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Album
Rock Bottom
Robert Wyatt →83,766 listeners1,088,489 plays
progressive rock1974canterbury sceneart rockrock
about this album
Rock Bottom is the second solo album (the first post-Soft Machine) by Robert Wyatt. Although Rock Bottom is technically Wyatt's second solo LP, he has stated in several interviews that he considers its predecessor The End of an Ear as juvenilia and not part of the recognised "canon" of Wyatt solo records. Preparations were under way for a third Matching Mole album—likely featuring earlier versions of several songs that ended up on Rock Bottom such as Sea Song—when, during the course of a raucous party on the night of 1 July 1973, an inebriated Wyatt fell from a fourth-floor window and was seriously injured, permanently losing the use of his legs. Forced by the accident to give up playing drums, Wyatt abandoned the Matching Mole project and instead changed the project into a solo album, more prominently featuring vocals from Wyatt; his time in hospital recuperating from the accident was spent refining and completing the songs which would form the Rock Bottom album. Although the music itself is intense and often harrowing, and the lyrics to the songs are dense and obviously deeply personal, Wyatt has denied that the material was a direct result of the accident and the long period of recuperation. Indeed, much of the album had been written while in Venice in early 1973 prior to Wyatt's accident, where his partner and future wife (the poet Alfreda Benge) was working as an assistant editor on Nicolas Roeg's similarly haunting and intense film Don't Look Now. Enlisting friends an
