It was reported recently that Robert Wyatt had retired as a musician. After some five decades, that distinctive falsetto has fallen silent. If the news is true, then this biography stands as a fine tribute to a remarkable career. It is a multi-faceted career, but three strands emerge most distinctly from Marcus O'Dair's account.

First, Wyatt is a representative of a persisting avant-garde tradition within music, born of the desire to fuse rock and jazz. For some, he is the exemplar of truly progressive rock, to use that much abused term. What makes him different from the more dour and pompous exponents of that genre are both his sense of humour and his musical references. ‘Virtuosity is very useful stuff’, O'Dair quotes his subject as saying (p. 126). And Wyatt goes on to explain how the techniques of jazz trumpeters like Dizzy Gillespie or Lee Morgan gave them the opportunity to express ‘an emotional discharge of immense, exhilarating power’. Mischievously he adds: ‘It's all in the service of. And, to that extent, it's neither better nor worse than Johnny Cash, who can hardly sing a note in tune. Johnny Cash, to me, is just as good as Lee Morgan’ (p. 126, emphasis in the original). Wyatt's wryness and his musical taste were key to his split from Soft Machine, as the band took an ever more earnest turn.

The second strand that Wyatt embodies is that of the collaborator. This too derives from jazz, where collaboration is part of the genre, but rather less integral to popular music. A double album (also called Different Every Time), released to coincide with the publication of this biography, devotes one of its discs to Wyatt's favourite collaborations. They signal the diversity of his partnerships: with Hot Chip, John Cage, Bjork, Phil Manzernera, Working Week, Nick Mason, Anja Garbarek. …

The third distinctive feature of Wyatt's career has been his politics. It would be hard to make sense of his music, and the path that it has taken, without knowledge of his long association with that least fashionable of left political groupings, the Communist Party of Great Britain (and his self-identification as ‘some kind of Marxist’, p. 384). There were early signs of his rebellious spirit. As a young boy he apparently employed ‘an old army to confuse hounds on the local hunt’ – as O'Dair comments: ‘an early use of music for political ends’ (p. 31). Wyatt, though, was not always a political animal, and he was not just a political animal. Some of the most vivid sections of O'Dair's account are those that capture the special brew of hedonism and dadaism that informed the early days of The Soft Machine (the definite article gets dropped at a later date). He recalls how tracks from the Soft Machine's second album referenced Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Thomas Pynchon's V and macrobiotic diets (p. 107). In their early days, the band embraced the Pataphysics of the playright Alfred Jarry, who defined it as the ‘science of imaginary solutions’. Its bizarre and quirky nostrums might still seem to resonate through the odd course of Wyatt's musical and personal history, which O'Dair chronicles in a lively and insightful biography.

O'Dair, an academic, journalist and musician, does not pretend to be anything other than an admirer of Wyatt. This is an authorised biography, and depends heavily on interviews with Wyatt and his spouse and collaborator Alfreda (Alfie) Benge. Fortunately, both seem to be open and self-critical, and the result is not mere hagiography. It is an approach that allows O'Dair to capture vividly the musical scenes in Canterbury and south London, where Wyatt was to forge his relationships with Hugh Hopper, Daveid Allen, Kevin Ayres and Mike Ratledge. He captures the spirit of experimentation and exploration of the mid- to late 1960s.

O'Dair's approach also allows us to understand the interplay of the personal, the political and the aesthetic in Wyatt's music. The accident that leaves Wyatt in a wheelchair is but one element. His drinking and his experience of depression are key to the narrative. Wyatt sees alcohol as giving him the ‘egomaniacal narcissism’ that his art demands (p. 372). In reporting such confessions, O'Dair concludes: ‘… what's impressive about Robert, I think, is that he lives his life and, as far as I can see, there aren't any glaring inconsistencies between what he claims to believe in and what he does as a person and as an artist’ (p. 392).