Theatre Royal Drury Lane 8th September 1974 is a 2005 live album by English progressive rock musician Robert Wyatt, documenting a concert on that date at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London. The concert took place the year after Wyatt had fallen from a fourth-storey window and become paralysed from the waist down. Since the accident, Wyatt has used a wheelchair. The concert remains Wyatt's first and only live performance as a headlining solo artist.
The concert served as the live premiere of Wyatt's studio album Rock Bottom, which had been released a little over a month prior. In addition to the songs from Rock Bottom, the set list included cover of songs by Wyatt's former bands; a performance by Julie Tippetts of her own song, "Mind of a Child"; and most notably, an extended version of "I'm a Believer", a song written by Neil Diamond for American pop-rock band The Monkees. Wyatt had just recorded and released his cover of "I'm a Believer", which became a surprise hit single in the UK. The assembled band, dubbed Robert Wyatt & Friends, included most of the musicians from the Rock Bottom recording sessions and several guests. Robert Wyatt & Friends consisted of Dave Stewart, Laurie Allan, Hugh Hopper of Soft Machine, Mongezi Feza, Gary Windo, Mike Oldfield, Nick Mason of Pink Floyd, Fred Frith of Henry Cow, Julie Tippetts, and Ivor Cutler. The BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel gave an introduction for Wyatt.
Contemporaneous reviews of the concert were positive. After the concert, Wyatt continued his recording career but stopped performing as a solo artist due to the difficulties of organizing a live backing band and his chronic, intense stage fright. Bootleg recordings of the concert emerged in the early 1980s. The official release in 2005 received generally favorable reviews, with critics praising the album as a showcase for Wyatt's vocals and a compelling document of the progressive Canterbury scene. Simon Reynolds wrote a]larming but true: one of the best releases of 2005 was recorded 31 years ago." However, the official release suffers from inconsistent sound quality because about half of the original recordings had been lost.
Background
In the late 1960s and early 70s, Robert Wyatt was known as an English songwriter, singer, and drummer associated with the Canterbury scene of prog-rock musicians. Wyatt was kicked out of the band Soft Machine in 1971 and then formed his own band, Matching Mole. After releasing two records, Wyatt dissolved Matching Mole, feeling overwhelmed by his responsibilities as bandleader. Still, he began writing new music with the intention of reuniting the band for a third Matching Mole album.
But plans for a third Matching Mole record were cut short in 1973 when Wyatt, heavily intoxicated from drinking, fell from a fourth-story window. He survived, but was left paralysed from the waist down. Since the accident occurred, Wyatt has used a wheelchair and no longer plays the drums. During the time spent recovering in hospital, Wyatt further developed the songs he'd intended to use for Matching Mole. These songs were ultimately recorded and released in 1974 as a solo record, Rock Bottom. His first album on Virgin Records, Rock Bottom was released on 26 July 1974, the same day as Wyatt's wedding to Alfreda Benge (known as Alfie). The British music press lauded Rock Bottom upon its release.
Wyatt recorded Rock Bottom with musicians from both the progressive rock and jazz scenes. Dissatisfied with jazz fusion as it had existed previously, which he felt typically took the "worst of both worlds" from each genre with excessive "noodling," Wyatt sought to achieve a novel, "upside down" style of jazz-rock fusion all his own on Rock Bottom. Musically, Rock Bottom combined the "looseness," "rhythm section," improvisation and instrumentation of jazz with the song-form structure of rock or folk music. The songs of Rock Bottom would form the centerpiece of the Drury Lane concert, which featured musicians from both the rock and jazz traditions.
The concert at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane Planning and promotion
To promote Rock Bottom, a headlining performance by Wyatt was held on 8 September 1974 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, a West End theatre in London. The concert was reportedly arranged by the Virgin Records executive Richard Branson, who told Wyatt that certain musicians had expressed interest in performing as Wyatt's backing band for a concert. Meanwhile, Branson also told the same musicians that Wyatt had expressed interest in recruiting them for his live band.
The one-off backing band assembled for the concert, dubbed Robert Wyatt & Friends, included most of the musicians featured on Rock Bottom along with several other guests. The band included Wyatt's "dream rhythm section" of Dave Stewart on keyboards, Laurie Allan on drums, and Hugh Hopper on bass guitar. Other performers from the Rock Bottom sessions included Mongezi Feza on trumpet, Mike Oldfield on guitar, Fred Frith on several stringed instruments, and Ivor Cutler on spoken word vocals. Nick Mason, the drummer of Pink Floyd and producer of Rock Bottom, made a guest appearance on drums. Julie Tippetts, who was not involved in recording Rock Bottom, sang back-up vocals on several songs and performed one of her own songs, "Mind of a Child". Most of the band had collaborated with Wyatt prior to Rock Bottom; for example, Hopper was also in Soft Machine, and Wyatt and Tippetts had both been members of Centipede.
Wyatt and most of the band members appeared in a promo photo, which was used for the concert poster and on the cover of NME. In the photo, the band members sat in wheelchairs for the photo in a display of "wheelchair solidarity" with Wyatt. Mason was superimposed into the image later. Commenting on the photo years later, Wyatt told Uncut it was "a real laugh doing it", but said that the NME received complaints from readers who felt the image was "a bit tasteless". Wyatt said he couldn't understand those who objected to the image: "I thought it was a very good idea. Especially on steps—wheelchairs on steps are dangerous, they're rubbish! There are people in wheelchairs and with other disabilities, who I know from letters and so on, who were very encouraged that far from my career as a musician being over, it actually got much stronger in terms of my contribution to it." The concert announcement in the NME prominently mentioned that the show would feature Oldfield, who was already one of the best-selling British musicians of the 1970s with the multi-platinum Tubular Bells and its followup Hergest Ridge released the month before the concert.
Performance
The concert was scheduled to begin at , and a crowd of hippies gathered outside the venue nearly two hours prior. John Peel, the BBC Radio 1 disc jockey, served as the evening's master of ceremonies wearing a glam rock-style costume. Opening acts Ivor Cutler and Phyllis King performed songs and spoken word poetry. Peel, who had considered Wyatt his favorite drummer prior to the accident, delivered an introduction and concluded by announcing: "And now, for Robert Wyatt of Twickenham... opportunity knocks!"
Wyatt entered the stage and received a standing ovation. Positioned between a mixer and keyboards, he said that the mixer was not actually plugged in but would give him "something to do with my hands." He said he would "probably not" play the keyboards, since he had not done so in rehearsal, but remarked that they "look good" anyway. The set list opened with two covers of songs composed by Hopper: "Dedicated to You But You Weren't Listening", from the Soft Machine album Volume Two, and "Memories", a song from The Wilde Flowers, Wyatt and Hopper's first band together. Wyatt's anxiety was evident during these first two songs; critics later described the performances of Hopper's songs as "good-naturedly rickety" and "fractured".
The band then performed the songs from Rock Bottom, starting with "Sea Song". Over the course of the concert, Wyatt's band performed Rock Bottom in its entirety, albeit not in the same order as the album. The more confident performance of Rock Bottom turned a corner from the unsteady playing in the first two songs. Wyatt, in particular, performed with noticeably greater confidence after the audience applauded in recognition at the opening lines of "Sea Song". During "Sea Song", the band launched into extended group improvisations not present on the studio version, which Simon Reynolds compared to an "Anglicised Bitches Brew," and ends the song with improvisatory scat singing, which Reynolds described as his "falsetto spiral[ling] up into ecstatic scat acrobatics, as though his spirit is trying to escape his shattered body." Will Hermes likened Wyatt's scat vocals throughout the concert to the sound of "a choirboy at an acid test."
The performance of the next song, "A Last Straw", has a noticeable swing rhythm and, according to NPR's Andy Battaglia, is "rawer [and] more raucous" than the studio version. Wyatt again sang vocal improvisations and scat vocals. Oldfield made a brief, inconspicuous appearance onstage to play synthesizer toward the end of "A Last Straw". On "Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road", Frith played rhythm guitar and Feza soloed on trumpet. Feza's soloing was lauded by critics; Mike Barnes of The Wire said Feza "lets rip some extraordinary note-streams in his trademark hard, bright sound." According to Barnes, Windo's tenor saxophone solo on "Alife" evoked the German free jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann. The first set ends with "Alifib", which Reynolds called a "gorgeous quilt of shimmering keys and glistening guitar".
After "Alifib", Julie Tippetts performed an interlude of her own music: the ballad "Mind of a Child", "Behind the Eyes", and a freeform flute solo. Both songs come from her 1974 album Sunset Glow, which Wyatt considered to be a "companion piece" to Rock Bottom. "Mind of a Child" is the only song by Tippetts included on the official live album; Barnes speculated that the others were presumably deleted to fit a CD-length total runtime. Critical assessment of Tippetts' segment of the show was decidedly mixed. The NME said she "rather derailed things" with her "uncertain" piano playing and the "lugubriousness" of her songs, despite her "compelling" voice. Barnes called "Mind of a Child" a "poignant" song and lamented the omission of Tippetts' other music from the album, but conceded her "two songs together did effectively drive a wedge through the set."
Tippetts' songs were followed by a noisy free improvisation with Wyatt, Feza and Windo, also omitted from the album. The second set began with the final song on Rock Bottom, "Little Red Robin Hood Hit the Road". In "Calyx", a Hatfield and the North cover originally recorded as an instrumental with wordless vocals, Wyatt sang lyrics of his own devising to the melody in addition to scatting.
Concert reception