“I’m so somewhere else now…”
THE tea is made, the carrot cake is ready to be sliced and Robert Wyatt has just slid his electric wheelchair under the edge of the dining table when he realises he’s forgotten the cake knife. Uncut offers to fetch it from the kitchen.
“No, it’s all right,” Wyatt says, reversing his chair. “I can get it without standing up, mate.”
He returns with a huge knife – “It’s a bit Agatha Christie” – and proceeds to slice the cake. “It’s great, I can sit anywhere in town,” he adds, detailing one of the advantages of being wheelchair-bound, “while everyone else has to sit on a bench. It’s a bit toytown round here, like one of those imaginary places in train sets, but that’s no bad thing.”
The town in question is Louth in the Lincolnshire Wolds, where Wyatt and his wife Alfreda Benge have lived for over 30 years. Their house, situated right in the hilly centre, is deceptively large, its ground floor stretching back through room after room. The space facing the street is Wyatt’s music room, complete with a baby grand piano and woven Tunisian wall hangings, while other areas are decorated with prints and paintings by the likes of Oblique Strategies co-creator Peter Schmidt. While Wyatt might have retired from making his own records after 2007’s Comicopera, music still plays a huge part in his life and Benge’s: indeed, when Uncut arrives, Who Is In Love?, by Iranian singer Shahram Nazeri, is blasting through the large dining room stereo.
“A friend of mine just came back from the Iranian film festival,” Wyatt explains, adjusting his yellow-and-pink glasses. “Apart from being irritated that she couldn’t wear her designer clothes there, she brought back some records for me. What I really like is Iranian singing, it’s just beautiful, so I’ve been playing this.”
On January 28, Robert Wyatt turns 75. It’s a milestone he didn’t expect to reach. To discover how retirement is treating one of our musical national treasures, has travelled to Lincolnshire for an afternoon with
