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I just saw a recent television program about art, and it was saying how from the end of the Second World War, so much of what our culture is comes from not just the United States in general, but New York in particular. In my case, I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

Robert Wyatt

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Robert Wyatt
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: January 28
Composer
Drummer
Musician
Recording Artist
Singer
Bristol
Gloucestershire
Robert Ellidge Wyatt
Life
United
General
World
War
Revolution
Bebop
Culture
Late
Recent
Comes
Second
Jazz
Art
Television
Extraordinary
States
Particular
Program
Without
Saying
Case
Much
Imagine
York

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I consider myself a sit-down comedian really, as much as anything else. I love comedy. Life is a cosmic joke.
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Because of my politics, people think I'm anti-American. But I was quite the reverse. What I don't like about the United States is when the government acts like an old, imperial 18th- or 19th-century European power.
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The gap between rich and poor is, in fact, widening enormously. This idea of building up the powers of people who are already powerful and keeping everyone else back is a recipe for endless misery and conflict.
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There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.
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I'm naturally quite conformist, really. If I go to a country and they say, You've got to drive on the right, I'm not going to drive on the left to show that I'm different. I'm able to stick to the law.
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I don't know how many thoughts we have a second, but it's quite an amazing number, and just to pin down the appropriate sequence of those, all you really need is a pencil and a piece of paper.
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The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality.
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There are a lot of composers who were fantastic, but I challenge them to write a record that you could play five times a day for two months on the radio, songs that people will want to dance to on a Saturday night.
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I think that pop, and to some extent rock, are like sport and fashion industry in that they're about the exuberance of youth. That's the sort of subliminal ideology.
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I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.
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Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.
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Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
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If you've never felt that you quite got a hold of it, you just feel that before you die, you've got to try and get it right once. And hope that the experience you have makes up for the some of the diminishing energy.
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People who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway.
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There are people I would like to work with. Its a bit harder, because I live out in the sticks anyway, and plus being in a wheelchair means that I cant really circulate. So I tend to stick to my own thing.
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People say, oh it's a shame, you're not nostalgic about the '60s. Well actually, it's quite good, when you think of it. Wouldn't it be sad if I was sitting here wishing it back?
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People have habits about what they think songs should be like. There's the folky thing of: Poor me, I'm a sensitive person in a cruel world. Or the pop thing of: Hey, look at me, I'm sexy.
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Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't.
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I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar
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I'm not a soldier for anything, either. I'm only a singer and I don't think it makes a difference what we sing.
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