{"id":4272,"date":"2024-05-28T16:39:04","date_gmt":"2024-05-28T15:39:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/?p=4272"},"modified":"2024-11-19T09:38:32","modified_gmt":"2024-11-19T09:38:32","slug":"rock-bottom-robert-wyatt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/28\/rock-bottom-robert-wyatt\/","title":{"rendered":"Rock Bottom, Robert Wyatt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s stunning 1974 album, <em>Rock Bottom<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Once you know a little about Wyatt&#8217;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&#8217;s difficult to listen to <em>Rock Bottom<\/em> without hearing the album as issuing from that life-altering moment (although much of it had been composed before the accident).<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s both incredibly beautiful and awfully saddening. Dave Gilmour said of Wyatt: \u201cHe 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.\u201d And, indeed, I find Rock Bottom a sobering listen one that seems find some kind of resolution in despair. The opening track, <em>Sea Song<\/em> is a haunting as a song can get.<\/p>\n<p><em>Rock Bottom<\/em> seems to me to be about loss and hope. It really is a wonderful album.<\/p>\n<p>[su_youtube url=&#8221;https:\/\/youtu.be\/Y1Wss9RHi_Q&#8221;]<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/i.discogs.com\/oAz6QAUEtCYMlrxc9CDowXzu-RSwcXeSUA3saAKP1j0\/rs:fit\/g:sm\/q:90\/h:500\/w:500\/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz\/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt\/YWdlcy9SLTM4ODYx\/NS0xMzEwNjg0NTY5\/LmpwZWc.jpeg\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s stunning 1974 album, Rock [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4272,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-microblog","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4272"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4280,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4272\/revisions\/4280"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}