The best song of the 21st century, according to Robert Wyatt
Despite being a card-carrying prog hero for his work in The Soft Machine and Matching Mole, there’s barely an area of music in which Robert Wyatt hasn’t put his spin in some way. Of course, prog as a whole covers a lot of ground, but he was also instrumental in putting the Canterbury Scene of jazz, rock and psychedelia off the ground.
He’s quite possibly the only musician alive to have collaborated with both Jimi Hendrix and Björk. Above all, though, Wyatt never lets the music he’s making get in the way of a good tune. His skill with a pop hook is legendary, and he doesn’t just mix them with his more high-minded influences, either.
This is a man who has released literal nursery rhymes during his prolific solo career and who made a surprise appearance on the UK charts in 1974 with a fairly straight-ahead cover of The Monkees’ deathless ‘I’m A Believer’. This is a man clearly not above capital P Pop music, and an interview he gave with The Guardian shows this from the man himself.
When putting together “the soundtrack to his life”, he curates an eclectic, tasteful list. One that includes classics from The Miracles, Stevie Wonder and Ella Fitzgerald. However, his one pick from the 21st century is one that is, in a way, very fitting for the man himself, so mainstream it becomes leftfield all over again.
Pharrell Williams’ inescapable Curtis Mayfield tribute from 2013 ‘Happy’. That is a song, it must never be forgotten, that was written for the cinematic masterpiece that is Despicable Me 2. Wyatt is amusingly open about his tastes, saying that whenever he’s got the TV on, “I’m watching pop TV. Even my son’s embarrassed by the infantilism of my tastes, but there’s some good stuff out there now.” Which he’s not wrong about.
Corny though the piece is, there is something very powerful in its simplicity, which Wyatt himself cottons onto as well. “The song is brilliantly put together. It’s a great drum track, and there are only four chords or so, but they’re just enough. It’s really subtly done, absolutely spot-on.” Wyatt also puts Pharrell himself in some seriously vaunted company in his praise of the track, calling him “as good as any ’60s soul singer” in a list almost entirely composed of the soul greats of the 1950s and ’60s.
This is a man who knows his soul and would happily put the man currently telling his life story in a Lego biopic among any of them. Joking aside, though, the irony of having a career as accomplished as him, in so many different avenues, is that you can identify and respect craft when you hear it. It’s always easy to take a cursory glance at the pop charts and snark about how music is dying, but that’s the easy option.
Look at how a new generation of pop kids are now dreaming of growing up in the late 2000s when many of us (myself included) thought the charts were dying a horrible death. The quality is there, and if the septuagenarian singer of ‘Shipbuilding’ can see it, then so can all of us.
