This is the first and definitive biography of Robert Wyatt, Britain’s greatest cult musician. Robert Wyatt started out as the drummer and singer for Soft Machine, who shared a residency at Middle Earth with the Pink Floyd and toured America with Jimi Hendrix. He brought a Bohemian and jazz outlook to the 1960s rock scene, having honed his drumming skills in a shed at the end of Robert Graves’ garden in Mallorca. His life took an abrupt turn after he fell from a fourth floor window at a party and was paralysed from the waist down. He reinvented himself as a singer and composer with the extraordinary album Rock Bottom that has brought him a loyal following not just in Britain but in France, Italy and Germany. Today, Wyatt remains perennially hip, guesting with artists such as Bjork, Brian Eno, Scritti Politti, David Gilmour and Hot Chip. Marcus O’Dair has talked to all of them – indeed to just about everyone who has shaped, or been shaped by, Wyatt over five decades of music history.

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This is the first and definitive biography of Robert Wyatt, Britain’s greatest cult musician. Robert Wyatt started out as the drummer and singer for Soft Machine, who shared a residency at Middle Earth with the Pink Floyd and toured America with Jimi Hendrix. He brought a Bohemian and jazz outlook to the 1960s rock scene, having honed his drumming skills in a shed at the end of Robert Graves’ garden in Mallorca. His life took an abrupt turn after he fell from a fourth floor window at a party and was paralysed from the waist down. He reinvented himself as a singer and composer with the extraordinary album Rock Bottom that has brought him a loyal following not just in Britain but in France, Italy and Germany. Today, Wyatt remains perennially hip, guesting with artists such as Bjork, Brian Eno, Scritti Politti, David Gilmour and Hot Chip. Marcus O’Dair has talked to all of them – indeed to just about everyone who has shaped, or been shaped by, Wyatt over five decades of music history.

Price : £ 11.99

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This is the first and definitive biography of Robert Wyatt, Britain’s greatest cult musician. Robert Wyatt started out as the drummer and singer for Soft Machine, who shared a residency at Middle Earth with the Pink Floyd and toured America with Jimi Hendrix. He brought a Bohemian and jazz outlook to the 1960s rock scene, having honed his drumming skills in a shed at the end of Robert Graves’ garden in Mallorca. His life took an abrupt turn after he fell from a fourth floor window at a party and was paralysed from the waist down. He reinvented himself as a singer and composer with the extraordinary album Rock Bottom that has brought him a loyal following not just in Britain but in France, Italy and Germany. Today, Wyatt remains perennially hip, guesting with artists such as Bjork, Brian Eno, Scritti Politti, David Gilmour and Hot Chip. Marcus O’Dair has talked to all of them – indeed to just about everyone who has shaped, or been shaped by, Wyatt over five decades of music history.

Price : £ 11.99

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Mark Blake’s history of Pink Floyd – the first for fifteen years – has already been acknowledged as the final word on this remarkable band’s life. Lucidly written, incorporating over a hundred new and exclusive interviews, it covers Pink Floyd from their Cambridge beginnings in the early sixties to their triumphant re-formation at Live 8 in 2005 24 years after their last live performance together and the death of their troubled founder-member Syd Barrett a year later. Pink Floyd’s albums like Dark Side of the Moon remain some of rock’s biggest sellers of all every year on CD; Both David Gilmour and Roger Waters continue to do arena and stadium gigs, and the market for this book will exist for many years. In hardback it has reprinted four times already. Aurum’s earlier book about the Clash by Blake’s Mojo stablemate Pat Gilbert, Passion is a Fashion, has so far sold over 22,000 in paperback – and the Floyd cult is far larger. Everyone has commented on the superb “flying pig” cover art and the spine treatment visible right across the bookshop: both are retained for this paperback edition.Mark Blake is a contributing editor at Mojo and Q magazines, and the editor of books on Punk and Bob Dylan. He is currently editing The Wit & Wisdom of Keith Richards for Aurum. He lives in Croydon.

Price : £ 6.99

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