Robert Wyatt ha cessato di far musica, stando a una sua dichiarazione ufficiale concessa alla rivista Uncut - numero 211, dicembre 2014 - accompagnata da un commento per (quasi) ogni suo album della lunga carriera, dal primo Soft Machine a Comicopera.

Robert Wyatt has revealed he has stopped making music. The singer and songwriter discusses his reasons for halting his musical career in the new issue of Uncut, dated December 2014 and out now. Wyatt also talks us through his career, album by album, right from Soft Machine’s self-titled 1968 debut to 2007’s solo Comicopera. “I thought, train drivers retire when they’re 65, so I will, as well,” Wyatt, now 69, tells Uncut. “I would say I’ve stopped, it’s a better word than retired. Fifty years in the saddle, it’s not nothing. It’s completely unplanned, my life, and it’s just reached this particular point. Other things have happened – I’m more taken up by politics, to be honest,than music at the moment. Music tags along behind it. There is a pride in [stopping], I don’t want it to go off.”

Alla notizia reagisce dal par suo Richard Williams al blog The Blue Moment recuperando tra gli immediati ricordi personali un manufatto originale di Wyatt pensato per accompagnare le registrazioni dell'Amazing Band - una sessione con Mal Dean, Veleroy Spall, Maia Spall, Mick Brennan, Chris Francis, Jim Mullen e Wyatt, effettuata nella primavera 1970 - uscite in verità solo molti anni dopo, e con copertina affatto diversa (Roar, su FMR, 1997).

Scrive Williams: "When I read, in the new issue of Uncut magazine, that Robert Wyatt has decided to stop making music, I felt an immediate pang of dismay. So I rang him up to see if he really meant it. His reply was to tell me a little story about the novelist Jean Rhys, who, after a long period of inactivity, responded to her publisher’s gentle suggestion that she might like to write another book by asking him if he’d enjoyed her last one. “Yes, of course,” he answered. “Well, read it again,” Rhys said."

http://www.uncut.co.uk/robert-wyatt/robert-wyatt-i-ve-stopped-making-music-news

http://thebluemoment.com/2014/10/30/pieces-of-robert-wyatt

Tra i suoi mille altri impegni Graham Bennett ha finalmente trovato il tempo di rivedere e aggiornare il suo bel libro Soft Machine: Out-Bloody-Rageous, uscito nove anni fa per SAF Publishing, mai ristampato da allora e divenuto oggetto raro anche sul mercato dell'usato. Ne dà annuncio egli stesso a What's Rattlin'? anticipando migliorie e integrazioni apportate al testo - ora un ebook per Syzygy - anche alla luce delle numerose pubblicazioni discografiche successive all'ottobre 2005: "Well, it’s taken a couple of years longer than expected but the revised and updated edition of Soft Machine: Out-Bloody-Rageous is now available. Apologies for the delay. In revising the biography I’ve been able to refine the narrative, update the discography, add some new illustrations and correct a few inaccuracies. It’s also enabled me to clear my conscience, after promising repeatedly for five years that the revised edition was imminent. The economics of publishing mean that it’s only available as an ebook, which I hope you can forgive. The good news is that it’s about £140/$180 cheaper than the few remaining print copies of the first edition that are on offer from the internet sharks (and the seller called Bennett Books Ltd has nothing to do with me!). Hope you enjoy it!".
Non manca nella nuova prefazione l'affettuoso saluto a quattro protagonisti centrali nelle vicende Soft Machine - Mark Ellidge, Elton Dean, Hugh Hopper e Kevin Ayers - che furono di grande aiuto a Bennett nella prima stesura del testo, e venuti purtroppo a mancare nel frattempo.

https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebook/soft-machine-out-bloody-rageous

Ha scelto la musica di Mike Westbrook per la sua tesi di dottorato presso la Durham University (Regno Unito), e così la introduce Gary Bayley: "This dissertation – the first on the life and work of Mike Westbrook – proposes that his unique conception of English modern jazz was inspired by early 1900s New Orleans culture, where live music was contemporary, culturally relevant, and had a social function. Initially intended as art for a new post-World War socialist Britain, his drawing on cultural, social, economic, and political constraints became an artistic credo. The thesis argues that jazz is primarily a cultural activity, not merely a style of music. While Westbrook has claimed that he was simply attempting to combine art and entertainment like Duke Ellington, this dissertation demonstrates how, as a trained painter, his jazz process is informed by Dada and Pop Art as well as by Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke, lending his ensembles a social function as ‘mediating structures’. His central ‘brass band’ concept draws on English music-hall, circus and fairground, together with European cabaret, and his tendency towards theatrical performance was reinforced through his creative partnership with Kate Westbrook. The approach taken in this study is twofold: on the one hand field-work and extensive access to archival materials (much of it previously unavailable); and on the other hand cultural and historical interpretation. The thesis argues that Westbrook attempted a cultural revolution in broadening the terms of reference for jazz to construct a peculiarly English, polystylistic multi-media art. Accordingly, this dissertation locates Westbrook’s work in the larger cultural field of English contemporary artistic expression, rather than simply seeking to situate it stylistically within a narrower history of jazz."

The Music of Mike Westbrook è in http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10712