Rare and wonderful occasions they are when the hidden hands guide you into contact with music that you never knew you couldn't live without; when you know you've never heard a note of this stuff before but there's a tiny yet proud flame of recognition just sparked off in your innermost; when the way you look at life changes ever so slightly but irrevocably. And of course I cannae guarantee it, but I'll wager there's just a chance that your first experience of Rock bottom might prove to be one such occasion.

The dark backdrop to the creation of Rock Bottom's probably far better known than the record itself: Robert Wyatt finds himself lying in a recovery ward after a drunken fall from a bathroom window at some party or other, faced with a couple of four-pipers that Holmes himself would struggle with, namely; how do i get through this? and pertinently, what does a newly-paraplegic drummer do now?

Not that I'm trying to be at all flippant about such a personal catastrophe, but Wyatt's own recollections of the period are, with his charcteristic tendency to underplay the hand, far from anguished. At this remove, he's more of the opinion that the tragedy opened doors for him, freed him in many ways from certain hidebound views and behaviours. His notes to the 98 Ryko reissue of Rock Bottom make it clear that the key to his convalescence was a deliberate drift into reverie - allowing the dreamlife to sculpt the music and lead towards new ways of things. Via the ether, sea-change.

There's real hurt and anguish in Rock Bottom, the hurt of frayed relationships, the ache of dependency. In a fascinating detail in his notes, Wyatt recalls the initial writing period (pre-fall) in Venice, whilst accompanying his partner Alfie as she worked on Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now, Roeg repeatedly recanting the film's message -"We are not prepared". And that's in Rock Bottom too; the terror of your known world simply washing away.

But ultimately, the album glows of rebirth, illustrates the sometime-necessity of surrender if we're to truly overcome - the sea of possibilities behind this first-level world we troll. It's about the pull of the tides, the waters we come from (the geographical and the female), the changeling nature of things under the influence of the full moon (in a recent mag interview, John Balance called Rock Bottom "the most lunar album ever made" and he may well be right).

It's also about the relinquishing of the strictly masculine, the schematic, and instead embracing the feminine and the other; Alifie/Alifib (the album's astonishing centrepiece, a babel of babytalk) is one of the bravest, most open-hearted lovesongs you'll ever encounter, honest injun.

Perhaps most of all, the album's an open channel, a balm - healing music. Not some new age bubblebath, but a tough succour; no easy answers or convenient resolutions, but still a clear message from somewhere that, yeah, you're not crazy, there is more to it all than just this.

In a parallel world, everybody flooded down the shops and bought this instead of Tubular Bells. Not that I've any axes to grind as regards Mike Oldfield - I couldn't name anything he's done in a pepsi challenge, and he crops up with some marvellously spidery and enervated guitar on Rock Bottom's finale Little Red Robin Hood Hit the Road - but rather I've distinct reservations about Saint Richard Branson, and I'd have been far happier if the heft of his coffers had arisen because he helped this magical invocation of an album into millions of homes. But how sad can you be when Rock Bottom's still out there waiting for you to discover and cherish? One full moon, treat yourself to a copy and take a little refreshing nightswim back in your mind. Come home for a bit. Drift and revive.

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