Divine Comedian

If any musician could be said to simultaneously occupy the positions of quintessential English outsider artist and national institution, it’s Robert Wyatt.

The Soft Machine founder and cult solo act (his plaintive version of Costello’s ‘Shipbuilding’ was a Peel perennial) has just crowned an extraordinary career with the equally extraordinary song cycle Comicopera. The new album also marks an inspired move to Domino, a label that for years championed left-field legends like Royal Trux and Will Oldham, before scoring major chart success with Franz Ferdinand and the Arctic Monkeys.
“We’re having a great honeymoon, I tell you,” Wyatt says. “We couldn’t survive intact on Ryko, they were lovely to us, but they got took over by a big American company. There was a sniff of asset-stripping in the air, and it was in my contract that I couldn’t be used as collateral in those sort of dog-eat-dog takeover things. So we were a bit stranded, but we had a friend in Ryko in publishing who’d moved to Domino and he said, ‘Look, why don’t you speak to some of the people here?’
“And we did and they came up to the studio and were great, no flashy showbiz stuff at all, just really nice straight people who wanted to get the music done and make it work, like the best record companies I’ve known in the past, like when I went to Rough Trade with Geoff Travis. They’re just on a completely human scale as people, and remain so now they’ve got the luck they deserved and had some whacking great successful bands on their books.”
One thing is glaringly apparent from Comicopera: Robert is one of the few artists who owns a whole colour on the musical spectrum, an unmistakably Wyattian consistency of tone and mood.
“Maybe it’s that I come from a sort of in-betweeny generation,” he considers. “My musical education went backwards, y’know, I started off listening to classical music and then jazz, and only then did I listen to pop. I really like the clarity and folk music quality of pop, the fact that it’s accessible music from people to people with no pissing about, but I’ve got all this other stuff in my background.”
Wyatt’s parents were of a bohemian bent, and his elder brother owned an extensive collection of jazz records (Robert himself was taught the drums by a visiting American jazz drummer, George Neidorf). Consequently, his records utilise the grammar of jazz without ever sounding arch or ‘experimental’.
“It’s not an add-on for me,” he says. “It’s a way of thinking about music, jazz. To me, classical music is about the overall sort of sweep of a piece of architecture in the sound; pop music is about direct communication, and jazz is about, I dunno, trusting the moment, so it’s really the philosophical stuff from all three, different aspects of what can be done, that I need to explore somehow.
“Jazz musicians have this vertiginous leap into the unknown in common with stand-up comedians. They’ve got a few things to launch themselves and then they just… go off. As we all do in real life when we have a conversation or meet people. There’s no script when you go to a party, is there? But they’re actually doing that through music, and it just seemed to be a natural way to work.”
Given that Comicopera features cameo performances from Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera, Paul Weller and Brian Eno, does Robert cast the musicians in advance, or do they just wander by Wyatt Towers?
“That’s a very good word for what I do, I cast them, you’re dead right, it’s all characters to me, people. I have to do what Mingus and Ellington did, which is get specific people in there, people with quite interesting and wilful characters, but also with the generosity and kindness to just play what’s necessary for my songs. Everybody does get to be themselves, but in a context they might not have set up. The great thing about people with their own trajectory is paradoxically they can afford to be the most modest in what they contribute to any particular thing, ’cos they’re not thinking, ‘I’ve got to get heard’ or, ‘When’s my bit coming in?’ They tend to be kind hearted, outward-looking people.”
Finally, has Robert noticed the influence of his music on acts like the High Llamas or Radiohead, specifically Amnesiac?
“I’m not that familiar with their stuff, but I’ve been told that, and I suppose in an uneasy way that makes me feel good. I remember the tenor player Lester Young, he was before your time I imagine, he was the only person who played with Count Basie for years. And then in the ’50s a whole bunch of people picked up on Lester Young and started playing like him, and they were younger so they did it with more chutzpah and dexterity than him in his old age. And he felt very flattered, but he said, ‘These people have taken the best of me – what’s left of me?’ (laughs) But I suppose anybody who keeps on bashing away decade after decade, if any of it resonates, then it all goes into the general pool for people to pick up as they want, as is the folk tradition really.”

Comicopera is out now on Domino