Stepping out into the world with headphones on can be a strange experience, like deciding to swim under water for a couple of strokes — especially if you’re listening to the weirdo strains of Robert Wyatt’s 70s masterpiece Rock Bottom. Maybe it’s alienating and irresponsible to disengage with the everyday even on the most quotidian stroll to the park or shop — there are probably many members of your community willing to chat, swap houseplants and stories; Grandmas needing help with their bags etc. Ah, Pa, people don’t care! Most ordinary days involve more humbug than hobnob. The underwater world of Rock Bottom is thus a most suitable companion for a walk to the park on a dry hot day, but also a weird one — a school-skipping dope carrying companion. The way in which the music deviates so gloriously, so shiftily, from the ordinary really kicks in on the final track “Little Red Robin Hood Hit the Road.”
There are two movements, the first of which is a dirge-heavy presentiment of the second, beginning with Robert Wyatt intoning “In the Garden of England” in true prog style, and ending with the most amazingly evil-sounding electric guitars, played by Mike Oldfield. The second opens with a wall of intensity: harmonium and viola descending like a heat haze. The harmonium belongs to Ivor Cutler, the Scottish eccentric — poet, humorist, and children’s author — who recites a nonsense poem over the music in a flat, hypnotic voice, his uncompromising Scots delivery at times bizarrely resembling a Jamaican accent. See, for instance, “I reflect on the life of the highwayman, Yum Yum Yum” and “I fight with the handle of my little brown broom.” The effect of these obscure ruminations — bordering on village idiocy — is to bind a homely, peaty darkness with a bloodshot menace, both of which are perfectly set off by Fred Frith’s scratchy viola. Cutler got three record deals on the back of this ‘little’ poem: probably the most amazing, unsettling finale to an album I’ve ever heard.
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