Robert Wyatt. Photgraph: PR
Photographs of Robert Wyatt often show him staring into the distance, stroking his beard, and having a jolly good think about occupied Palestine. It's not how he comes across when you see him being interviewed. He's usually chortling away to himself, like he's just had a particularly enjoyable shag. Perhaps he has.
Hearing him sing is a whole different thing. Though he now looks like a cool Father Christmas, he has the voice of a delicate melancholy flower. Ryuichi Sakamoto called it "the saddest in the world". It is. Endearingly self-deprecating, Robert has compared his faltering falsetto to "Jimmy Somerville on Valium". In terms of expressing emotion - meaning sounding human - I'd put him right up there with Elvis Presley.
This delightfully dippy, lippy old hippy has been making music for 40 years. He's disowned his early days, singing and drumming with Soft Machine. He says he reached musical adulthood in 1973, after he broke his spine falling from a window at a party ("A good career move...").
Rock Bottom was written in hospital "in a trance". Most regard this album's mellow submarine sketches of pain as his masterpiece, but there was even better to come.
He once told a journalist how he heard one of his records played on Radio Free Europe in the early 80s, and vowed "to make unmisusable music". It led to an amazing series of agitpop singles for Rough Trade. Popular music has its fair share of armchair socialists, this wheelchair communist is the real deal. His political songs are far from tub-thumping. He often sounds despairing, defeated even. As full of political contradictions as musical ones, Wyatt still describes himself as a Marxist-Leninist. But his best album, Old Rottenhat - like all that's come after - owes more to Robert reading the anarchist Noam Chomsky.
He's pretty good at love songs, too. The beyond sublime O Caroline apart, they're hymns to Alfreda Benge, his wife, muse, teacher, co-writer and album cover painter. Alfie and Bertie seem like a match made in heaven on earth. Wyatt recently revealed how their relationship reached rock bottom last year because of his drinking (He's now in AA). The most heart-smashing songs on his new album, Comicopera - Stay and Just As You Are - are the sound of them pulling back together.
And, as ever, if you share Wyatt's "everlasting hatred" of US imperial hegemony, you'll love this record. He explains its three "acts" with typical bathos; Robert thinks people might want to go and do something else after listening to him warbling wistfully for 20 minutes.
Lo-fi, leftwing and left-field, Wyatt's revered as one of rock's most avant gardeners. Robert says: "I try to make completely normal records, but they must come out funny." Tellingly, he had a hit with a cover of The Monkees' I'm a Believer. He only troubled this cruel world's charts again after Elvis Costello and Clive Langer constructed Shipbuilding around his voice.
Wyatt uses the distinctly un-rock'n'roll analogy of good music being like getting in a warm bath: "Just sort of melting into the world ... I want to get lost and diffused." Which might explain all those songs about sea and soup. And maybe even the sauce.
It's a pretty good description of what his records do. It's always wonderful to climb back into Robert Wyatt's bath and get lost in his music again.
