Robert's Breath

Robert Wyatt: how one does not commit suicide after falling from the window on the fourth floor and realizing that he will never walk again.
While at the hospital, he started to write one of the most personal and intimate album ever, "Rock Bottom", realizing that he would never walk again let alone rock drumming (though he would continue to play drums and percussion in more of a "jazz" fashion, without the use of his feet).
The lyrics to Alifib seem to be about his time in hospital, lying in bed, with his wife Alfreda Benge (nickname Alife, hence Alifib) by the side of him.
Fuelled by the motivation of the new musical freedom he had just found under his inconvenient paraplegic condition, and additionally inspired by the dramatic circumstances that outlined his past life as he knew it, the rhythm background of the song is traced not by drums, but by the syncopated breathing of a man in a coma supported by machines.


"His private persona erupted on Rock Bottom (1974), one of rock music's supreme masterpieces, a veritable transfiguration of both rock and jazz. Its pieces straddle the unlikely border between an intense religious hymn and a childish nursery rhyme. Along that imaginary line, Wyatt carved a deep trench of emotional outpouring, where happiness, sorrow, faith and resignation found a metaphysical unity. The astounding originality of that masterpiece, and its well-crafted flow of consciousness, were never matched by Wyatt's later releases." -Piero Scaruffi


Alifib - lyrics

Not nit not nit no not
Nit nit folly bololey
Alifi my larder
Alifi my larder
I can't forsake you or
Forsqueak you
Alifi my larder
Alifi my larder
Confiscate or make you
Late you you
Alifi my larder Alifi my larder
Not nit not nit no not
Nit nit folly bololy
Burlybunch, the water mole
Hellyplop and fingerhole
Not a wossit bundy, see ?
For jangle and bojangle
Trip trip
Pip pippy pippy pip pip landerim
Alifi my larder
Alifi my larder