Scott Walker part 2

After the Walker Brothers split, Scott went solo, sang gorgeous, angsty songs, many by Jacques Brel, and enjoyed great success with a series of albums: Scott, Scott 2 and Scott 3. The tunes weren't quite as easy and lush as they had been, and hints of dissonance crept in. The lyrics made up unsettling short stories, all the more creepy for their delicate orchestral backdrop. The public rejected his fourth album, Scott 4, as too weird and it didn't chart, though today it is seen as a classic. That was when Walker cracked up big time.

Let's rewind a bit: Scott (1967) was released only six months after Walker's third album with The Walker Brothers, Images. Its mixture of Walker's original compositions and selection of cover versions established Walker as a more serious and sombre artist; gone were the Beat group and Blue-eyed soul material of his former group. The choice of material generally fell into four main categories: his own work (Montague Terrace (In Blue), Such a Small Love, Always Coming Back to You), contemporary covers (The Lady Came from Baltimore, Angelica), movie songs (You're Gonna Hear From Me, Through a Long and Sleepless Night) and significantly, English-translated versions of the songs of the Belgian musician and songwriter Jacques Brel (Mathilde, My Death, Amsterdam). Brel was a major influence on Walker's own compositions, and Walker included Brel material on his first three solo albums. Walker described Brel without qualification as 'the most significant singer-songwriter in the world'. The real coup for Walker was his luck in acquiring and recording the new Mort Shuman-translated versions of Brel's material before anyone else.

The album's opening track was a Brel composition: Mathilde describes the ambivalent feelings a man feels when the big love of his life, as well his cause of ruin, comes back to him.

Another great track from the album was When Joanna Loved Me, a song popularised by Tony Bennett in 1964. Here are both songs sung live in the Dusty Springfield TV show at the BBC:

My favorite song of the album is a song Scott wrote himself: Montague Terrace (In Blue) is an exquisitely elegant song filled with gut-wrenching images ("The girl across the hall makes love,

her thoughts lay cold like shattered stone" and "The window sees trees cry from cold, and claw the moon").

Such a Small Love was also his composition, a achingly lovely song about a friend of a man witnessing a girl who was a one night stand crying at the grave:

Always Coming Back to You was also his own: the orchestra follows a deceptively mainstream melodic line, but it's a complicated structure, not easy to sing, and the lyrics carry saddened overtones of loneliness and death. A unique blend.

Two more great Brel songs are featured. My Death is as majestic as they come: Scott's version, his phrasing in particular, greatly impacted Bowie.

Amsterdam is full of tender, funny, sad, and grotesque images that are all found in the port of Amsterdam:

The album received critical praise and had commercial success, hitting #3 on the UK Albums Chart.

As a teaser from his second solo album, Brel's Jackie was Scott's first solo single. One of the few "fun" songs of the Brel/Walker canon ("I'd have to get drunk every night, and talk about virility

with some old grandmother"), this clever and energetic song was met with controversy in the UK likely because of lyrics like "authentic queers and phony virgins" and drug references. The song was banned by the BBC and was not performed on the corporation's TV or played on the mainstream radio channels; which would probably explain why the song stalled at #22 in the UK, barely missing the Top 20.

The B-side was a Scott Walker composition called The Plague:

How can I sleep in hours like this

When anguish tracks me like a fist

My nakedness exposed, I can't stand

Still I...try to remember lips on lips

Hips on hips and ice on fire

In gloom and glow ...

When did they leave the man?

If great songs like this were relegated to the B-side (it wasn't included on the album)... That goes to show that buying singles and listening to the B-sides pays off big time:

His record company felt that he had to go more mainstream, so he was given a Hatch and Trent composition to record as his next single. Scott contributed to the lyrics, and his heavenly voice elevated the song, making it his biggest solo single ever (#6):

Another non-album single was released: the theme song to The Rope and the Colt, a French Spaghetti Western. Should that be called a Bouillabaisse Western?

His second album, Scott 2, was released in March 1968 and went all the way to the top of the UK album chart, his only album to achieve that feat. Jackie was in it, and so were two other Brel compositions. First there's Next, about a guy whose first sexual experience in an army whorehouse marked him for life. You don't find many songs containing a line such as "I swear on the wet head of my first case of gonorrhea".

I just love this completely over the top version by the late Alex Harvey:

The third Brel song in the album was The Girls and the Dogs: It's about the charms of girls vs. the charms of dogs (spoiler: the girls win in the end).

There were a few other interesting covers. One of those was Tim Hardin's Black Sheep Boy:

The Bacharach/David ballad, Windows of the World:

But it was his own compositions that shone most brightly. Plastic Palace People was one of his great songs, a glorious game of light and darkness that contains lyrics such as "She steals the cards tomorrow deals with deafening despair".

The Amorous Humphrey Plugg is another masterpiece. It examines Mr. Plugg's double life: days with the kids in the park, nights in the alluring Channing Way.

Another great song of his was The Girls from the Streets:

"The world is up for auction sales

A thousand lies descend

The women's tear-tracked cheeks

Still we'll dance them on and on

We can't stop now

Not now until we reach the dawn"

Scott 3 was released in March 1969. Upon release, it met with slower sales than his previous albums, as Pop audiences struggled to keep pace with Walker's increasingly experimental approach. The dense lush string arrangements by Wally Stott (who would soon undergo gender reassignment surgery and become two-time Oscar nominee Angela Morley) seemed to evoke a Vegas-style lounge crooner atmosphere, but one tinted with surreal drones and touches of dissonance. It was a hit, however, peaking at #3 in the UK.

It was also his first album to contain mostly his own compositions: it only had three Brel songs, apart from is own.

Here's Sons Of:

... And here's If You Go Away:

It was his own compositions that stole the show once more: the heartbreaking Big Louise is an observational vignette of a lovelorn woman, trying to lose herself in dreams to forget her pain. There are those who consider the song to be written about a transgender woman. Perhaps...

Copenhagen is near perfect, using the city as a metaphor for the awakening of love, and swelling to a quite gorgeous climax.

Two Weeks Since You’ve Gone evokes that period of desolation and confusion that follows the end of a relationship:

30 Century Man was Scott's nod to Bob Dylan:

The album's opening track, It's Raining Today, sets the mood:

Finally from this album, Rosemary is a girl living in a suffocating small town with her mother, reminiscing of a fleeting affair that she had with a man the summer before.

In June 1969 he released a non-album single, the more "commercial" Lights of Cincinnati, written by Macaulay and Stephens. The song peaked at #13 in the UK and at #20 in Ireland.

At the peak of his fame in 1969, Scott Walker was given his own BBC TV series, "Scott", featuring solo Walker performances of ballads, big band standards, Brel songs and his own compositions. Walker has suggested that by that time, a self-indulgent complacency had crept into his choice of material.

His fourth solo album – Scott: Scott Walker Sings Songs from his TV Series – exemplified the problems he was having in failing to balance his own creative work with the demands of the entertainment industry and of his manager Maurice King, who seemed determined to mold his protegé into a new Andy Williams or Frank Sinatra. The album does not include original compositions by Walker and consists of performances of ballads and big band standards. Although it was moderately successful at the time (UK, #7), it has since been deleted and has not been reissued. From this album, here's The Impossible Dream:

... And here's Lost in the Stars:

Scott 4, released that same year and consisting entirely of Walker’s own material, is simply a work of pure genius. It was released under his real name, Noel Scott Engel. The public, having searched in vain for Pop songs on Scott 3 & having no idea who Noel Scott Engel was, didn’t go for it, and it didn’t even chart and was deleted soon after.

The trouble was that Scott lived in a world of his own. He was impossible to market. The Rock crowd had its hairy-faced heroes and the last thing they wanted was a crooner who modelled himself on Tony Bennett and Jack Jones. But the Easy-listening audience, the mums and dads, were simply repelled and confused by Scott’s songs. It’s a poignant symbol of his predicament that he’d appear on cheesy TV variety shows to sing grim stuff like Jacques Brel’s My Death.

A few years later Scott 4 was re-appreciated. "This is bold, confident, swaggering Pop from a man at the very peak of his powers" is one description given to the album. It was also highly praised by artists such as Bowie and Radiohead. The opening track, The Seventh Seal, is a direct hommage to Bergman's classic film of the same name. Listen to the song and watch the film when you can.

On Your Own Again is a classic lovelorn ballad (no lyric has ever summed Walker up better than “I was so happy I didn’t feel like me”.)

The World's Strongest Man is one of the great underrated Walker songs:

Angels of Ashes is one of his most spiritual songs:

The stunningly beautiful Boy Child is my favorite song of the album, along with The Seventh Seal:

After Scott 4's failure, Scott drank himself into oblivion, withdrew from the world and thought about killing himself. "Well, I was an intense young guy," he recently said. "The record company called me in and carpeted me and said you've got to make a commercial record for us."

So, 'Til the Band Comes In came about. It was released in December 1970 but that too failed to chart. Walker wrote the songs for the album quickly while on a working holiday in Greece in September 1970. Receiving negative reviews the album was deleted and was not available for over twenty-five years. It was later reassessed much more favourably and was eventually reissued in the UK.

The first side (the strong one), included original songs, while the second (the weak one) was mostly covers. It begins with a track called Prologue/Little Things (That Keep Us Together):

If there are two songs that make the album worth it, these are the two next ones: Joe, a jazzy, poignant tale of a dying, forgotten old man:

Then there's my favorite song from the album, which is also my excuse for including Scott in this series of Gay Culture themes: Thanks for Chicago Mr James is a gay Dear John letter, simply one of the best things he ever did. Here are the lyrics:

You always said I wouldn't stay

I guess you saw the way before it all began

I've always been a changin' train

And when you think on this you might forgive me then

Thanks for Chicago Mr James

And all the shiny suits and all the shiny names

The things a country boy can't grace

Without the look of shame upon a city face

And you needed more than the smile I wore

You picked me up on my way down

That dusty one horse town - I won't forget the jail

The mayor's wife and Cadillac

The sheriff on my back 'til you put up the bail

Thanks for Chicago Mr James

You got a lot of grace but you're an empty place

The dawn falls hard upon my face

I'll move as I began through fields without a plan

Thanks for Chicago Mr James

That world of grey and gold that watched you growing old

The things I never saw I see

To think that I'm still free and I'm not feeling cold

And here's the song:

"I think I did temporarily go crazy, because I don't remember the period at all very well. I can hardly remember it," Scott said. The funny thing is, during that period, he began making relatively commercial records – show tunes, movie themes, songs from a short-lived TV series.

His last original song till 1978 was the B-side to 1971's failed single I Still See You. It was called My Way Home:

"I was acting in bad faith for many years during that time." Why? "Well, I was trying to hang on. I should have stopped. I should have said, 'OK, forget it' and walked away. But I thought if I keep hanging on and making these bloody awful records..."

Hey Scott, they weren't that bad. There was some good in each one: from The Moviegoer (1972), here's The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti:

Any Day Now (1973), contains When You Get Right Down to It:

Stretch (1973), contains Sunshine, which is OK:

We Had It All (1974), a out and out Country album, contains songs such as Low Down Freedom. Not bad, but where's Scott Walker?

Perhaps for mutual protection, The Walker Brothers reunited in 1975 to produce three albums. Their first single, a cover of Tom Rush's song No Regrets, from the album of the same title climbed to #7 in the UK Singles Chart, a surprise comeback if there ever was one:

However, the parent album only reached #49 in the UK. The next album, Lines (1976) failed to chart. Its title track, which Scott regarded as the best single the group ever released, also failed to chart.

Nite Flights, the last studio album by The Walker Brothers, was released in July 1978. Each member of the group wrote songs for the album: two by Gary Walker, while Scott Walker and John Walker each contributed four. The best song in the album was a composition from Scott (of course), called The Electrician, a song that seemed influenced by Bowie and Brian Eno's Berlin period.

The narrator of The Electrician is a torturer addressing his victim, offering a nauseating monologue accompanied by an implacable bass note and eerie, discordant strings. But for the gorgeous orchestration of the melodic middle section, it could have come from Walker's more recent "difficult" albums. All those artistic lows and disappointments of Scott's 1970s, his embarrassing drift away from integrity towards the light entertainment treadmill, led to this decisive moment. After Nite Flights, Scott would never again attempt to be commercially successful. And once that decision had been made, he was free.

The album's title track was later covered by Bowie himself in 1993 for his album Black Tie White Noise. Here's the original:

In 1981, interest in Scott Walker's work was stimulated by the compilation Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker, containing tracks selected by Julian Cope, which reached number 14 on the UK Independent Chart. Walker subsequently signed a long-term multi album deal with Virgin Records.

In 1984, Scott Walker released his first solo album in ten years, Climate of Hunter. The album furthered the complex and unnerving approach Walker had established on Nite Flights. While based loosely within the field of 1980s Rock music (and featuring guest appearances by contemporary stars Billy Ocean and Mark Knopfler), it had a fragmented and trance-like approach. Many of its eight songs lacked either titles or easily identifiable melody, with only Walker’s sonorous voice as the link to previous work. Like Nite Flights before it, Climate of Hunter was met with critical praise but low sales. Plans to tour were made but never came to fruition. A second album for Virgin was rumoured to be in the works (with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois producing) but was abandoned after early sessions. Soon afterwards, Walker was dropped by the label. This would be his only album of the 80s.

Track Three, or Delayed, as it's also known, would certainly feel at home in a Bauhaus album:

Rawhide is certainly different than the old Frankie Laine number of the same name. The opening line is "This is how you disappear": an appropriate description of Scott's feelings towards publicity.

After Climate Of Hunter, another decade was lost to the world, with the exception of this surprise collaboration with Goran Bregović called Man From Reno, that reminded us of the old Scott Walker from the 60s. It was composed for a French comedy film called Toxic Affair, and it referenced the Zodiac killer. Go figure.

When he returned in 1995 with the album Tilt, it was as a fully fledged modernist composer. On the surface, there couldn't have been a more unlikely transformation – imagine Andy Williams reinventing himself as Stockhausen.

The best song of the album, the opening track, Farmer in the City, is subtitled Remembering Pasolini. It's about top Italian film director/author/poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini, an unapologetically gay man who gave us some of the boldest and best films of the 60s and 70s. He was murdered in the mid 70s in what could've been cruising gone bad or a poilitical assassination. Both theories have their champions.

A few of the lyrics are appropriated from Norman Macafee's English translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's poem, Uno dei Tanti Epiloghi (One of the Many Epilogs), which was written in 1969 for Pasolini's friend and protégé, the scruffy young nonprofessional actor, Ninetto Davoli. Throughout the song, Walker's chant of "Do I hear 21, 21, 21...? I'll give you 21, 21, 21...", may be a reference to Davoli's age when he was drafted into (and subsequently deserted from) the Italian army.

The song is a cinematic sweep that somehow maintains a melody beneath the unrelenting melodrama of Scott's most intense vocal ever. Seemingly undecided whether he's recording an opera or simply haunting one, Walker doesn't so much perform as project his lyrics, hurling them into the alternating maelstroms and moods that careen behind him.

Bouncer See Bouncer would have quite a catchy chorus if anybody else had gotten their hands on it. Here, however, it is highlighted by an Eno-esque esotericism and the chatter of tiny locusts.

In 1999 he was asked to compose the soundtack to Pola X by Leos Carax. Here's a short scene from the film with Catherine Deneuve and Guillaume Depardieu:

And here's Scott Walker giving us Light:

His next album, The Drift, was released in 2006. It was as inpenetrable as Tilt. Perhaps the key to unlocking the mysteries of Tilt (1995), The Drift (2006) and Bish Bosch (2012) is to understand that Walker is a cineast, and infuses his music with the influence of film. His lyrics use powerful visual imagery, playing out dramas, and can adopt a variety of viewpoints and personas within a single song. He uses sound as a film-maker might, for dramatic effect. To Walker, making music means finding the most appropriate sonic environment for his lyrics. These unconventional, sometimes mocked and often alarming sounds are a mise-en-scène, a dramatic setting for Walker's lyrics, which Brian Eno has described as "peerless".

In Clara, the Clara of the song title is Claretta Petacci, Benito Mussolini's young mistress, who chose to be shot dead alongside Il Duce in April 1945 by Italian partisans. Their bodies were strung up and beaten with sticks by a crowd in Milan's Piazzale Loreto. Walker says he saw newsreel footage of this as a young boy and it gave him nightmares. The scene was – notoriously – evoked in the recording studio by percussionist Alasdair Molloy punching a side of pork with his fist. Yet such verité elements are only part of the sound palette. In some ways what is striking about Walker's later work are the similarities with his earlier work – the dynamics, the orchestral swells, the tambourine, and always, that voice. It's the same sound as we remember from The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Any More, in places – but we are a long way from three-minute songs with verses and choruses.

Jesse is a harrowing 9/11 song that also obliquely references Jailhouse Rock as Elvis Presley cries out ("I'm the only one left alive!") to his stillborn twin brother.

I wouldn't expect to find a Pop song called Psoriatic, but there you are:

In 2007 he recorded And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball? which was originally commissioned as a contemporary dance piece for disabled and non-disabled dance company CandoCo, choreographed by Rafael Bonachela.

His next album proper came in 2012 and was called Bish Bosch. Its title combines urban slang for the word "bitch" and the last name of Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch.

If you thought Psoriatic was a weird title for a song, try SDSS14+3B (Zircon, A Flagpole Sitter). Subatomic science, a dwarf jester in Attila the Hun’s court, St. Simeon, and an early 20th century fad all appear in this song, whose running time is 21:45.

Epizootics! is disorienting and confrontational. Cartoonish swamp jazz, pummelling drums, finger clicks and hand claps, withering slide guitars, trumpet fanfares. You think: none of this stuff should be happening. And that's the wonder of it.

In 2014 Soused appeared; a collaborative album between singer Scott Walker and experimental metal band Sunn O))). From this album, here's Brando (Dwellers on the bluff)

Earlier this year, Scott composed the soundtrack to what appears to be a very good film. I plan to watch The Childhood of a Leader asap. Here's the opening theme:

I believe the man has still a lot of great music to give us. An appropriate headline for his music to come would be, "Scott Walker: the sound of an artist freely expressing himself, perhaps uniquely unconstrained by commercial considerations."