Verity Sharp At Home With Robert Wyatt - Late Junction 17th October 2017

VERITY SHARP AT HOME WITH ROBERT WYATT - LATE JUNCTION 17.10.17 (320kbs-m4a/207mb/1hr30mins)
BBC Radio 3 broadcast: 17th October 2017

Verity Sharp heads to the edgelands of Lincolnshire for a special programme recorded at home with one of the most distinctive voices in British songwriting, Robert Wyatt. A pivotal figure in the alternative music scene of the last 50 years, Wyatt has had a profound influence on the history of British music. But he's also one of its most affable story tellers. Over a plate of local plum cake, Wyatt talks Verity through some of the music that has helped shape him as an artist and the stories that go with it. With the ease of someone who is as comfortable reciting nonsense verse as discussing the Syrian crisis, he swings from surrealist verse by Hilaire Beloc to the time when Bjork came to visit him in Louth.

Robert Wyatt came to prominence in the late 1960s as the drummer with the jazz-infused psychedelic band Soft Machine before a debilitating accident in 1973 left him paralysed from the waist down. He went on to make some of the most startling music in his repertoire, abandoning the drum kit in favour of piano and a haunting vocal style. He became known for his unique voice and a playful way with words - qualities that run through his eight solo albums, which veer from the fiercely political to the childlike and surreal. Although probably most famed for his vocal part on the Elvis Costello-penned hit 'Shipbuilding', Robert Wyatt's influence stretches far beyond that, having worked with American jazz composer Carla Bley, Icelandic artistic powerhouse Bjork and Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto as well as jazz musicians fleeing apartheid South Africa, and long-time friend Brian Eno.

Over the course of an hour and a half he looks back on the last 50 years of his life as an artist and an avid music collector, picking out selections dear to his heart - from his love of British tenor Peter Pears to his fanaticism for early jazz singers and Ivor Cutler's absurdism. Verity also brings some of her own choices, sparking discussions around British surrealism, his dislike of the 'wobbly singers' of opera, his undying love for life partner Alfie and a frank conversation about his battle with depression, before giving us a quick piano lesson to boot. An intimate portrait of a truly British voice with a love of the absurd and an ear for the unusual.

Produced by Alannah Chance for Reduced Listening.

Robert Wyatt - I'm A Believer
Duke Ellington - Creole Love Call
Zainidin Imanaliev - Küidüm Chok (I Burn, I Smoulder Like Charcoal) [Smithsonian Folkways]
Benjamin Britten - Serenade For Tenor, Horn & Strings, Op. 31 [Decca]
Thomas Tallis - Salvator Mundi
Soft Machine - Why Am I So Short? [Probe]
Soft Machine - So Boot If At All [Probe]
The Jimi Hendrix Experience - The Wind Cries Mary [Polydor]
Baraka - Kecak (Balinese Monkey Chant)
Robert Wyatt - Shrinkrap [Rough Trade]
Björk - Desired Constellation [Polydor]
Björk - Submarine  (Feat. Robert Wyatt) [Polydor]
Ivor Cutler - Good Morning, How Are You? Shut Up!
Robert Wyatt - Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road [Virgin]
Robert Wyatt - Pigs... (In There)
Peru Field Recording - Santiago Musica de Huancayo
Rahsaan Roland Kirk - Alfie [Verve]
Robert Wyatt - Free Will And Testament
Danny Kaye - Anywhere I Wander

Soul Music Series 15 - 5. Shipbuilding

SOUL MUSIC SERIES 15 - 5. SHIPBUILDING (320kbs-m4a/64mb/28mins)

BBC Radio 4 broadcast: 17th March 2013

The song from 1982 was written by Elvis Costello and Clive Langer for Robert Wyatt and has been recorded in several versions by Elvis Costello himself, Suede, June Tabor, Hue and Cry, Tamsin Archer and The Unthanks.

The blend of subtle lyrics and extraordinary music makes this a political song like no other. It transcends the particular circumstances of its writing: the Falklands War and the decline of British heavy industry, especially ship-building.

Clive Langer and Elvis Costello describe how the song came to be written and how the legendary jazz trumpeter and flugelhorn player, Chet Baker, came to perform on Costello's version.

Richard Ashcroft is a philosopher who wants the song, which he describes as a kind of secular hymn, played at his funeral because it gives a perfect expression of how he believes we should think about life. Not being able to feel the emotion of the song would, he feels, be like being morally tone-deaf. If you don't like this song, he'd find it hard to be your friend.

The song's achingly beautiful final couplet about "diving for pearls" makes the MP Alan Johnson cry and has also inspired an oral history and migrant integration project in Glasgow. Chris Gourley describes how the participants found a way to overcome their lack of English and communicate through a shared understanding of ship-building practice.

Other contributors include Hopi Sen, a political blogger who was an unusually political child, and the Mercury Prize winning folk group The Unthanks. They toured their version to towns with ship-building connections as part of a live performance of a film tracing the history of British ship-building using archive footage.

Producer: Natalie Steed.

The Voices Of Robert Wyatt

THE VOICES OF ROBERT WYATT (320kbs-m4a/63mb/28mins)

BBC Radio 4 broadcast: 6th October 2012

Robert Wyatt has been recognised as a prog-rock drummer, jazz composer, avant-garde cornet player, artist and activist in a wheelchair. But, above all else, he has been known by one of the most instantly recognisable and distinctive voices of the last fifty years.

Forever associated with Shipbuilding, Elvis Costello's song written in reaction to the Falklands War, Wyatt's voice and the causes he gives voice to are intricately entwined.

This intimate radio portrait, in his own words, traces Wyatt's journey from the psychedelic excesses of Soft Machine (appearing both with Jimi Hendrix and at the BBC Proms), through the life-changing accident that has confined him to a wheelchair for almost forty years, to recent celebrated musical projects that are reaching new audiences.

Produced by Alan Hall.
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4.