Different Every Time + Benign Dictatorships (Domino)

THE HAUNTINGLY sincere and heartfelt music on Different Every Time and Benign Dictatorships is as good an introduction as any to Robert Wyatt’s immense talent, evidenced by the 30-plus albums he has made or been involved with.

A personal collection, which he’s sequenced for mood and continuity with the story of his life, it reveals at its core the pop sensibility which informs much of his music.

But his ingenious and quintessentially English creativity is a unique fusion, reflecting his love of jazz, percussive rhythms and keyboard experimentation.

Before his confinement in a wheelchair aged 28 — after an accident in which he broke his back and which he described as his “biped drummer” phase — he was unquestionably one of the best drummers this country has ever produced. He played songs and not the beat, just as he sings like he talks.

His band Soft Machine were psychedelic contemporaries of Pink Floyd and the sonic palette he brought to their art was unparallelled.

The only track from that era which features here is the 19-minute Wyatt epic Moon in June. Beginning like a pop song, it soon morphs into a landscape of ideas. “Oh wait a minute, fuck!” Wyatt exclaims before running through ideas that could easily be an album’s worth of other songs.

A drinker, but not a drug user, his warm and whimsical voice might as well be reciting a stream of stoned consciousness in a song that sounds as perfect now as it did back in the day.

That track is typical of a man who simply cannot be pigeonholed. His is a truly unique and plaintive tenor that wilts, lilts and tilts in so many different ways. One minute he sounds like a choirboy, the next an old man as he sings or scats.

The delivery, by turns weary, warm or whimsical, employs a vocal instrument that both accompanies and creates the music.

His songs, he says, in the excellent biography by the great Marcus O’Dair which accompanies the albums, “are strange little things” that always seem to “come out funny.”

But that has never put off the vast array of talent who both respect and want to work with him, among them Hot Chip, Phil Manzanera, Bjork, Nick Mason and Mike Mantler.

John Cage provides Wyatt’s unaccompanied rendition of Sonnet III from Tulips and Chimneys by EE Cummings, a track consisting purely of his beautiful and emotionally charged voice.

His contribution to the pop legacy of the Thatcher era are two absolute gems. There’s his cover of Elvis Costello’s sublime Shipbuilding — an achingly mournful, yet devastating anti-war song from the time of the Malvinas invasion — and Working Week’s powerful and upliftingly jazz, African and Latin-based dance song Venceremos (“We will win”), which sounds as fresh today as when it was released during the 1984 miners’ strike.

Wyatt, who was in the Communist Party and describes the Morning Star as “one of the five things that makes my world a better place,” is now 70.

He’s stopped working on music but with his wife, fellow artist and soulmate Alfreda Benge by his side, one doubts he will ever stop being creatively engaged and that whatever he comes up with will be more than worthwhile.