Author: wamdines

Rosalie Cunningham’s psych-infused third solo album, To Shoot Another Day, is a reminder of what makes her so special. She tells Prog about the joys of DIY recording, her passion for Bond soundtracks and the anticlimax of releasing records today

“I can do whatever the fuck I like – it’s my album,” declares Rosalie Cunningham, explaining the outlook that inspired the title track of new album To Shoot Another Day. On the cover she stares through the viewfinder of a vintage camera; it’s her way of “breaking the fourth wall,” she says.

“On that song I’m talking about the process of making an album, but through the lens of making a film, where I can be anything in my own screenplay. That’s the way I wanted to open my album. The verses, which are like script notes, describe the scene, and essentially say, ‘This is my work, and I can do what I want.’”

It’s a statement Cunningham hasn’t always been fully comfortable embracing. It’s five years since the release of her self-titled solo debut, her first full release since she’d disbanded Purson in 2017. It was was testament to the fact that she had been, and remains, the driving component behind her endeavours. “Not everybody knew that I was the creative force behind Purson,” she says. “So with my first album I felt that I had to throw everything at it to prove that I could do it all.”

The follow-up, Two Piece Puzzle, saw her ramp up the theatrics; but since it was released during the pandemic she had “tentative” feelings about its reception. Perhaps third time’s the charm? To Shoot Another Day finds Cunningham unencumbered by her previous constraints; and it’s also the first release she’s recorded and mixed entirely at her home studio in Southend-on-Sea.

“There were incredibly extensive, long days,” she says. “I get into a hyper-focus at night; I kind of forget to drink water or go to the toilet and just go deep. It’s a blessing and a curse having a home studio, because there’s no clock to tell you to stop.”

Though tempted to retire to a more traditional recording environment, she powered through with the support of partner and guitarist Roscoe Wilson. “I actually think it’s the best-sounding album I’ve done. I’ve spent thousands in studios in the past and not got the same results – and this time I’ve been a hell of a lot more relaxed. I’m still enjoying listening to it, which is insane for me. Normally I can’t listen to a thing I’ve done until about five years later. So that, to me is, a really good sign.”

The level of attention she’s paid shows in her unshrinking journeys into different musical territories, expanding from psychedelic prog to unexpected moments of frisky lounge jazz (as heard on Heavy Pencil – with clarinet and saxophone contributions from Gong’s Ian East – and In The Shade Of The Shadows), fuzzy psych metal (Spook Racket) and poppier melodies (Denim Eyes and Stepped Out Of Time). To Shoot Another Day is her most diverse release to date; although she insists it has nothing to do with a change in musical taste.

“It’s just a progression of me as an artist,” she says, noting her continued devotion to Pink Floyd, Genesis and King Crimson. “It’s more to do with exploring genres that I was too scared to indulge in. Maybe I thought they were too predictable or too cheesy – now I’ve let go. Now there’s some really pop elements there, and there’s some bluesy elements, is definitely my partner’s influence.”

Wilson co-wrote some of the songs and also helped the album’s direction to evolve thematically, based on the couple’s shared love for James Bond soundtracks; both were obsessed with the spy movies as children.

“It’s just a genre of music that’s always seduced me,” Cunningham says. “I find the whole vibe fascinating, so I’ve had a very natural inclination for it. I’m dramatic with my own music, so it kind of fits.” She adds: “I’m trying to coin the phrase ‘spy-chedelic rock’ – but everyone thinks it’s just a typo, so it’s not catching on yet!”

In spite of the strong espionage influence, she refutes the idea of it being a concept album. “It is bookended by two songs that share a theme, similar to the tried-and-tested trope of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, where it only has a slightly developed theme.”

Just as the title track correlates the arts of music and film, closer The Premiere revisits the idea, humorously exploring her frustrations over the contrast between album launches and red-carpeted movie premieres. “Releasing an album in this day and age, you’re just sitting there in your pyjamas and you’re like, ‘Wow, it’s premiering all over the world!’ It should be a really big deal in terms of the kind of connection that we have with the rest of the planet – but it’s really anti-climatic. There’s a lot of moaning about my social media duties embedded in the lyrics across this album too.”

As well as drawing from the shadowy and seductive world of Bond, To Shoot Another Day finds colour in observing the ordinary moments of the everyday. Timothy Martin’s Conditioning School – named after the founder and chairman of the Wetherspoons pub chain – is set in the mundane and commonplace scenario of teens getting drunk on the weekend; but it’s developed into something shrewd and impishly psychedelic.

“I was looking around Wetherspoons in Southend on a Friday night, and it was just teenagers drinking sweet alcohol buckets, like WKD, using just one straw, and getting absolutely plastered. It’s just hilarious that that’s allowed! As soon as you’re 18 you can go and do that, and they just actively encourage it. Not that I’m judging, of course – I was that 18-year-old too!”

More playfulness can be found in the instrumental The Smut Peddler, a wink to the nickname she gave Roscoe. “He can be quite smutty!” she laughs. “That was just an instrumental riff that I had hanging around on guitar.” Elsewhere, Spook Racket unravels the fantastical and mystical side of showmanship. “It’s a term I picked up in one of my favourite books, Nightmare Alley [by William Lindsay Gresham].

“It’s about the conning mediums who used to go around in the early 20th century. I translated the term to a live band, exploring the magic of it. I was just thinking about how someone from that time, if they saw a rock show now, they’d think it was magic. They’d wonder how the hell it was being done. Like, where are the wires and pulleys?”

No such illusionary devices are required for Cunningham’s live performances; just the talent of her own band. “They’re all great musicians – virtuosos in their own right,” she says. “Live, there are always a lot of extended improvisational bits, which I think this album definitely has room for, with all the new blues and jazz elements. Also, we’re a more bombastic rock show live than I ever have been on record, so it’ll be more energetic than before.”

Despite having been part of the prog scene for more than a decade, Rosalie Cunningham still exists very much in her own space; no one does it quite like her. “How do I say this without being mean about modern music?” she reflects. “There’s a lot of this new wave of classic rock stuff, which I find highly cringeworthy. It follows every cliché imaginable, and I do wonder why that is.

“There are amazing artists out there, but you’ve got to scratch the surface a little bit. The ones that seem to get a lot of attention seem to be because they’re pouring all their efforts into social media and promotion, and not songwriting. And people have such short attention spans these days – they’re just throwing in common denominators.”

While she admits to a minor concern that To Shoot Another Day might be a little “too pop” for the typical prog listener, she says she’s always felt accepted within the genre. “The prog audience is especially broad-minded. It’s a great community because I don’t have to worry about anything being too ‘out there’ for them. I’m very grateful for that.”

Liz works on keeping the Louder sites up to date with the latest news from the world of rock and metal. Prior to joining Louder as a full time staff writer, she completed a Diploma with the National Council for the Training of Journalists and received a First Class Honours Degree in Popular Music Journalism. She enjoys writing about anything from neo-glam rock to stoner, doom and progressive metal, and loves celebrating women in music.

Being a heavy metal journalist is the best job in the world, but there are only so many times you can wring a headline out of whatever Metallica did this week before you go insane. People enter this line of work for various reasons and, for me, it was finding new, exciting, brutal shit and screaming about it from the rooftops. So now I’m going to do just that.

Below, you’ll find 11 mind-bending acts that I’ve long wanted to write about despite never getting a decent-enough excuse. From clamouring thrash obsessed with pizza to power metal made by monks, these free-thinkers need to be heard to be believed. Have a read before my boss turns back around and asks why that piece ranking Slipknot’s masks in reverse-order of sexiness isn’t on his desk yet.

Blindfolded And Led To The Woods

These New Zealanders are extreme metal’s ugly duckling story. They formed as a “funny” deathcore troupe and released a debut EP called Armed To The Teeth With Jelly Beans. So 2010s, so random, LOL, etc. Mercifully, they enjoyed a glow-up over the ensuing years, then emerged from the pandemic with Nightmare Withdrawals: a choking ooze of noise, tech-death and breakdowns. 2023’s Rejecting Obliteration doubled down on the density, affirming these former jesters as one of the underground’s most disorienting forces.

Briqueville

The moment you accept you’ll never understand Briqueville is the moment you’ll fall in love with Briqueville. At first, the Belgians seem like a riddle to solve, playing instrumental but shamanic post-metal in hoods and robes. It’s tempting to search for the meaning behind those riffs, but that way only madness lies. In a world where Sleep Token and Ghost have conditioned us to expect lore from masked bands, it’s refreshing to get one that just writes avant-garde music for its own brilliant sake.

Crippling Alcoholism

If Nine Inch Nails were somehow creepier, they’d be Crippling Alcoholism. New album With Love From A Padded Room is a nightmarish concept piece where each lyric tells the story of a prisoner in a made-up jail. It coalesces noise rock, metal, goth and lashings of synthesisers underneath Tony Castrato’s baritone vocals, half-sung and half-spoken like a looming maniac. It’s not just the atmosphere, either – the fact the Bostonians know how to write a memorable hook means their songs cruelly linger long after you’ve stopped listening.

Ecclesia

Have you seen that priest who went viral last year by nailing the drum part to Meshuggah’s Bleed? Ecclesia are that guy but a whole band. They’re a hooded order of monks who, if their press releases are to be believed, were united by the Vatican to fight heresy with the power of trad-metal. 2024’s Ecclesia Militans is a collection of hymns about burning witches, exorcising demons and redeeming souls, converging into a rare metal album that makes virtue sound badass.

Grorr

France may be the greatest hotbed of forward-thinking metal in the world right now. As well as such pioneers as Gojira and Alcest, it’s giving us underground innovators like Hypn0se and Slift. Grorr (their name an onomatopoeia for the sound of a death growl) only strengthen that argument. The Pyrenees-based originals mix djent with world music, as epitomised by latest album Ddulden’s Last Flight, which adapts an unfilmed movie script into a saga of hard riffs and twanging Asian folk.

Lord Buffalo

Not to be confused with psych outfit King Buffalo, these Americans lead a genre that fans call “mud-folk”. You’ll see why the quartet had to receive their own catch-all when you listen to them, because the tag “country-noise-metal” wouldn’t exactly roll off the tongue. They carry the tar-smoked soul of Americana through walls of scratching riffs and equally discordant violins, but all that roughness is smoothed out by the pipes of frontman Daniel Pruitt. How this lot are so under-heard is baffling.

Love Sex Machine

One of my hardest laughs of 2024 came when I saw Love Sex Machine at Pelagic Fest. This is a collective of four burly, bearded Frenchmen unleashing riffs heavy enough to make Morbid Angel shit themselves. But all of their lyrics are tongue-in-cheek yarns about fucking, aliens and warfare. So, how could my sides not split when, while onstage, the band’s sonic fury gets interrupted by their singer saying, “This next song is called Killed By A Monster Cock”? Just… genius work, lads.

Obscure Sphinx

Who are the scariest metal band ever? Is it Mayhem with their murderous history, or Amenra with their panic-attack-like intensity? How about Slayer when they hit terminal velocity? Wherever you align, I’d humbly like to add Obscure Sphinx to the conversation. The Polish enigmas release noxiously claustrophobic post-metal, and their grip on your neck only tightens every time frontwoman Zofia Fraś snarls like a hellhound. If those vocals don’t haunt your nightmares, the art of 2013 album Void Mother certainly will.

Pizza Death

Ever heard of ‘pizza thrash’? It’s a condescending label thrown at bands who deal in high-speed, 80s-style aggro with snapback caps and party-hard lyrics. Pizza Death, however, wear it like a badge of honour. Each of the Australians’ rapid tracks genuflect before the glutinous, with titles like Napalm Cheese and Pizzapocalypse to their name. Is it stupid? Yes. But lay down one of their records and you’ll get a saucy thrashback to the likes of Suicidal Tendencies and even Napalm Death.

Psychonaut

Stick on some Psychonaut and they’ll gladly pull you through a wormhole ear-first. The Belgians may only be a power trio, but the way their space rock blockbusters escalate and deviate sounds like they have the force of a thousand men. The echoing, distorted vocals only make the whole journey even more alien, and by the time the band reach the crescendo of whatever it is they’re playing, your mind will be as expanded as the protagonist’s at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Spaceslug

Since 2017, Spaceslug have been making wobbly doom about a mollusc that travels through space and time. Whatever drug they needed to come up with that, the three-piece have probably smoked the world’s supply of it, having put out five albums and three EPs around the theme already. As easy as it is to laugh at their central concept, though, the smoothness and melody of their music make this seemingly jokey band something worth hearing again and again and again.

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Prog and Metal Hammer, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Guitar and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

Its legacy, obviously, is undeniable, but is Rumours actually Fleetwood Mac’s best album? While it’s undoubtedly a work of genius, I’d argue that the group’s 1987 release, Tango In The Night, is far more deserving of that title.

When the album was finally completed following 18 gruelling months in the studio, tensions came to a head with a physical fight between former lovers Nicks and Buckingham after the latter revealed he would not be joining Fleetwood Mac on the road. In hindsight, this decision came as no surprise, as the guitarist considered it “the worst recording experience” of his life. After unshackling himself from the group’s toxic dynamic, he was subsequently replaced by guitarists Billy Burnette and Rick Vito for the album’s follow-up, 1990’s Behind The Mask.

There was a lot of trial and error. Tapes would be sped-up, slowed-down and re-recorded due to Buckingham’s scrutinising need for perfection, and the limitations of the new tech proved more complex than they had originally imagined. To stop the record from glitching, the tapes even spent a night in a refrigerator. It was incredibly hands-on, and yet most of his bandmates spent their time partying in an RV which they had parked on Buckingham’s driveway.

Altogether, Nicks only spent two weeks in the studio. Not wanting to run into Buckingham’s then-girlfriend Cheri Casperi, she was moreover distracted by her addiction struggles, which evolved into a dependency on the anxiety medication Klonopin and brandy. As a result, the vocals she had laid down were lacklustre and quickly deleted, replacement parts often pieced together from other recording sessions. She contributed three songs to the record, the gorgeously haunting When I See You Again, the aforementioned Welcome To The Room…Sara, and the wildly romantic Seven Wonders, her writing credit cheekily bestowed via a misheard lyric, originally by Sandy Stewart. These songs are perfectly Stevie; magical, shimmering and tragically poetic. While her conflicting personal circumstances might not have allowed her to play such an integral part overall, her presence within the album is felt throughout. Like a disembodied spirit, her vocals echo out obscured behind the lush expanse of sparkling synth. Elsewhere, they take centre stage, a sorceress at her most enchanting.

An archetypal 1980s release, Tango In The Night captured the era’s flamboyance without the tack. For me, it harks back to the esoteric beauty of their 1975 eponymous album, avoiding the overly accessible poppiness of Rumours, pinpointing Fleetwood Mac in their most distinctive form. There’s the mystique and sensuality of Stevie, the oddball eccentricism of Lindsey, Mick’s tantric, animalistic drumming, John’s velvet-warm bass lines, and spectacular crooning and songwriting by Christine.

Sensual, carnal and often as bewitchingly wild as its lavishly-foliaged cover by Brett-Livingstone Strong, the album starts with Big Love, a risqué grunt-littered creation by Lindsey (who takes on both the female and male parts by sampling his voice with a variable speed oscillator). Later on, he helms Caroline, a steamy, mystical ode to his former girlfriend Carol Ann Harris, grounded by a hypnotic, daring groove. Then there’s the title-track, intoxicating in its otherworldly mood and accentuated by Lindsey’s euphoric guitar solo that can only really be described as a spiritual experience. Of course, there’s also fan favourites/singles Everywhere and Little Lies, both Christine contributions and wonderfully charming. Christine additionally finds perfection on Isn’t It Midnight, a racing, snare-snapping dance-y number, coloured in twilight hues and by an unfamiliar urgency present in her vocal, full of deep longing.

Liz works on keeping the Louder sites up to date with the latest news from the world of rock and metal. Prior to joining Louder as a full time staff writer, she completed a Diploma with the National Council for the Training of Journalists and received a First Class Honours Degree in Popular Music Journalism. She enjoys writing about anything from neo-glam rock to stoner, doom and progressive metal, and loves celebrating women in music.

Folk? Rock? Blues? Jazz? John Martyn was a mixture of all four and certainly one of the most progressive artists of his generation – as late Prog writer Tommy Udo argued in 2009, soon after the singer-songwriter’s death at the age of 60.

Bearded men with acoustic guitars always appeared to be the antithesis of prog: by their very nature, folkies seemed to be making regressive music, retreating to tradition, to rootsiness. They also seemed to epitomise that most nausea-inducing spectacle: the sensitive young man, the lonely boy outsider, the bedroom poet who can’t get a girlfriend and tells the world so in dreadful, self-pitying verse.

Who among us has not guffawed uproariously at the scene in National Lampoon’s Animal House when John Belushi, descending the stairs to find some anaemic beatnik with an acoustic guitar serenading a girl with a sensitive folk ballad, seizes the guitar and smashes it savagely against the wall? Who among us hasn’t wanted to do the same to the whey-faced, bum-fluffed fun-annihilators who produce their bloody 12-strings and start picking out Neil Young’s The Needle And the Damage Done at parties?

Growing up in Glasgow in the late 70s and early 80s, one of the party favourites of the acoustic guitar and scraggy beard massive was John Martyn’s May You Never, a haunting, Celt-tinged blues ballad from his classic 1973 album Solid Air. You probably heard it murdered many times by some flat-voxed James Taylor wannabe before actually hearing the original.

Your reporter, then, was probably not alone in having, for many years, an unreasonable prejudice against Martyn based solely upon those who sought to interpret his work. This prejudice, like so many, was a stupid one that was happily blasted to pieces in 1978 when he performed Big Muff from the astonishing One World album in a live film for The Old Grey Whistle Test.

Fed through a labyrinth of effects pedals, it sounded like the madder end of dub, it sounded like music that had more in common with Can than with any of the rootsy folkies that I then so detested. It was one of those what-the-fuck?! moments that we have all experienced upon being confronted with music that blows our minds. Man.

And any preconceptions that Martyn was some knock-kneed, introspective bedroom wallflower were soundly destroyed a year later when he headbutted my mate in a bar in Glasgow.

He’d been enjoying a small sherry after dinner, as it were, and my pal had – metaphorically speaking – spilled his pint. Martyn drew his head back and cracked him on the nose. There was blood. After a few minutes spent tearing lumps of flesh from each other’s faces, Martyn put him in an armlock and rammed him face-first into the wall. “Stay the fuck down, cunt!” he growled in the sort of Glasgow accent that can loosen the bowels. My chum, slumped in a heap, was no longer in a position to argue.

At which point one of the bar staff tried to calm John down and get him to leave. Martyn grabbed him by the throat: “You want some too, ya fuckin’ fanny? Do ye?” The hapless pint-puller acknowledged that he did not, in fact, want some or indeed any. Martyn slowly released him and was led out of the bar.

Twenty minutes or so later he was onstage at the Glasgow School of Art and we were in the audience, my friend still pressing a wet towel to his now-ruined nose. Martyn was mesmerising in a performance that I remember clearly: much of the material was drawn from One World, at times spacey, dub-crazed, at others jazzy and late-night.

May You Never had the hairs on the back of everyone’s necks bristling. In a month when I also went to see The Pop Group, James ‘Blood’ Ulmer, Kevin Coyne, Suicide and Pere Ubu, Martyn’s was the most disconcerting and memorable show.

Afterwards I saw him and bass player Danny Thompson and my busted-nosed friend sitting together in the bar – all pals together after some eye-to-eye apologies and manly handshakes. Martyn was by now very convivial, a beardy uncle, telling us about his trip to Kingston, Jamaica, to record at The Black Ark with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry (“Now Scratch, he is really fucking mental, by the way,” said the pot of the kettle) and recommending that we listen to Pharoah Sanders and Davy Graham. We did.

He also said he’d come and see our band the following week. He didn’t, of course. Probably just as well. He’d probably have kicked fuck out of us for crimes against music.

Martyn was many things. He was actually a sensitive poet – a proper one – firing off autobiographical despatches from a life that was happy but knew more than its share of sorrows. He was a Glasgow hard man when it suited him, though he was born Iain David McGeachy in New Malden in Surrey and spent only part of his early childhood in Scotland. He grew up in the respectable South Side of the city with his father and grandmother. Still, to outsiders, when he lapsed into that Glasgow snarl, he may as well have been the Razor King from the violent streets of the Gorbals.

In his teens he straddled the sub-cults of beat and mod, dressing like a tramp to go to folk clubs but donning a sharp suit on a Saturday night to go to the dancing with his girlfriend. Glasgow had a thriving folk scene in the 60s, thanks in part to the influence of the great Scottish traditional song revivalist Ewan MacColl, and the active encouragement of the Communist Party, who’d decided that it was authentic people’s music in opposition to commercial trash like rock’n’roll.

By 1965, inspired by Dylan, a new generation – Martyn among them – was discovering folk music. New venues, particularly Clive Palmer’s Incredible Folk Club in Sauchiehall Street, catered to this less traditional traditionalism. Clive’s group The Incredible String Band were already starting to branch out and experiment with other ethnic musical sounds. Martyn was a contemporary of the ISB as well as Billy Connolly and Bert Jansch.

His biggest inspiration and mentor was the now largely forgotten Hamish Imlach, who taught him blues guitar and allowed him to play the odd song of his own between sets. At 17 he was a prolific writer and performer, though he hadn’t seriously thought of music as a career.

Like many Scots, Martyn migrated south of the border almost as soon as he had the bus fare. He started playing in folk clubs in London; then a meeting with label boss Chris Blackwell resulted in his becoming the first white artist to sign with Island Records – until then best-known as a UK outlet for Jamaican bluebeat, ska and reggae. His 1967 debut album London Conversation is a fairly standard folk album of the time (mostly self-penned, obligatory Dylan cover) though the flute and sitar on Rolling Home hint at a more expansive sound to come. His voice had yet to develop into the slurred instrument that he said was his attempt to sound like a tenor sax.

The second album The Tumbler was still more adventurous, thanks in part to the happy fusion of Martyn’s pastoral songs with jazz flautist Harold McNair’s ethereal woodwind sound. But John was dissatisfied with his recorded output. “I got bored with the folk/acoustic thing,” he said. ”Churning that out stifles innovation – kills the personal touch.”

In 1970 he was hired as guitarist on an album by Beverley Kutner that was to be produced by Joe Boyd, who’d been instrumental in the success of Fairport Convention, The Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd and Nick Drake, later to become a close friend of Martyn’s. Martyn and Beverley became an item, began writing together and released the subsequent album Stormbringer! as a duo.

It was the first time Martyn used the Echoplex on his guitar – a sound that would become his signature. On the next album, The Road To Ruin, he fell out with Boyd over the multiple overdubs. He also worked with a band for the first time, one that included his long-time collaborator bassist Danny Thompson (a muso for hire who’d worked with The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention and Pentangle). Thompson moved Martyn in a jazzier direction, becoming the perfect foil for the songwriter’s guitar and voice. They worked together right up until Martyn’s death in 2009.

He began to experiment with effects pedals, feedback and keyboards, and collaborated widely, most notably with Steve Winwood of Traffic, Free’s Paul Kossoff, Richard Thompson, improvisational jazz drummer John Stevens, and Phil Collins and bassist John Giblin of Brand X.

The music became free ranging, from the complex 1973 classic Solid Air (written about the decline of Nick Drake, who’d die a year after its release) to the echo-laden 1977 masterpiece One World. Chris Blackwell became a close friend and encouraged Martyn in his collaborations. Artists like dub producer and certifiable genius/madman Lee Perry proved a fruitful if unlikely creative foil. While in Jamaica he played on Burning Spear’s roots reggae classic Man In The Hills as well as some sessions with Perry and Max Romeo. He later claimed he was paid in Tia Maria and porn films.

He was no record company darling. Chuffed with the success of Solid Air, Island received the follow-up Inside Out anticipating more of the same – nice mellow, pastoral jazz folk. What they got was about 40 minutes of wild electronics, free jazz and vocals that sounded like a drunk in space. In retrospect, it anticipates the Island era of Tom Waits nicely. But at the time, to put it mildly, it was totally misunderstood and critically panned. Martyn held a serious disregard for the press ever since.

His music was not difficult in the sense of being unapproachable. Some of it was definitely ‘progressive’ by any definition, although much that was recorded after 1980’s harrowing Grace And Danger was conventional by comparison. He was always a great songwriter, though, and songs covered by Eric Clapton, Dr John and Wet Wet Wet probably earned him far more in royalties than any of his own recordings.

He never settled into a comfort zone. In the 90s he signed with then hip-
as-fuck label Independiente. His 1996 album And saw him experimenting with trip-hop and drum & bass. Later he made a record of startling covers called The Church With One Bell, where he played music by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Portishead, Dead Can Dance, Elmore James, Randy Newman and others. And on his 2000 LP Glasgow Walker he abandoned the guitar and wrote the whole thing on keyboards.

The last time I spoke to him, around the release of the box set Ain’t No Saint in 2008, he was still wildly enthusiastic about music, chuffed to bits that Pharoah Sanders had asked him to work on a new album, and generous about younger bands. He was also talking about releasing music on the internet.

After his death an almost inevitable process of rediscovery and reassessment went on, not unlike the cult which grew up around Nick Drake. “I don’t want to talk about Nick. It’s creepy, ghoulish and strange; this lionisation is too late when you’re dead,” he told Classic Rock in 2000. “If they’d dug him enough then, he’d still be here now. I’ve often thought of faking my own death and watching the record companies fucking drum up all the shit they can.”

So beware of cashing in on his incredible legacy: if there’s one guy who would get so pissed off up in Heaven that he’d jump back down to Earth and stick the heid on you, it’s definitely John Martyn. Definitely.

Allan McLachlan spent the late 70s studying politics at Strathclyde University and cut his teeth as a journalist in the west of Scotland on arts and culture magazines. He moved to London in the late 80s and started his life-long love affair with the metropolitan district as Music Editor on City Limits magazine. Following a brief period as News Editor on Sounds, he went freelance and then scored the high-profile gig of News Editor at NME. Quickly making his mark, he adopted the nom de plume Tommy Udo. He moved onto the NME‘s website, then Xfm online before his eventual longer-term tenure on Metal Hammer and associated magazines. He wrote biographies of Nine Inch Nails and Charles Manson. A devotee of Asian cinema, Tommy was an expert on ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano and co-wrote an English language biography on the Japanese actor and director. He died in 2019. 

Whether with prog-jazz pioneers Soft Machine or on his own dreamlike solo albums, Robert Wyatt always followed his instincts – right up to feeling it was time to retire in 2014. The following year he offered Prog an overview of his remarkable achievements.

“The music I heard in my head didn’t really exist in the real world,” says Robert Wyatt, trying to explain the unique otherness of his recorded work. “Elements of my ideas were already out there – an attraction to hummable tunes, for example – so I was neither trying to be different, nor trying to sound familiar. I’m not interested in following a tradition; but nor am I interested in being esoteric. I just follow my undirected instinct wherever it leads me.”

Wyatt’s instinct has rarely let him down. In a career that he brought to an unexpected close in 2014 with his retirement from music, he produced some of the most strikingly original work of the past half century. His, he says, is “an improvised life” – one fuelled by jazz, socialism and an absurdist slant on the world around him.

It’s an approach that first found expression with prog-jazz pioneers Soft Machine n the mid-60s, though he’s keen to dismiss the notion that they were part of a broader Canterbury Scene. “There were a few musicians I played with from around there, but I don’t remember a ‘scene,’” he says, explaining that he feels, Canterbury was more emblematic of a very English variant on freeform jazz and psychedelia.

Referring to their countercultural days at London’s Roundhouse and UFO Club, Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason described the Softs and his own group as “the twin house bands of the London underground.” Wyatt reflects: “I always found the underground a more realistic place to be. There’d be bodies all over the floor, film projections on various surfaces, and a right old racket coming from the stage. There was a timeless feel, altogether rather dreamlike.”

Wyatt’s memories as singer/drummer of Soft Machine – for whom he contributed such stellar moments as Moon In June – are bittersweet. By his own admission, he’d become a liability by the time of 1971’s Fourth. An obstinate boozer and wild stage presence (flailing, shirtless, from behind his kit), he was utterly at odds with the restrained disposition of bassist Hugh Hopper and keyboardist Mike Ratledge. In autumn ’71, Wyatt quit to form Matching Mole – though, as Hopper admitted later, he was effectively “pushed out of what he felt was his own group.”

The episode forms one of the most moving passages in Marcus O’Dair’s book, Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography Of Robert Wyatt. In it, the subject confesses he still has nightmares about being ejected from the band. “It is strange, even to me,” he says. “Something to do with the humiliation of rejection, when it’s rejection from the people you got together with in the first place, I guess.”

Post-Soft Machine, two events changed him forever. In early 1972 he met artist Alfreda Benge, who was to become his wife, muse and lyricist. It also coincided with the beginning of his devotion to Communism, with politics serving as “the missing protein” in his music.

Then in 1973 came the drunken fall from a window that left him paralysed from the waist down. The effect, he says, was truly liberating, in that it narrowed his career choices and made him concentrate on being a singer. He calls the accident a neat dividing line between adolescence and the rest of his life: “Your youth is a period of maximum physical potential. Suddenly being anchored to a wheelchair forces you to experience life in a more abstract way. You become more reflective.”

Aside from his expressionistic blend of free jazz, folk, classical and world music, what truly sets him apart is his exquisite voice. Reedy and tremulous, there’s a haunted vulnerability and disarming candour to his singing, which his friend Brian Eno compares to “a poor innocent cast into a complicated world.”

There are very few precedents for Wyatt’s voice. “I try to make the most of what’s doable with it,” he says. But one chief inspiration was the late English tenor and Benjamin Britten collaborator Sir Peter Pears. “I didn’t warm to opera singing, but Peter Pears had a gentler vibrato, which suited Britten’s adaptations of folk songs in particular. They were probably the first records that got to me as a toddler.”

The sheer breadth of Wyatt’s solo work is dizzying. As an extension of his modus operandi – “I do like to rummage around what’s been done in the past and find a different take on it” – he has reworked pieces by such disparate artists as John Cage and The Monkees, and recorded with Henry Cow, Eno, Phil Manzanera, Syd Barrett, Björk and Ryuichi Sakamoto, to name but a few.

“I think of it as alternating dictatorships,” he says of his myriad collaborations. “On my records, I hope the musicians I invite will trust me to put it all together in my own way. Conversely, when employed by others, I try to do what they would like me to do.”

Stick a pin anywhere you like, from 1974’s Rock Bottom to 2007’s Comicopera, from Soft Machine’s 1968 debut to 2010’s For The Ghosts Within, his three-way alliance with Gilad Atzmon and Ros Stephen – all of these albums are freighted with his rare brilliance. For all the genre-hopping, his work occupies a distinct corner entirely of its own.

“My identity doesn’t feel threatened by cultural variety,” he says. “Such differences as there are seem to me to highlight the specialness of each. Underneath, what we have in common with others warms the heart even more. My heart, anyway.”

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2008, and sister title Prog since its inception in 2009. Regular contributor to Uncut magazine for over 20 years. Other clients include Word magazine, Record Collector, The Guardian, Sunday Times, The Telegraph and When Saturday Comes. Alongside Marc Riley, co-presenter of long-running A-Z Of David Bowie podcast. Also appears twice a week on Riley’s BBC6 radio show, rifling through old copies of the NME and Melody Maker in the Parallel Universe slot. Designed Aston Villa’s kit during a previous life as a sportswear designer. Geezer Butler told him he loved the all-black away strip.