Robert Wyatt: Classic or Dud?

Comicopera was my favorite album of 2007; it remains so.

The Daevid Allen clip upthread suggests that would not have been a concern of French TV in the 60s.

― The British Boy of Film Classification (Tom D.)

i'd honestly like to know more about french pop music television in the late 1960s... when i look at clips there are names of all these different shows, "Dim Dam Dom, "Tous En Scene", and then in the 70s you have "RockEnStock" and "Pop 2" and later "Melody" with Genesis and King Crimson... and then late in the decade the main show is "Chorus". all these shows and I can't keep track of them all. They showed a _lot_ of pop music, it seems like, on a _lot_ of different shows. I was looking up Soft Machine clips the other day and somebody mentioned that "Pop 2" was started by someone who'd run one of the earlier shows, but that show was cancelled for political reasons. And in the Anglosphere you just get to see the clips, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, nobody says anything about the shows themselves, their history, what they were _like_... anyway INA preserves them all and has put a lot of them online. Often paywalled but it doesn't stop it from getting out. And in fact the video stuff is far more widely accessible than the French radio stuff. There are lots of French radio broadcasts that are just unknown and unheard in good quality. And yeah, INA does seem to have kept everything, they seem to have a _very_ good archival policy. You can see not just the broadcast sections but unbroadcast rehearsal outtakes, in many cases. Just like in Germany, the Beat Club show would broadcast maybe four minutes of a Dead '72 show but the whole set is on audio, at least, and often the whole set is on video. The archival policy is very, very different to that in the UK, which barely showed anything and immediately wiped it all.

The other thing that I am aware of personally is June of 1968. Which seems to have been a significant event, and I don't know how that affected the music TV shows, but God, it must have, right?

this one will never not slay me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Huwy0Vq5-Ak

Thanks, I relate to all of that, although your experience goes deeper--wish I'd been listening to him at 21!

― dow

ahhh, well, there was a lot i missed out on by spending my late teens and early 20s focused entirely on "classic rock" and "prog rock", but it's good to know i didn't miss everything. wyatt wasn't really "prog rock" or "classic rock", but he was adjacent enough that i heard him relatively early on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEEX3uRJyo4

I don't think Cuckooland is one of his most loved albums, but I love it. Forest is a powerful Romani holocaust song and has really beautiful lyrics by Alfreda. It makes me well up every time.

The other thing that I am aware of personally is June of 1968. Which seems to have been a significant event, and I don't know how that affected the music TV shows, but God, it must have, right?

You mean May? Yes, the French are good at archiving stuff (cf. the BBC).

Yes, Paris in May, Moon in June

l

I don't think Cuckooland is one of his most loved albums, but I love it. Forest is a powerful Romani holocaust song and has really beautiful lyrics by Alfreda. It makes me well up every time.

Thanks, I relate to all of that, although your experience goes deeper--wish I'd been listening to him at 21!
― dow

It doesn't seem like this has been posted before, but I loved it. One hour doc from 1998, Italian made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z5zy6MaFtI

missed this. heartbreaking

Friend of mine managed to end up backstage at a Patti Smith concert (in the Southbank probably?) Verlaine might have been there and Gillespie almost certainly was and various other luminaries. He said everyone there were complete arseholes and then he noticed a guy sitting (he thought) in a corner, pint of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, covered in ash. He went over to talk to him and it was Robert Wyatt and he was like, "What do you make of all this?" and he was basically the only genuine person in the room.

^exactly as you would expect

Robert Wyatt is the best <3
Wish him all the love

this sux :(