: Robert Wyatt

Engineer: Dick Palmer, Steve Cox
Engineer [Assistant]: Toby Bird
Illustration: Alfreda Benge
Liner Notes: Robert Wyatt
Photography By: Pennie Smith
Producer: Nick Mason
Typography, Layout: Phil Smee
Written-by [Drones And Songs]: Robert Wyatt

Credits.

Lyrics.

You look different every time you come
From the foam-crested brine
Your skin shining softly in the moonlight
Partly fish, partly porpoise, partly baby sperm whale
Am I yours? Are you mine to play with?
Joking apart – when you’re drunk you’re terrific when you’re drunk
I like you mostly late at night you’re quite alright
But I can’t understand the different you in the morning
When it’s time to play at being human for a while please smile!
You’ll be different in the spring, I know
You’re a seasonal beast like the starfish that drift in with the tide
So until your your blood runs to meet the next full moon
You’re madness fits in nicely with my own
Your lunacy fits neatly with my own, my very own
We’re not alone

Seaweed tangled in our home from home
Reminds me of your rocky bottom
Please don’t wait for the paperweight
Err on the good side
Touch us when we collapse
Into the water we’ll go head over heel
We’ll not grow fat inside
The mammary gland
Into the water we’ll go
Head over heel
A head behind me
Buried deep in the sand

Orlandon’t tell me, oh no
Don’t say oh God
Don’t tell me oh dear me
Heaven’s above oh no
I can’t stand it
Stop
Please oh deary me
What in heaven’s name?
Oh blimey mercy me woe are we oh dear oh
Stop it
Stop it
You’ve been so kind I know I know
So why did I hurt you?
I didn’t mean to hurt you
But I’ll keep trying and I’m sure you will too

Not nit not nit no not
Nit nit folly bololey
Alifi my larder
Alifi my larder
I can’t forsake you or
Forsqueak you
Alifi my larder
Alifi my larder
Confiscate or make you
Late you you
Alifi my larder Alifi my larder
Not nit not nit no not
Nit nit folly bololy
Burlybunch, the water mole
Hellyplop and fingerhole
Not a wossit bundy, see ?
For jangle and bojangle
Trip trip
Pip pippy pippy pip pip landerim
Alifi my larder
Alifi my larder
(I’m not your larder,
jammy jars and mustard.
I’m not your dinner,
you soppy old custard.
And what’s a bololey
when it’s a folly?
I’m not your larder,
I’m your dear little dolly.
But when plops get too helly
I’ll fill up your belly.
I’m not your larder,
I’m Alife your guarder).

In the garden of England dead moles lie inside their holes
The dead-end tunnels crumble in the rain underfoot
Innit a shame?

Can’t you see them?
Can’t you see them?
roots can’t hold them
Bugs console them

I fight with the handle of my little brown broom
I pull out the wires of the telephone
I hurt in the head and
I hurt in the acting bone
Now
I smash up the telly with remains of the broken phone
I fighting for the crust of the little brown loaf
I want it I want it I want it give it to me
(I give it you back when I finish the lunchtea)
I lie in the road try to trip up the passing cars
Yes me and the hedgehog
We bursting the tyres all day
As we roll down the highway towards the setting sun
I reflect on the life of the Highwayman yum yum
Now I smash up the telly and what’s left of
The broken phone

Stream.

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Based on Robert Wyatt’s album, “Rock Bottom”, the movie is a tormented love story between a young artist couple immersed in the creative and groundbreaking whirlwind of the post-hippie culture of the early ’70s. Drugs will turn a dream summer into a nightmare through a dreamlike journey, set to Wyatt’s soundtrack, taking us from desolation to a search for hope.

A universal story about the transformative power of art and music.

Movie.