My attention in music recently has shifted again towards the early 1970s to the post-psychedelic stuff produced by musicians loosely grouped as the Canterbury Scene. My tastes in pyschedelia have always been in the slightly-folksy English pastoral strain which has brought me via Soft Machine and Matching Mole to Robert Wyatt’s stunning 1974 album, Rock Bottom.
Once you know a little about Wyatt’s life and that, in 1973 at the age of 28 he fell out of a window drunk and broke his back leaving him permanently paralysed from the waist down, it’s difficult to listen to Rock Bottom without hearing the album as issuing from that life-altering moment (although much of it had been composed before the accident).
It’s both incredibly beautiful and awfully saddening. Dave Gilmour said of Wyatt: “He has one of those voices which just tear at your soul. He really does have a voice which endears itself to you and tugs at the heartstrings.” And, indeed, I find Rock Bottom a sobering listen one that seems find some kind of resolution in despair. The opening track, Sea Song is a haunting as a song can get.
Rock Bottom seems to me to be about loss and hope. It really is a wonderful album.
