Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt

Description

Robert Wyatt started out as the drummer and singer for Soft Machine, who shared a residency at Middle Earth with Pink Floyd and toured America with Jimi Hendrix. He brought a Bohemian and jazz outlook to the 60s rock scene, having honed his drumming skills in a shed at the end of Robert Graves' garden in Mallorca. His life took an abrupt turn after he fell from a fourth-floor window at a party and was paralysed from the waist down. He reinvented himself as a singer and composer with the extraordinary album Rock Bottom, and in the early eighties his solo work was increasingly political. Today, Wyatt remains perennially hip, guesting with artists such as Bjork, Brian Eno, Scritti Politti, David Gilmour and Hot Chip. Marcus O'Dair has talked to all of them, indeed to just about everyone who has shaped, or been shaped by, Wyatt over five decades of music history.

Marcus O'Dair is a writer, lecturer and musician. He writes on music for the Guardian, Independent and FT. He is also a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 3 and BBC 6 Music. He is also one half of the Ninja Tune act Grasscut, who have performed at the Pompidou Centre and across Europe.

An uplifting, inspiring book ... compelling and entertaining -- Mike Barnes * Mojo * English music has produced some fascinating personalities, but few are as unusual as Robert Wyatt. This excellent book captures his gentle, generous and intelligent personality, and is incidentally a very good history of the music scene in England from the sixties onwards. -- Brian Eno I loved Different Every Time ... a great biography and a terrific book -- Jason Toynbee * Senior Lecturer, The Open University * Wonderful and a huge pleasure to read ... Brilliantly researched and well told. Marcus O'Dair has written the book that Robert and Alfie deserve and I can't give higher praise than that. -- Jez Nelson * Presenter and Producer, BBC Radio 3 * An informative biography ... makes thrilling reading. -- Mark Hudson * Daily Telegraph * A fascinating biography -- Jeremy Harding * London Review of Books * Praise for Robert Wyatt 'The most eloquently lackadaisical of jazz-loving English troubadours * Guardian * If you don't believe avant-garde political music can be both playful and polemical, heartfelt and heartbreaking, you need Robert Wyatt in your life * NME * A highly idiosyncratic and intuitively melodic maverick * BBC Music * Robert Wyatt is one of the greats of English music -- Geoff Travis, Rough Trade