Robert Wyatt’s Masterpiece: “Rock Bottom”

The term “British Invasion” is such an overused piece of Boomer nostalgia that – as with Woodstock or the draft – hearing it is more likely to call to mind PBS specials than the subject itself. If one can cognitively push through this thicket of meaningless signifiers, one manages to project a highlight reel in the mind’s eye: Beatlemania, the Rolling Stones kicking off “Satisfaction”, The Who taking the stage emblazoned with the Union Jack, and so on. But this hardly does justice to the efflorescence of creative achievement produced by a small island over the span of less than a decade from the mid-1960s. For sheer artistic excellence on a per capita basis, only Jamaica during the golden age of rocksteady and reggae (roughly 1962-1977) can compete with the UK during this era.