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ABSTRACT
The British musician Robert Wyatt has released two top 40 hits and, in 1974s Rock Bottom, at least one album that features in the popular music canon. Wyatt has performed on Top of the Pops and has appeared on several magazine covers. Wyatt is not an archetypal celebrity in the terms outlined by celebrity theorists, in that the media continues to focus primarily on his public rather than private life; yet he has certainly achieved cult status among popular music fans. In this article, I critically reflect on the experience of writing Wyatt’s biography, focusing in particular on challenges and opportunities related to the book’s authorised status. While authorised biography has been criticised as ‘autobiography in disguise’, I argue that there is in fact a clear distinction between authorised biography and ghostwritten autobiography, a distinction I frame with reference to the paratext and the autobiographical pact as well as the musical notion of polyphony. Though I focus primarily on my biography of Wyatt, my reflections shed new light on the broader interconnections of celebrity and life writing, particularly in relation to the relatively neglected topic of authorised biography.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Marcus O’Dair is Associate Professor in Music and Innovation at Middlesex University, and convenor of the Blockchain for Creative Industries teaching and research cluster. He has contributed to the edited collections Jazz and Totalitarianism (Routledge 2017) and Punk Pedagogies (Routledge 2018), as well as to academic journals including Popular Music, Strategic Change and IASPM@Journal. Different Every Time, his 2014 biography of Robert Wyatt, was a Radio 4 book of the week and was shortlisted for the Penderyn music book prize. A former session musician with Passenger, he has also released three acclaimed albums and toured Europe as one half of Grasscut.
Notes
1 The individual life, for Woolf, should be placed in the context of family, inheritance, influences, environment, and so on. The specific quote runs as follows: ‘I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place, but cannot describe the stream’ (Woolf Citation1985, 80).
2 The only exception to this rule were those few individuals with no public profile and whom I could not feasibly reach myself, for instance Wyatt’s son, Sam Ellidge.
3 Jobs does, however, seem to have been interested in how he was portrayed on the book’s cover, a key part of the paratext (Isaacson Citation2011, xviii).