Robert Wyatt

Robert Wyatt, born in Bristol in 1945, helped found two of the Canterbury scene's defining bands, Soft Machine and Matching Mole, and in those years he was a drummer who sang, right in the thick of British psychedelia, jazz fusion and progressive rock as they were being invented. Then in 1973 an accidental fall from a window left him paraplegic. He gave up band life, turned to other instruments, trumpet among them, and began a solo career that would run for four decades.

What he made on his own is like nobody else's music: fragile, wandering song cycles shot through with jazz, folk and something close to nursery rhyme, sung in that frail, unmistakably English voice. From the mid-'70s on the work grew more collaborative and more political, and he became a remarkable interpreter of other people's songs, pop singles included. His ghostly "Shipbuilding" came out in 1982, and "Biko", on the Work in Progress EP, followed in 1984; his records have appeared on Virgin and Domino.

He is married to the painter and songwriter Alfreda Benge. The University of Liège made him an honorary doctor in 2009, and he retired from music in 2014.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.