Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt

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 that has brought him a loyal following not just in Britain but in France, Italy and Germany. For about a decade he was a member of the Communist party, 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.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
The most eloquently lackadaisical of jazz-loving English troubadours 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 A highly idiosyncratic and intuitively melodic maverick Robert Wyatt is one of the greats of English music An uplifting, inspiring book ... compelling and entertaining I loved Different Every Time ... a great biography and a terrific book 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. 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. An informative biography ... makes thrilling reading. A fascinating biography Meticulously researched [#2 in Uncut's Books of the Year 2014] The strange, varied and very English career of Robert Wyatt is done full justice in this authorised life. ... Wyatt is still one of the most genial rockers we have ... O'Dair gives a fine sense of Wyatt's personal and musical evolution. Different Every Time is a wonderful read. It's brilliantly researched, comprehensive and written with love and compassion. Wyatt really makes his fans feel and think about the world we're in, not just through his music but through what he says. I learned so much more about Robert Wyatt from reading this book, and it has informed my understanding of his life and music greatly. It is a generous book in the same way that Wyatt is a truly generous and thoughtful person. I loved this book. Beautifully structured and narrated ... Wonderful. A fascinating portrait of a musician who became a national treasure by remaining gloriously out of step with the world around him. Wyatt is an English pop maverick ... O'Dair relates these latter years with insight and flair. His prose style rarely attracts attention to itself, but he proves a shrewd music critic, diligent researcher and sensitive interviewer, eliciting hours of unguarded testimony from Wyatt and his collaborators. The reader is left with the sense of having borne witness to an extraordinary life. Different Every Time renders all other Wyatt books unnecessary Robert Wyatt's story is a kind of alternative cultural and political history of modern Britain, one of freewheeling experimentation, fun, dissent, laughter and conviction. Marcus O'Dair's wonderfully warm but incisive book gives the great man the biography he deserves. Exceedingly well written ... an honest determination to get under the skin of his subject ... without dodging awkward facts From the viewing point of Britain in 2015, Robert Wyatt looks as intriguing as he is needed. A quintessentially English creativity with an Internationalist outlook, always manifested with a soulful feel that makes his writing and performance one of the high marks in individual human expression. This book made me aware of tracks by Robert Wyatt that I'd never heard before and are now some of my all-time favourites. How often can you say that about a book? Ideal for both mega-fans and absolute beginners. An extremely well-written and well-researched book on the genius that is Robert Wyatt and would be appreciated by any serious music fan.