OLD ROTTENHAT

Robert Wyatt's sole album-length work of the 1980s (aside from the Animals Film soundtrack and the EP and singles collection Nothing Can Stop Us) is a strange beast. Performed by Wyatt himself, some artificial-sounding (but interestingly so) 80s keyboards, and Alfreda Benge (who pops in for a brief vocal cameo), the album finds Wyatt in outraged lefty mode, though to be fair this was the middle of the Thatcher era and anyone whose politics leaned towards the left was feeling besieged at that point.

With incisive lyrics - "You say you're self sufficient (but you don't dig your own coal)" is a razor- sharp takedown of the rhetoric of Tories and yuppies of the era who liked to pretend that the world could get by without the working class entirely - and intense, dramatic compositions given an eerie, otherworldly air by his synthesisers, Wyatt's voice is the odd feature out here - he sounds like a genuine human being who's wandered into a cold world of emotionless machines and isn't impressed by what he's found there. Perhaps an album to visit late in one's exploration of Wyatt's back catalogue, but I think it represents a very significant achievement in his discography - certainly, there's almost nothing out there that sounds like it. Genuine outsider art for those who who themselves have been shoved outside by compassionless Tory policies of the 1980s - or today, for that matter.