Music Arcades: Robert Wyatt: Going Back a Bit - A Little History of Robert Wyatt

Bought when it came out, in the mid-nineties, on the strength of positive press notices and my enjoyment of some of his eighties records plus that Peel session version of I'm a Believer. I was hoping that this album might give me a CD copy of that version — it's billed as a collection of rarities, after all — but it turned out to be the single version, less affecting to these ears.

One thing that did move me was O Caroline — and it still does, though the line "I love you still, Caroline" was closer to the bone then, as I'd only recently split up with Caroline. "If you call this sentimental crap, you'll make me mad / because you know that I would not sing about some passing fad."

Kicking off with "I can still remember the last time we played Top Gear" and reaching "Erik Satie gets my rocks off, Cage is a dream / Phillip Glass is a Mineralist to the extreme" via the usual doses of international socialism, it's the lyrics that strike me most about this collection.

Though, to be honest, after 16 years in my collection, I've never got to know it very well. At nearly two and a half hours, it was too dense to yield to the cursory attention I had to offer it. Listening again now, I come across Wyatt collaborations I'd never heard of. The Mineralist song is from a Nick Mason album, written by Carla Bley, with Mike Mantler on trumpet. There are also a couple of songs off Mantler's Hapless Child album from the mid-seventies. These include Terje Rypdal on guitar and Jack DeJohnette on drums, but, aside from the difference in style from Messrs Hackett and Collins respectively, musically they could almost be tracks from Genesis's Trick of the Tail or Wind and Wuthering. Edward Gorey's lyrics to The Doubtful Guest, in particular, could be Squonk or All in a Mouse's Night. The backwaters of jazz-prog crossover turn out to be more extensive than I imagined.