Yet another Wyatt back-catalogue re-release? Ho-hum - means I might have to buy them all over again, though by & large I'm happy enough with the Hannibal editions which, I suppose, are getting on a bit now.

There's some choice Wyatt-era Soft Machine clips on YouTube, my favourite presently being this, which is the first of two parts featuring the Ratledge / Wyatt / Hopper trio doing Moon in June.

Much as I love Wyatt, his politics leave me cold, just more upper-middle-class polemicising which, for me, has marred much of his last two albums (compared to the relatively a-political Shleep) though, perhaps ironically, I regard Matching Mole's Little Red Record as something of a classic, and the heavily politicised experimental 80s Italian radio sessions (available as a free download from BigO from time to time) is some of his finest work, especially Opium Wars - now I'd love to hear Rachel Unthank covering that!

It's like Henry Cow - filching their music wholesale from Zappa and playing it with a po-faced earnestness that missed the essential humanity, profanity & humour that made Zappa's work (Uncle Meat especially) so appealing in the first place. Whilst Wyatt is less obviously derivative, he's at his best bordering the surreal and the impressonistic, as he does on Rock Bottom, or else working with his wife's more abstract landscapes (as he does on Shleep) or even Edward Gorey's macabre narratives. I used to have an album of him singing John Cage songs too, I wonder what happened to that?