07 giugno 2026

Nel pieno dei festeggiamenti per i cinquant'anni dall'apertura del celebre negozio Rough Trade Records in Notting Hill a Londra, che culmineranno in tre giorni di concerti e iniziative pubbliche in tre diverse sedi del Southbank Centre a metà luglio, Geoff Travis e Jeannette Lee ricordano tra i momenti più rilevanti dell'intera storia dell'etichetta l'incontro con Robert Wyatt, che con loro firmò quell'indimenticabile serie di singoli poi riuniti in Nothing Can Stop Us (1982): "The first time I ever met Robert, I went to the recording of Launderette by Vivian Goldman. John Lydon was producing it, and Robert did the percussion. I went down to the studio and everyone was there, everyone was contributing. They were making it up as they went along – he used to just lend his hand to anything that he liked." (Jeannette Lee) "He liked the indie community, he felt much more at home there. He hated being on Virgin for years after, the later period. They wouldn’t let him make any records for a while, and that’s when we came up with a plan: ‘let’s not make an album which you can’t contractually do, let’s just make some singles’. That was a way of getting rid of Virgin." (Geoff Travis).