A year later, Wyatt left Soft Machine and, besides participating in the fusion bigband Centipede, formed his own band Matching Mole (a pun on "machine molle", the French for Soft Machine), a largely instrumental outfit. After two albums and a split, Matching Mole were about to embark on a third record when, on 1 June 1973, during a drunken party, Wyatt jumped from a third floor window. He was subsequently paralysed from the waist down (paraplegia) and confined to a wheelchair.