We sat in Cafe Beckmann, in Dortmund, and one guy in our class had always been looking for strange, leftfield music. We all loved the Beatles or Stones, and my No.1-band were The Kinks, but this guy, P.S., came up with early Charles Lloyd, with Caravan and Soft Machine. One afternoon he gave me his copy of Soft Machine’s THIRD, and this was the beginning of a long-time relationship with Robert Wyatt’s music. All four sides of that double album were killers, but Robert Wyatt’s MOON IN JUNE overwhelmed me with its surreal beauty and his singing. I don’t know how often I had heared it during my late teenager years, but I think I belonged to the Top Ten or Twenty of German MOON IN JUNE-listeners.
Years later I stood in DIE SCHALLPLATTE, a record shop in Dortmund. The man in the shop (that was very small but seemed to contain the best music of the world) looked like Jimi Hendrix, and the woman was so much older than I was then, and sometimes I dreamed of her fucking me all day and all of the night. She was no. 10 of my masturbation charts. Both knew a lot about music, there I bought my first ECM album which must have been SART or RUTA AND DAITYA – and now there stood a guy in the corner. I knew him only a little bit, but I knew he was a music freak of highest order. So I approached him from the side and saw that white-grey album in his hands, ROCK BOTTOM. – He fell out of a window, he said to me, but now he’s back. Immediately I took another copy, had to wait much too long for the bus, ran home with that album in my hand, and put it on the record-player. I was stunned.
From that year on I always got a new Robert Wyatt-album as soon as it appeared in the shops. Often there were long breaks between his solo albums, but it was always worth waiting. The next album nevertheless was released quite fast after ROCK BOTTOM, and it was called RUTH IS STRANGER THAN RICHARD. By that time I had a little cassette record player with batteries, and on my holiday with U.U. in the Bretagne it was nearly the only music we heared in the car, the other one was HOTEL HELLO with Gary Burton and Steve Swallow. Musically spoken, these were days of wine and roses and Camembert and baguettes, but we were young, not really in love, the sex was so la la, and even when we returned via Paris, we couldn’t live up to the cliche of „the city for lovers“: the only real magic of those days was looking at the sea for hours, swimming at rocky coasts, sitting quietly in a famous little parc in Paris, and listening to Robert’s and Gary’s music.