ABSTRACT
The body of work produced by British singer and composer Robert Wyatt over the course of more than four decades shows a fascination with the ways in which words, music and sound can be made to interrogate each other. While he has been a writer of songs from his early days with the jazz-rock group Soft Machine onwards, in his solo career Wyatt has used his song lyrics as ways of exploring the borderlines between direct, ‘intimate’ address and more distanced, cryptic or coded styles. His music, which has drawn on numerous genres and styles, has aided in this blurring of boundaries, and Wyatt has often focused on sonic experimentation, even at the seeming expense of conventional ‘songwriting’. Then there is Wyatt’s voice. When we speak of singer-songwriters we tend to consider voice as both literary tool and musical instrument, and of the resulting persona(s) of an author and a vocalist. In Wyatt’s case, both writing style and vocal instrument are utterly distinctive, and this combined ‘voice’ has served to mediate, and occasionally muddy, the already playful relationship between words and music in Wyatt’s work. 1 Much of his own songwriting, with its predilections for nonsense and the absurd, is articulated via a childlike sense of wonder at the world and a desire to cling to domestic comforts. This is supplemented by a more explicitly political body of work, reflecting Wyatt’s engagement with left-wing politics and an ever-increasing geopolitical outlook. This political work takes the form of both self-written material and cover versions of work by international singer-songwriters, a process which contributes to a global network of committed music.
