Robert Wyatt

A tribute to Robert Wyatt, written and recorded for remote participation in a 2025 birthday celebration for the Great Man, organized by Sukhdev Sandhu at NYUAnother great Englishman Mark E. Smith once said “I hated The Soft Machine and that kind of thing. Rock was ruined when the students took it over”.Having been a student once, and middle class through and through, it falls to me to mount a defence of the bourgeois contribution to rock Let’s start with Canterbury, in the south of England – where Soft Machine formed and where other groups directly related to them or influenced by them also hailed from, resulting in what was known as the Canterbury Scene or the Canterbury Sound - an incestuous cluster of post-psychedelic jazz rock outfits who were sometimes endearingly whimsical and sometimes forbiddingly abstruse and often both at the same timeWith its superfluity of universities and colleges, Canterbury has the highest ratio of students to native residents of any town in the UK.…