On visiting a friend

The front of the home of Robert Wyatt and Alfie Benge, a pretty Georgian house on a quiet street close to the centre of the Lincolnshire market town of Louth, was bathed in sunshine as I pressed the bell one day last week. The door was opened by Dee, Robert’s daughter in law, who took me inside to see him.

I’ve known Robert since the end of the ’60s, when he was still with the Soft Machine. He and Alfie tell the story of how I officiated at their marriage one night at Ronnie Scott’s in the early ’70s, before his accident, using a twisted-up piece of silver paper from a cigarette packet as an improvised wedding ring. A couple of years later they were formally married at Sheen register office on the day of the release of the extraordinary Rock Bottom, his great 1974 album of songs expressing fathomless emotions.

Alfie was in London for attention to her eyes on the day I visited to see Robert for the first time since before the pandemic. She’d warned me that a near-fatal encounter with something nasty called Lewy Body Dementia had impaired his memory, although “he’s far less away with the fairies than he was.” And his sight had improved after long-awaited double cataract surgery.

His eyes were bright as we started to talk, his conversation just about as animated and every bit as surreally funny as I remembered. A mention of that first informal wedding ceremony prompted him to talk about how he had been 10 years old when he first met Ronnie Scott, when they were both guests at Robert Graves’s famous house in Mallorca (Robert’s mother, Honor Wyatt, was a friend of the poet, and may have named her son after him). He loved Ronnie and his co-director Pete King — whose name provoked a chuckling mention of “The great smell of Brut!” — and the whole vibe of the club, where Alfie had worked behind the bar. He remembered young Henry, who looked after the cloakroom and saw the ageing Ben Webster safely home every night during the great and hard-drinking tenorist’s residencies.

We talked about a little about how Robert had enjoyed contributing vocals to three tracks on Artlessly Falling, Mary Halvorson’s second Code Girl album in 2020, about Duke Ellington, and about Gil Evans, another venerated figure whose “Las Vegas Tango” Robert turned into a mesmerisingly wayward two-part invention on his first solo album, End of an Ear, in 1970. And about the 1971 Berlin jazz festival, where Robert — having just left the Softs — was selected by the festival director, Jo Berendt, for the rhythm section accompanying a Violin Summit starring Don “Sugarcane” Harris, Jean-Luc Ponty, Michal Urbaniak and Nipso Brantner (“I don’t think they liked my playing — I was either too rock or too jazz”). When I remarked that a mutual acquaintance perhaps “fell in love too easily”, he picked up the cue, hummed the opening of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” and talked about how much he still enjoyed listening to Chet Baker singing such songs.

I stayed an hour and a half, longer than expected. On the drive home I listened to Comicopera and …for the ghosts within, two late masterpieces. It had been a joy to find that Robert is still entirely himself, one of the most original and loved figures of his generation, still living his “improvised life”, not making music any more but continuing to incarnate his socialist principles and thereby justifying his friend Brian Eno’s description of him (in Marcus O’Dair’s excellent authorised biography) as living without “any glaring inconsistencies between what he claims to believe in and what he does as a person and as an artist.”

Alfie wanted to leave me a copy of Side by Side, the book of poems, lyrics and drawings that she and Robert published in 2020. “It came out during the lockdown,” she said, “so it didn’t get much notice.” I told her I’d already bought one. If it escaped your attention, this might be the time to rectify that omission — maybe as a way of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of their wedding (the official one), which falls on July 26**: a milestone in a remarkable, wonderfully creative and happily enduring partnership.

* Side by Side by Robert Wyatt and Alfie Benge is published by Faber & Faber. Marcus O’Dair’s Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2014. The photograph of Robert and me was taken by his son, Sam Ellidge.

** Correction: the piece originally said that the anniversary is on July 24. It’s the 26th. Alfie also points out that that they originally chose the date to coincide with the first day of Fidel Castro’s first attempt to start the Cuban Revolution: the attack on the Moncada garrison in 1953.