Different Every Time

It’s perfectly accepted by everyone from poets to politicians’, as Wyatt himself has said, ‘that they mature as they get older. This is accepted, especially in really important things like wine and brandy – serious stuff.’

God, what an idiot I was when I was forty. I thought I’d really got it. What did I know when I was forty?” And the same when I was fifty. And then, when I got to sixty, I

thought, “I never knew anything! I didn’t know anything, right up till now. But now I do.”’

‘I like that thing Miles Davis said: “I play in a club, I play solo after solo, and for that evening there’ll be just eight bars where I just absolutely got it right.” B

Post-classical’ composer Max Richter persuaded Robert to read passages by Japanese author Haruki Murakami on his 2006 album Songs from Before.

But I think the most extraordinary thing about Robert’, says Alfie, ‘is that he has managed to survive all this time against the odds, without doing concerts. Part of that extraordinariness has been that we’ve actually been able to survive financially. There were certain moments when it was really touch and go. Funnily enough, I think if he hadn’t been paraplegic, there are points at which I think he would have given up, because he could have found another job.’

longevity without compromise.

olved in a protracted and painful planning dispute. ‘Early in the season,’ Alfie recalls, ‘I was there on my own for a couple of weeks and a cuckoo would come every day and sit on the wire fencing. I knew the nest it was after, because there were some meadow pipits and I saw it eating caterpillars. I started thinking about its life – and then that got muddled up with the perception of me by a lot of those people.

One of the troubles for engineers’, says Robert, ‘is that they have their own CVs. They are very conscious in their world of being heard by other engineers, and they don’t want to be associated with records with bad sound. I often want what they would think of as a bad sound. And Jamie didn’t give a toss. I would bring him tapes made at home, with traffic going by, recorded in my front room with hiss on.’

Robert also carried into the studio something gleaned from his counselling: ‘I went into work preparing for the inevitability of mistakes,’ he recalls, ‘and determined not to withdraw into my shell. Just think: “That was a mistake. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.”’