Robert Wyatt, Red Eccentric

By David Hobbs
01.29.2026


English eccentricity has historically functioned as a conservative idea, but experimental musician Robert Wyatt shows it can be repurposed in the service of Marxism.

Drummer Robert Wyatt performs live on stage with Matching Mole at the Roundhouse in London in 1971. (Credit: Fin Costello via Redferns.)

In April 2012, I went to see Tony Herrington interview the musician Robert Wyatt at Café Oto in Dalston. All these years later I can still remember quite a lot of what he said, for example about his admiration of Miles Davis, who he often strived to imitate (‘Would Miles be trying to flog CDs and t-shirts on the door after his concerts? Would he fuck!’), and about how his wife, the artist Alfreda Benge, had saved his life (‘That didn’t seem like a figure of speech, either,’ said my girlfriend at the time, as we made our way home). I also remember Wyatt’s bemused reaction to the tendency of some critics to describe his work as being distinctively English, despite the internationalism that is so clearly central both to his music and his outlook more generally.

As well as ‘English’ (or sometimes ‘British’), there is another term that is habitually applied to Wyatt, often at the same time and by the same people: both the Guardian and the BBC have dubbed him a ‘Great British Eccentric’. Wyatt’s musical output can be whimsical and even strange, so the epithet is not completely undeserved. At the same time, though, the term ‘eccentric’ seems vaguely dismissive, as if Wyatt was not only a highly original artist, but oddly wayward, with only a tenuous connection to the rest of us.

Exploring the eccentricity of Wyatt’s music offers a way of elucidating this concept’s broader implications. This is worth doing because the idea of English eccentricity is profoundly political. By understanding it, we on the British Left can gain a new perspective on our predicament, including both the difficulties that we face and the resources that remain available to us. At the same time, though, the aim of this article is to clarify the significance of Wyatt’s contribution. By thinking seriously about him, and by using him to think about the world, I mean to pay tribute to someone whose career has combined political commitment and integrity with creativity in a way that is extremely rare.
Blues in Bob Minor

Wyatt was born in Bristol in 1945, but grew up in London and Canterbury. His parents were middle-class, bohemian types: Honor Wyatt was a BBC journalist and radio broadcaster from a prominent artistic family; George Ellidge was a music critic and a classical pianist. When they met in Majorca during the early 1930s, as participants in the island’s expatriate literary scene, Honor and George were both married to other people, and for the first six years of his life Wyatt was raised by his mother alone. By the time he and his father were reunited, George had retrained as an industrial psychologist.

It was through him that Wyatt was first exposed to Jazz. George favoured the music of Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, in particular, but this influence was both compounded and counterbalanced by that of Wyatt’s half-brother Mark, George’s son from his previous marriage, whose tastes were more modern. Wyatt began learning the trumpet and then graduated to percussion. Meanwhile, other young beatniks were appearing all over the country. Canterbury, in fact, was a hotspot, and in 1966 Wyatt formed the band Soft Machine, named after the novel by William Burroughs, with three fellow Jazz fans: Mike Ratledge, Daevid Allen, and Kevin Ayers.

The group soon found themselves at the hedonistic forefront of the British counterculture. As with the Grateful Dead in the US, their semi-improvised, exploratory performances resonated strongly in the era of high psychedelia. In 1968, at the crest of the hippy wave, they joined the Jimi Hendrix Experience on two North American tours. By now, though, Wyatt was drinking heavily, and this eventually led to him being sacked from the band. More serious still, he suffered a life changing injury, a fall from a fourth story window in which he was paralysed from the waist down.

Wyatt’s career as a progressive rock drummer was over, but this was also the start of a new chapter. With no band anymore, Benge became his key collaborator. While occasionally referenced in Wyatt’s songs, she was far more than just a muse, contributing both lyrics and artwork for his releases, playfully surrealist work that is now hard to conceive of separately from the music, and vice versa. Wyatt’s later output was also strongly shaped by his political commitments, which grew in depth and coherence after the accident. This marked the beginning of what might be called his ‘red period’, something which was to last for the rest of his creative life.

It was in 1979 that Wyatt officially became a communist. In some ways this was the logical conclusion of his leftist upbringing, followed by his exposure to politically radical elements within the counterculture. Still, Wyatt stands out among his generation of post-war left-wingers because of his decision to join the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), rather than one of the Trotskysist groups that were generally more popular with this cohort. His anti-racist and internationalist commitments seem to have played a key part in this decision: he was particularly inspired by the prominence of Communist leaders like Joe Slovo in Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’), the armed wing of the African National Congress.

With Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party mere months from taking power, though, Wyatt was out of step with the times. ‘It was certainly a lost cause,’ he remembered to his biographer Marcus O’Dair, ‘The Party, I mean, not the aspiration or the analysis. But it was a lost cause for a reason. By then, the CP, like the Labour Party — like the entire left, in fact — was either trying to deny its past or, in a Blairish way, dressing to the left while fighting tooth and nail for the Right.’

Wyatt himself was certainly no revisionist. In ‘The Age of Self’, a track from the album Old Rottenhat (1985), he refutes the arguments of the influential circle around Marxism Today to insist on the continued relevance of a politics centred on class struggle: ‘It seems to me if we forget our roots and where we stand,’ runs the chorus, ‘the movement will disintegrate like castles built on sand.’ One of the verses singles out Martin Jacques, the editor of Marxism Today, for playing with ‘printer’s ink’, even as ‘the workers round the world still die for Rio Tinto Zinc’ (a British-Australian mining company).

If this approach to songwriting seems hectoring or dogmatic, it combines with the other aspects of Wyatt’s style, especially his restless experimentalism, to great effect. For a sympathetic or even just an open-minded listener, Wyatt’s most explicitly political work has much to offer. Indeed, while his solo career was punctuated by periods of depression, its peaks included several highly acclaimed records, notably Rock Bottom (1974), Cuckooland (2003), and Comicopera (2007). He retired from music in 2014.
The Peculiarity of the English

The Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács supplies the starting point for a theory of eccentricity in his book on the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Less than a hundred pages long, Solzhenitsyn (1969) comprises two essays, one focussing on A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), and the other comparing The Cancer Ward (1966) with The First Circle (1968). Lukács, one of the twentieth century’s most prominent Marxists, might be expected to treat the right-wing Solzehnitsyn with some hostility, but in fact he was full of praise, presenting him as the inheritor of a ‘critical realism’ whose most successful exponent, fifteen years dead by the time of writing, was Thomas Mann.

The discussion of eccentricity here is incidental to Lukács’ main argument, a brief aside prompted by his close reading of The First Circle. Nevertheless, his insistence on this concept’s wider social significance is arresting:


… [O]ne is used to regarding eccentricity, or the making of unimportant whims into the point around which life revolves, as a psychic peculiarity of certain people. This approach is wrong […] For eccentricity is a certain attitude on the part of the subject which arises from the specific nature of reality and the potentiality of his own social praxis. More precisely, it arises from the fact that a character may well be inwardly capable of denying certain forms of the society in which he is forced to live […] in such a way that his inner integrity (which they threaten) remains intact; however, the conversion of this rejection into a really individual praxis […] is rendered impossible by society and therefore he must remain enmeshed in a more or less abstractly distorted inwardness. In this process his character acquires crochety eccentricity.

For Lukács, eccentricity consists in a kind of inverted dissent. It is not that he politicises this concept, exactly: instead, what Lukács emphasises is the failure of eccentricity to become political, its inability to develop into ‘a really individual praxis’. While it does entail a refusal (the subject’s negation of ‘certain forms of the society in which he is forced to live’), this defiant gesture is made in a totally unconducive context, hemmed in by the overbearing reality of the status quo. The eccentric thus emerges as simultaneously heroic and pathetic, a Don Quixote figure who, unwilling or unable to accept the world as it is, must pay the price of becoming ridiculous.

Why, then, should eccentricity be so closely associated with Englishness, if only by the English themselves? To answer this question, Lukács’ theorising must be grounded in history. Indeed, to understand the deeper significance of the idea of English eccentricity requires us to confront another key component of the national ideology: the idea of Britain as a fundamentally conservative, non-revolutionary society.

This claim will already be familiar to many readers. Not only does it circulate widely in centrist and right-wing discourses, but it also echoes in some of the British Left’s foundational texts. For example, it plays an important role in ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, the 1964 article in which Perry Anderson first advanced the influential complex of ideas that has since become known as the ‘Nairn-Anderson Thesis’.

In the mid-1960s, the journal New Left Review became the venue for a highly significant reinterpretation of British history. Anderson, its lead editor, along with the Scottish theorist Tom Nairn, wanted to understand why Britain seemed to have entered a period of relative economic decline. Drawing on the theoretical perspective developed by Antonio Gramsci in his prison notebooks, they alighted on the following explanation: unlike other European countries, Britain had never fully modernised its politics and culture. More specifically, the British bourgeoisie had failed to make good on its historic task of displacing the aristocracy and thereby instituting a capitalist republic. Britain’s revolution, better known as the English Civil War, was premature and incomplete: in its wake it left a lopsided polity full of feudal atavisms that continued to frustrate historic progress.

There is not space here to account for the various criticisms that have been levelled at the Nairn-Anderson thesis, though this includes important contributions from Ellen Meiksins Wood and, more recently, David Edgerton. What matters is Anderson’s insistence that ‘capitalist hegemony in England has been the most powerful, the most durable and the most continuous anywhere in the world’. Paradoxical as it may seem, for him the failure of the bourgeoisie to become fully dominant ultimately strengthened the hand of British capitalism against its opponents. This is because this failure led to a situation in which there was no coherent liberal ideology for the working class to seize upon and transform, preventing the emergence of a revolutionary tradition alike to those of mainland Europe.

This part of Anderson’s argument, too, has been challenged, nowhere more vociferously than in E.P. Thompson’s essay ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ (1965). Among other things, Thompson takes Anderson to task for omitting the 1920s and 1930s from his account. This was the historic height of the British communist movement, which, though never strong in numbers, functionated like the ‘alter ego of the Labour and trade union Left’. To ignore this fact was, for Thompson, akin to writing Wuthering Heights without a Heathcliff, creating a version of British history that lacked an awkward and otherworldly but nonetheless central antagonist. In fact, Thompson saw the CP as just one part of a long tradition of British radicalism, seriously underplayed by Anderson, that reached back to the Social Democratic Federation and the National Council of Labour Colleges, and forward to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Anderson’s case, then, is somewhat overstated. Still, the fact that Britain’s radical left could conceivably be overlooked by him is itself symptomatic. Even Thompson was forced to admit that the passing of a motion in favour of unilateral disarmament at the Labour Party conference of 1960 was an exceptional moment of triumph in a period marked by general retreat. While 1968 saw the beginning of a resurgence in Republican politics in the north of Ireland, followed in the 1970s by a reinvigorated trade unionism and the spread of movements for Black, gay and women’s rights, it remains true that, compared to countries like France and Italy, in Britain capitalism continued to be relatively secure.

Hence the significance of English eccentricity. While other countries could muster revolt and even revolution, here, where the grip of capital was especially tight, it sometimes seemed as though the best that we could manage was to be strange. This futile form of individualised dissent was even celebrated as an amiable vice, like binge drinking or griping about the weather. The English eccentric is an avatar of enduring resistance, yes, but most of all this figure registers the confidence with which such resistance has been nullified and contained by the powers that be.
The Politics of Nonsense

One reason why Wyatt has been deemed eccentric, then, is because of his stubborn refusal to conform to this hostile political climate. From the perspective of the status quo, he appears as a quixotic ‘Yesterday Man’, or, as another of his song titles has it, an ‘Anachronist’, still espousing a revolutionary politics that even his supposed comrades in the modernising wing of the Communist Party considered outdated. Defensively, but with an assurance and ease that speaks to the immense power of British capitalism and its beneficiaries, Wyatt was rendered eccentric because of his Marxism.

But there is far more than this to Wyatt’s multi-layered oddness. Eccentricity was not only something projected onto him as a way of neutering the political tradition with which he was allied: it was also something that he actively embraced. There are various aspects of Wyatt’s creative output that might usefully be viewed through this lens, from his engagement with Jazz to the persistent theme of ‘madness’, which is especially prominent on Cuckooland. Most revealing of all, however, is his reworking and revolutionising of the literary genre of nonsense writing.

‘There has never been a strong surrealist tradition in England,’ writes the British essayist Adam Phillips, ‘but there has of course been a unique tradition of nonsense.’ Instead of the continental movement led by André Breton, whose participants volubly self-identified as revolutionaries in their proselytising manifestoes, and were often sympathetic to (or actually members of) the French Communist Party, in conservative Britain there was only Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ and Alice in Wonderland. Indeed, Phillips’ remarks seem to echo Nairn and Anderson’s assessment of British political history as a whole: just as they positioned the English Civil War as a ‘premature’ version of the French Revolution, nonsense writing appears here as a relatively feeble anticipation of the more developed revolt against rationalism that was yet to break out in mainland Europe.

Nevertheless, while nonsense writing is not as ideologically developed as Surrealism, its political dimensions have certainly not gone unnoticed. Nonsense is often seen to embody an anarchic sensibility that rejoices in flaunting rules, inverting power relationships and generally turning the world upside down: the main antagonist in Alice in Wonderland is, after all, the Queen of Hearts, a bloodthirsty, despotic monarch (‘Off with their heads!’). The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Lecercle, on the other hand, characterises nonsense as a ‘conservative-revolutionary genre’, blending an excessively strict adherence to linguistic norms with wild negations of rationality (think of how the grammatical propriety of Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ is combined with a richly suggestive but ultimately impenetrable lexicon). In this way, Lecercle sees nonsense writing as foregrounding the same dialectic that lies at the heart of all human communication: the fact that even as we speak language into existence, this language also shapes, moulds and ‘speaks’ us in turn.

Nonsense thus emerges from the same stunted and foreclosed form of opposition as eccentricity. In such an unconducive environment as late-nineteenth-century Britain, revolt degrades into whimsy. While the Surrealists wanted to bring the unconscious out onto the barricades, Alice’s battle with the Queen of Hearts is safely contained within her dream on the riverbank. Likewise, Lear’s nonsensical poetry is ultimately ordered into strict taxonomies. The ‘lands where the Jumblies live’ and the adventures of the Owl and the Pussy-Cat are pointedly confined to far off places. That’s not the way we do things here.

‘The Duchess’, a song from Wyatt’s 1997 album Shleep, serves to demonstrate the influence of nonsense on his work, though in truth this can be felt almost everywhere. Sung to the tune of ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’, its lyrics combine punning, paradox and playful opacity in a way that strongly recalls Lear’s poetry:


Oh my wife is tall and short
She won’t do what she ought
She never lies, but then again
She lies down all day long.

As in nineteenth-century nonsense writing, it is immediately clear that Wyatt’s wordplay is laden with destabilising social implications. The speaker is presumably identical with the duke of the original nursery rhyme. While his grace has no discernible difficulties taking charge of ‘ten thousand men’, though, women seem to be a different matter. The duchess is composed of contradictions (‘tall and short’, ‘old and young’, ‘sour and sweet’), and in this way she seems to lie beyond his verbal grasp. She is also contradictory in the sense of talking back to and disobeying her husband. In the second stanza she even silences him completely, if only for a moment:


Oh my wife is fat and thin
She’s generous and mean
She’s –––––, and
Her secret’s safe with me

In the recording, Wyatt mumbles and hums his way through the third line. As if to demonstrate her ‘meanness’, the duchess confiscates his words, taking control of the song’s very form. Later she is emphatically identified with the criminalised working class (‘on her evenings off she blackmails toffs’), and perhaps more specifically with sex workers (‘she hangs out down the port’). Once again, her greeting (‘hello sailor, how’s your dad?’) suggests a bold rejection of aristocratic respectability, combined with an unabashed sexual confidence.

Nor is all this counterbalanced, as in traditional nonsense writing, with more conservative elements. The most that could be said in this regard is that the duchess retains her title, and by extension her affiliation with the aristocracy. But the strict metre of ‘Jabberwocky’ is nowhere to be seen, and the delivery and instrumentation are markedly undisciplined. The song barely hangs together. Keyboards, violins, saxophone and voice all occasionally seem out of key, moving at different tempos. At the end the vocals simply tail off as the accompaniment dissolves into electronic squelching and frenetic scales on the piano. The overall effect, however, is not unpleasant. Throughout the song we grow accustomed to the dissonance, which never builds to a crescendo. Like much of Wyatt’s work, ‘The Duchess’ is radical without being alienating, combining experimentation with palpable human warmth.

The crux of Wyatt’s approach to nonsense, then, is to preserve and heighten its progressive implications, while stripping away any residual deference towards established forms. If the fact that this genre first emerged at the same time as Marxism seems to hint at a deeper radicalism, then Wyatt’s music makes good on this promise, allowing it finally to achieve its revolutionary potential. Here and elsewhere, the literary tools furnished by this tradition are unequivocally deployed by him in the service of a socialist and feminist sensibility.
Dialectics of Eccentricity

Wyatt’s music itself seems to enact the same critique of English eccentricity that I have extrapolated from Lukács, Anderson, and Thompson. His work de-sublimates the politics that underlie this concept, making explicit what is at stake in the eccentric’s denial of ‘certain forms of the society in which he lives’. Wyatt’s communist eccentricity reveals the strangeness attributed to this figure as a way of stigmatising non-alienated ways of being and ensuring that they do not become sufficiently widespread to threaten the status quo.

On the other hand, Wyatt’s engagement with the tradition of nonsense writing complicates this picture. As much as the idea of eccentricity is a way of containing his intolerably un-English politics, it also appears to offer him a set of tools that can be adapted to advance precisely the same project. Wyatt’s eccentricity, in other words, is dialectical: it is both a formidable weapon wielded against him by those who would defend the prevailing social arrangements, but also something that he succeeds in using against the system itself, in turn.

It can be risky to reduce art to a set of political lessons or a mechanism through which to develop analysis and strategy. Nevertheless, Wyatt’s music has something important to teach the British Left. While some lament our apparent inability to be ‘normal’, assimilating into the imagined style and values of working-class people, Wyatt’s example might encourage us, on the contrary, to embrace oddness. After all, collectivist politics must inevitably appear strange in a place like this, where capital has held sway for so long. Perhaps the only way to get beyond communist eccentricity is to go through it.

Contributor

David Hobbs holds a PhD from the University of Manchester on prison writing and the British New Left.