Two Robert Wyatt Quotes

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Ryan Dombal: “…your career is a good example of how being an underdog isn’t necessarily something to overcome.”

Robert Wyatt: “Well, that’s about the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in years. I hope that’s the truth. It’s not even a moral question. It’s a question of pride. You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, and I don’t know how some people do that. God knows I’ve been so wicked and selfish in the past, but nevertheless, I do really think the things I think and support the people I support. I would encourage people to realize that you don’t have to panic if you’re not part of a mainstream or if you find yourself outside the flow. If it doesn’t suit you, don’t go along with it. Just sit it out and get your stuff done. Don’t just sit moaning or getting drunk—I spent some years doing that. But if you can just come up with something of your own, however minor it is, that’s going to be easier to live with when you’re at the end of your life.”

– Robert Wyatt

From this piece: https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/9544-robert-wyatt/


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“I kind of had nervous breakdown in ‘95. I felt burnt out before my time and just collapsed. I just didn’t want to be me anymore. I was tired of it, though not suicidal. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about is me attempting to find an identity outside of the given one, whether it’s listening to Spanish music or Russian communist music or black music. They’re all ways of getting out of the prison of self, really. But at that point, I couldn’t get out. I just felt trapped. Maybe that was a decade-late delay about the accident – at last, the difficulty I was in kicked in. Alfie and I spent most of our time in a sort of fancy wooden cabin on the coast at this point, half an hour away from where we lived in Lincolnshire, and there was no electricity. We didn’t even have records. We listened to stories you could get on cassette.

I got some treatment. I actually went to the doctor and went to anxiety management classes. Alfie said, “I can’t handle this at all,” because I’d gone mad. She’d dealt with everything up to that point, but not that. I came out of that and started working on a record, which became Shleep, and that’s really what took me out of it.

I’d been making records on my own, and somebody said, “Why don’t you get some other people in? You don’t have to marry them. They can just spend a couple of days at your house and do a song with you.” And I thought, "Why not?" From that point on, my records got more crowded. [laughs] It’s helped me. I made two or three records totally solo, and I was going mad in this musical isolation. I just felt so cut off from the world.”

– Robert Wyatt

From this piece: https://pitchfork.com/features/5-10-15-20/8776-robert-wyatt/



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