Robert Wyatt
Robert Wyatt
Robert Wyattis an English musician, and founding member of the influential Canterbury scene band Soft Machine, with a long and distinguished solo career. He is married to English painter and songwriter Alfreda Benge...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionDrummer
Date of Birth28 January 1945
world culture youth
The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.
singing legs bass
When I lost the use of my hi-hat and bass drum legs, I became basically a singer. I was a drummer who did a bit of singing, and then I became a singer who did a bit of percussion.
thinking people youth
I think the people who did well, or are happy, in a youth industry, they define themselves out of the business after a decade or so.
butterfly thinking littles
I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar
song character adventure
Even if you're specific about the character of the song, it's more exciting to place them, juxtapose them in such a way as to make an adventure out of the sequence of the songs.
people influence poet
Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
mean want able
It just doesnt mean anything to me, the high-profile, big money side of things. I just want enough to live on, and to be able to get on with what I do, and hang around my friends.
thinking world
I do think there are deep structural things that are wrong in the world.
disappointment done constant
What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done...
mother baby voice
When there is a voice in a piece of music, we tend to focus on the voice. That is probably something from when we were babies and we depended on hearing our mother's voice.
sports fashion thinking
I think that pop, and to some extent rock, are like sport and fashion industry in that they're about the exuberance of youth. That's the sort of subliminal ideology.
song writing thinking
We've all got to earn a living. And writing songs is what I do. But when I've done a record, it's not that I think it's better or worse than anyone else's, but if I think that nobody else would have done it if I hadn't, well then that's ok.
nice play people
I play music a lot but on my own mostly, so it was nice to be around other people. There was a certain sense a relief in the physical act of just playing and being with other musicians.
money taken paradise
We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.