![]() ![]() The original artwork has been restored for this Domino edition.) (For the album’s 1998 Rykodisc reissue, this cover was replaced by another Benge illustration. The cover illustration for Rock Bottom, drawn by Benge, showed children playing in a tranquil bay, oblivious to the frighteningly vivid world going on under the water’s surface. It all adds to a picture in which danger and comfort are not easy to tell apart. Wyatt’s “wa-wa” scat vocal (he’s imitating a muted trumpet) sounds as though the waves have submerged him. “A Last Straw” gets caught up in a strong current, rolling around like a storm-tossed boat. A woman steps out of the sea in the album’s opening line (“You look different every time you come from the foam-crested brine”, “Sea Song”), and the songs seem to drift further out from shore as the record goes by. Salty water, mysterious water, whole kingdoms of starfish and whales. It’s a rare description of Rock Bottom that strays too far from water. But as Benge would later point out, Venice’s real influence on Wyatt came from something else entirely – something that La Serenissima has in vast quantities. The film, of course, is about a couple whose world is shattered by a sudden traumatic event Wyatt himself has remarked on the eerie analogy. ![]() ![]() ![]() He sat indoors composing music while his girlfriend (later wife) Alfreda Benge worked as an assistant editor on Nicolas Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now. Wyatt had started writing the songs prior to his fall, in late 1972, in Venice. ![]()
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