Robert Wyatt

A hero of mine, from The Guardian 18.10.07, on his new LP Comicopera, out on Domino records.

...The section's final songs are bleak and brutal, but gloriously so; extreme and committed songs born out of the specifics of the current troubles in the Middle East, but with wider reach. "I had this piece of music that was really busy; I hadn't got words. Alfie came in in tears one day. She'd been watching television, the battering of Beirut. The poignancy and awfulness of it. The word 'hate' comes into it, which is a very hard word to sing - as is 'love' - but 'hate' is even harder. On a record, you hope it's a transitory [state]. But bombing somewhere, waiting until the ambulances went in and then bombing that - fucking hell. It's not anything about the specific politics of the region. It's more about the horrible tangle that happens with the backwards and forwards of cycles of violence. I know it in myself. If someone's nasty to me, I'll be even nastier back, and then you're off. War is imminent."
Wyatt says his work is instinctive. "A French journalist asked if my music was spiritual, and I said, 'Only in the original sense of spirit meaning breath.' I am a breathing animal. If anything, I get lower, not higher, in art to work things out, relying on animal instincts to guide me through what sounds right. Beyond that, it's unknowable, verbally inaccessible." He adds, with characteristic self-effacement: "That's why I work with musicians."