On March 25 this
year, the music world lost Noel Scott Engel, better known as Scott
Walker. But we’d already lost his music a long time before that.
The Scott Walker who made albums like Tilt, The Drift
and Bish Bosch was arguably not the same artist who produced a
slew of lush, orchestral records during the late 1960s. It’s an
analysis with which Scott Walker himself would likely have agreed: he
considered his early career hermetically sealed off from his later
work and neither listened to nor referenced those works in later life. So what happened? It’s a question I’ve pondered on
for many years, and one to which I’ve returned in the light of his
demise...
I first became
properly aware of Scott Walker in 1990, with the acquisition of a
compilation CD, Boy Child, made up entirely of self-composed
material drawn primarily from his four solo albums spanning the years
1967-70. Of course I knew of him well before this. I’m sure I knew
the Walker Brothers’ single The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More
purely from airplay at the time of its release, but I probably
couldn’t have put a name to the group at the age of five or six.
Neither was I aware of the identity of the singer responsible for a
record that caught my attention in the early summer of 1969: The
Lights of Cininatti. It was one of those songs that seemed to
embody the spirit of the time, warm and mellow, like a long summer
evening. I liked it a lot, but it was only years later, when thumbing
through a copy of the Guinness Book of Hit Singles that I was
finally able to put a name to the singer. His earlier solo hits,
Jackie and Joanna had failed to make any impression on
me, hardly surprising in the case of the former, a Mort Shuman
translation of a Jacques Brel song, which the BBC banned outright for
its reference to ‘authentic queers and phoney virgins’ (a word
for word translation from the original French). Neither had I been
aware of Scott’s television series for the BBC, now lost in its
entirity. But the very fact that such a series was commissioned is a
clear indication of how the entertainment industry perceived the
Scott Walker of the mid-1960s: a polished, professional cabaret
crooner with a rich baritone that bore comparison with the greatest
singers of his day. But all of this was about to change.
The change came
with 1969’s album Scott 4 – released under his real name
of Noel Scott Engel, a commercially disastrous decision which was
later reversed. The album, entirely self-composed, adopted a much
less elaborate musical texture than had been heard on his three
previous solo outings, with many songs underscored by a clipped,
stacatto bass guitar playing intricate contrapuntal parts. The songs
were challenging in their choice of subject matter, one of them (The
Old Man’s Back Again) subtitling itself as ‘dedicated to the
neo-Stalinist regime’, whilst The Seventh Seal was a literal
re-telling of the Ingmar Bergman movie. This was daring stuff,
especially in light of Scott Walker’s typical fanbase, which was
overwhelmingly young, and female.
Anyone perceptive
enough might have guessed at this change in direction from as early
as the first solo work, titled simply ‘Scott.’ Here, alongside
some inoffensive but richly melodic standards, Scott had chosen to
record a brace of numbers by Belgium’s challenging ‘chansonnier’
Jacques Brel, well known in his home territories for songs dealing
with difficult and often intimidating topics, such as the abuse of
young army recruits (Au Suivant) or meditations on death including Tango Funebre, Le Moribond, and L’Age Idiot.
Scott’s own compositions displayed the lyrical influence of Brel in
self-consciously ugly lines like ‘we’re swallowed in the stomach
room’, clearly the first step towards the more disturbing material
he would later release.
 |
| Scott Walker, pictured during the years of greatness. |
The next solo
album, released in July 1968, contained originals like Plastic
Palace People (seemingly influenced by the short French Film The
Red Balloon) and The Amorous Humphrey Plugg (the title
clearly tipping its hat in the direction of TS Eliot’s The
Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock). The clues were beginning to
amass for anyone interested enough to spot them: Scott Walker was a
Europhile, well-read, a literate, philosophical artiste whose slick,
easy-listening façade
masked some increasingly uncomfortable lyrical ideas.
In time, of course,
this desire to disturb and disorient would entirely overwhelm Scott
Walker’s compositions, but for the time being, he played it safe,
couching his strange wordplay in the deceptively velvet upholstery of
arrangements by the likes of Reg Guest and Wally Stott (latterly
Angela Morely). But was this really playing it safe? I’d argue that
here, in the mid-1960s, Walker was at his most genuinely subversive,
drawing in the unwary with melody and texture only to turn their
preconceptions upside down with lyrics about an anthropomorphic
balloon with a ‘string tied to his underwear’ or a ‘big-shot’
husband who deceives his wife by visiting brothels on his way home
from work. It’s dead easy to sound subversive through dissonance,
atonality, serialism or simply using a dead pig as a percussion
instrument – all of which Walker would later go on to do in the
absence of genuine musical ideas. But it’s the mark of a genius to
be subversive in the context of a beguiling, sinuous melody,
delivered by a full orchestra. And this is what Scott Walker did with
his first four solo albums. So why did he not continue to do so?
The commercial
failure of Scott 4 saw Walker act on the advice of his record
company (presumably, toe the line or leave the label), and the next
release was the more accessible ’Til the Band Comes in .
Here, Walker employed his manager, Ady Semel, to weed out the darker,
subversive elements of his lyrics, which were clearly perceived as
part of the reason for Scott 4’s disappointing
performance.’Til the Band Comes in was widely
perceived for years as an album to be avoided. The Walker cognoscenti
(amongst them Julian Cope, who expressed this actual opinion to me in
person) considered it a mis-step, and while the first four albums
were reissued on CD during the 1990s, it took a lot longer for ’Til
the Band... to find its way onto the digital format. When it did,
it was quickly deleted, and the CD was soon changing hands for
ridiculous amounts of money...
There are some
worthwhile moments on ’Til the Band Comes in,
although Walker does sound like he’s getting tired of fighting his
corner. The jazzy Time Operator is a highlight as is Sleepers
Awake (both were included on the Boy Child collection),
but some of the cover versions are bordering on blandness, and this
kind of reactionary conformity would increasingly come to define
Walker’s career during the early 1970s. There would not be a single
Noel Scott Engel original on any of his subsequent solo albums until
1984’s comeback Climate of Hunter.
Mid-decade saw the
Walker brothers come together again, with a moderate-sized hit single
(No Regrets) taken from a critically-mauled album of the same
name. Walker’s delivery on the single hinted that some of the old
greatness was still present, but his voice seemed to have lost a
little of the range and drama that had been showcased on the four
‘Scott’ albums. A further album of covers followed for the
Walkers, but the turning point for Scott was just around the corner.
The trio’s final album, Nite Flights, saw each member
contributing their own material to what was essentially three mini
solo albums joined together. Their label, GTO, was hovering on the
brink of collapse, presenting the band with an opportunity to do
something uncompromising.
John Maus brought
four songs to the table, Gary Leeds just two, whilst Scott supplied
the remaining four. Amongst these was a track that would become a
kind of clarion call to Walker fans, and a beacon to others in the
music industry. The Electrician came about after Scott had
read Noam Chomsky’s writings on American imperialism in South
America, and describes the work of a CIA torturer. If Scott’s songs
had already hinted at dark and disturbing depths, then on this
evidence, there were still greater profundities awaiting his
examination. The Electrician begins with an atonal drone on
strings that instantly recalls Scott’s earlier use of such effects
on songs like Such a Small Love. Other, ill-defined sounds can
be heard in the background (seagulls? screaming voices?), and when
Scott’s voice enters it’s still recognisably the old familiar
baritone, albeit with somewhat less range than we’d previously been
used to. The brooding darkness of the first part then opens out into
a sunny, expansive orchestral setting, before the threatening mood
descends once again for the coda.
The Electrician
is, essentially, the pivot between the two eras of Scott Walker: the
strings and orchestration hint, briefly, at a return to the
greateness of the mid-60s, whilst the grim, doom-laden intro and
outro, replete with sounds that hover somewhere between the realm of
music and sound effects, point the way towards Tilt and its
successors...
The Walker Brothers
ended their career on Nite Flights, and Scott Walker himself
now entered a period of obscurity, during which he lived, by his own
account, on ‘not a lot.’ Despite his low profile, interest
continued to grow in his work, and the early 80s saw a number of
compilations released. Eventually, Walker signed a deal with Virgin
records, which culminated in his first solo album for fourteen years,
Climate of Hunter, released in March of 1984.
Climate of
Hunter is a long way from being Tilt, or Bish Bosch;
but it stands equally far apart from the 1960s solo albums. There is
more melodic content than would be apparent on the later works, but
the circumstances of the recording lend the whole a fractured,
indecisive feel. Walker reportedly refused to allow the session
musicians to hear the vocal melody which they would be accompanying,
and was keen to avoid the sound of a band ‘all swinging together.’
There is, accordingly, not a single moment on Climate... that
could be described as swinging. The songs, though somewhat more
melodic than those Walker would later produce, were poor things
compared to those on the mid-60s albums, and the voice sounded in
need of an overhaul, thin, plaintive, determined at all costs to
avoid the soaring, vibrato-laden drama of his earlier persona.
Clearly, something
had happened to Scott Walker. He was no longer the artiste he had
been a decade earlier. Even on the sleeve, there’s something odd
about his appearance: gone is the cool, good-looking young man of
1967: instead, we see a middle-aged man, already losing his youthful
appearance, holding out a hand as if caught in the middle of asking a
question. His expression is similarly challenging, as if demanding of
his audience: ‘what are you expecting?’ whilst simultaneously
defying them to ask for anything other than what’s on offer.
Personally, I find
Climate of Hunter quite hard to take. Not in the way that
Tilt, The Drift or his other later works would be hard
to take, just hard in having to accept that Scott Walker could have
produced something so aimless and mediocre. The melodies go nowhere
and seem almost to have been improvised in the moment over the
pre-recording backing tracks. His voice, once deep and resonant, is
thin and whiny. Frankly, it’s a bit rubbish. But try finding a
Scott Walker fan who’d agree with that.
If Climate...
was hard going, then the next message from planet Walker would be
harder still. Made-up words, atonal meandering melodies, and a sense
of darkness and dislocation characterised the long-awaited Tilt.
At the time of its release, I speculated that Walker, now bereft of
creative musical ideas, had simply caved in to the pressure for him
to do something, anything, and simply cranked out an album of
random garbage, secure in the knowledge that it would sell, simply
because it had his name on it. He even appeared on Later With
Jools Holland, performing one song solo, accompanying himself on
a Fender Telecaster, on which he scratched away without making a
single musical sound. It was rubbish. But the fans loved it, just
like they’d swooned over that new suit of clothes of the Emperor’s.
Clearly, it wasn’t just Scott Walker who had changed... but from
hereon in, there would be no change, no relief from the slog of
hard-grind albums immersed deep in the morass of wilful obscurity.
Looking through the
online obituaries last week, I was dismayed at the level of regard
and attention lavished over these feeble later works, none of which
can honestly be described as musical or entertaining in any aspect
whatsoever. I almost began to wish that Scott Walker had remained a
recluse so that now, on his demise, we could celebrate the true
genius of the maverick singer who married skewed, literate lyricism
to extraordinary melodies and elegant orchestral arrangements. This,
as I’ve already stated, was, to me, his true genius – not the
industrial noise of the later years.
I began by asking a
question: what was it that turned Scott Walker from the
orchestral-accompanied crooner into just one more purveyor of atonal
musical horror? I struggle to provide an answer but find myself
coming back increasingly to this hypothesis: melodically, and
lyrically, had he not got as far as it was possible to go by the end
of the 1960s? Scott Walker was never one to stand still (he
reportedly never listened to any of his albums after he was done with
it in the studio). He always had to move forward, to innovate. During
the early 70s, he was prevented from doing so, and by the time the
chance arose to do his own thing once again, the musical landscape
had changed. Melody had served him well, but it was now time to
dismantle the conventions he’d previously employed. Climate of
Hunter is the sound of him doing just this, and by the time of
Tilt, eleven years later, the process was complete – not one
vestige of classical melody or harmony remained, and lyrics had been
sanded down to the roughest, most impenetrable textures.
But equally, he
might simply have forgotten how to write a decent song. Such things
do happen...
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