Scott Walker - The Eternal Enigma

The curious listener may occasionally stumble upon musicians with bizarre, unconventional, out-of-the-box careers: quite a few have managed over the years to transform their musical discourse so thoroughly as to drift astonishingly far from their own "roots", even going so far as to disown their earliest material. But Scott Walker transcends this whole discussion: his uniqueness lies in having managed to transform, often abruptly and more than once, both the form and the content of his output, without worrying about the impact of this chameleon-like evolution on critics and audiences alike. He was a shrewd self-marketer during the Sixties, without ever abandoning his fruitful search for a deeply personal style (and his love for Jacques Brel); a forerunner of new wave in the Seventies; a polymorphous synthetic singer-songwriter with unbridled ambition in the Eighties; and a brilliant avant-garde parvenu in the last decades; among the musicians who cite him as an influence are names such as Julian Cope and David Bowie; what lies behind that dark, melancholy gaze? What is the secret driving force behind such a varied and perpetually radical musical path? Who is Scott Walker? Is there really only one of him?

Noel Scott Engel was born on January 9, 1944 in Hamilton, Ohio. He took to music from a very young age, perhaps encouraged by his parents to make the most of his fine, if still quite immature, voice: by the mid-1950s he already had a record deal, while the show business machine was eager to launch him into the then-booming teen-idol phenomenon. The young, enthusiastic Scott recorded no shortage of material (which today gets dished out to us via countless low-budget compilations, starting with Looking Back With Scott Walker from 1967), although only a handful of singles were the actual output of these sessions, released in short succession toward the end of the decade.

Hardly discouraged by the scant success of these mediocre releases, in 1962 Scott joined a local band, John Stewart's Routers, with whom he would release a couple of singles before they broke up. Engel and Stewart were also the core of the Daltons, who released a little-noticed single in early 1964: "I Only Came To Dance With You" (which would, two years later, give its name to a compilation collecting recordings from this period).

But in the meantime things had changed for young Scott: he had abandoned the carefree phrasing of his early years to focus on a lower, darker, more pensive, almost solemn timbre - and above all he had met two close partners in crime, John Maus (whom he'd known from the Daltons) and Gary Leeds (former drummer of the Standells, a fairly well-known bubblegum band); the three adopted the fictitious surname Walker and thus became the Walker Brothers, but their happiest stroke of inspiration was something else entirely: moving to England, to London, and trying their luck by riding the wave that, from distant Albion, seemed poised to sweep over the United States.

No sooner said than done: with a handful of spot-on singles (Bacharach's "Make It Easy On Yourself", "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore", "Love Her", "My Ship Is Coming In") the Walker Brothers - neither brothers nor English - paradoxically became (if only for one season) one of the leading phenomena of the British Invasion. The scenes of mass hysteria already witnessed for the Beatles and the Stones repeated themselves in front of Scott's seductive baritone and the languid, lavishly orchestrated love ballads sung by these three young men with their inexplicable sex appeal (neither Maus nor Leeds could exactly be called good-looking).

Their first British album was Take It Easy With The Walker Brothers, from 1965, hastily put together to keep up with the success of "Make It Easy On Yourself" and "Love Her": besides the hits, it contains a heartfelt rendition of Dylan's "Love Minus Zero/No Limits" and a few gems of the band's featherweight style, enriched by orchestral arrangements that, as ever, are quite intrusive. Though a quick-consumption product, it contains the first shadows of Scott's towering personality ("The Girl I Lost In The Rain") and boasts an all-too-varied repertoire (from ballads to the fiery R&B of "Land Of 1,000 Dances"); that the "brothers" don't even play on this record is as predictable as it is insignificant.

Portrait (1966) was another huge success in Britain, despite containing no hit singles: its impact rests on the overwhelming lament of "In My Room" and on small gems like "Just For A Thrill", but on the whole it doesn't quite work (and the cover of Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready" is the most alarming sign of that). The year's singles are preferable: "Another Tear Falls" and, above all, the dark and wonderful "Deadlier Than The Male", Scott's first great composition for his band (also worth noting is the fantastic B-side, "Archangel").

The Walker Brothers' third (and final) album, Images (1967), marks the end of their days as hitmakers, and is also their weakest set (the covers of "Blueberry Hill" and "Stand By Me" are dreadful): standing out in such a flat context is the airy, epic melody of "Orpheus", an enveloping, sensuous song that could easily have found a home on one of the finest Scott Walker solo records. After the modest success of the singles "Stay With Me Baby" and "Walkin' In The Rain", the trio split up. Each of the three then went his own way: while Gary recruited the group The Rain to pursue a psychedelic pop with little impact (the gratuitous childishness of "Come In You'll Get Pneumonia" would be his biggest success in that field) and John never strayed far from the "brothers'" path except to indulge his passion for country, Scott's solo career would be quite different, both in artistic results and commercial success.

On his own again, Scott - by now an expert at selling his own image as much as his own music - took a first, bold step: he brought back, indeed pushed to near-parodic extremes, the orchestral arrangements that had defined the Brothers' sound, donned a pair of very dark sunglasses, made public his visceral love for an uncomfortable songwriter like Jacques Brel, and picked up the thread begun with the trio through pages of languid sadness and delicate, muted despair, while at the same time trying to get himself accepted as a modern crooner, heir to a tradition already in decline; and all this within the span of a single album, Scott (1967), which manages to pair an admirable (or at least courageous, for the veteran of a boy band ante-litteram) stylistic choice with a lasting presence in the British top ten. "Mathilde", "My Death", "Amsterdam" (the latter two later also performed by Bowie) are heartfelt Brel covers, in which the American Scott Engel is transfigured into an utterly European figure of the doomed chanteur, but the new compositions "Montague Terrace (In Blue)" and especially the near-psychedelic "Such a Small Love" also conceal, within airy choruses, the anguish and anxiety of melodically daring verses - the first true masterpieces of what is now a classic body of work.

Scott 2 (1968) was an even more resounding success: led by the single "Jackie" (more Brel, as with the splendid "Next", banned by the BBC, and the playful "The Girls And The Dogs"), the record went to number one; the musical approach is even more refined, boasting genuine classics ("Plastic Palace People", a sensuous, operatic and graceful microcosm, the beguiling melody of "The Amorous Humphrey Plugg" and "The Girls From The Street"), but Scott knew he could, and should, do more; it's no coincidence that he would later describe this album as "the work of a lazy and self-indulgent man".

Overexposure, hit singles, even his own television show on BBC1, were all factors that warned him of the risk of becoming nothing more than a vacuous showman.

So, from a promising singer-songwriter and (almost) impeccable interpreter, in 1969, with his third solo album, Scott 3, Scott took a further step forward, sketching out, rather sharply, his own persona as a crooner who was at once provocative ("Funeral Tango", fittingly by Brel) and leaden ("It's Raining Today", set against an atonal orchestral backdrop, or "Copenhagen", a splendid foreshadowing of the splendor still to come, steeped in a Mitteleuropean atmosphere destined to find many followers); his impeccable melancholy is diluted in the sensuous verses of "Big Louise" and "Rosemary", but at times it breaks through with angular bursts of force outside the arrangement, as in the stark and precise "30 Century Man", one of his classics. A few too many filler tracks mar the atmosphere, however; and yet this album alone would be enough to define Scott Walker as a genius and a trailblazer - but, as we know, the story doesn't end here.

While (and we're still in 1969) Philips puts out a dull compendium of the songs recorded during his TV show, Scott already has his head out of those half-hearted performances that simply pay the bills: Scott 4 (1969) is his first true masterpiece. Pushing his own poetics to the extreme and marrying them to an entirely original, top-tier repertoire, Walker hands his audience a work that's dense yet graceful, steeped in rarefied atmospheres (the splendid ballad "Duchess", or the enveloping, scented cloud of "Boy Child"), pulsating energy ("The Old Man's Back Again", carried by a tremendous rhythm section, dedicated to Josef Stalin; the sarcastic, anti-militarist folk gallop of "Hero Of The War") and pitch-black darkness ("The Seventh Seal", inspired by Ingmar Bergman's film of the same name, "Angels Of Ashes" and even the anguished nursery-rhyme of "Rhymes Of Goodbye") - a work this audience won't be able to embrace with enough warmth: it's a minor flop for someone like Walker, who was used to seeing his records top the charts.

Disheartened, Scott sets aside his heroic fury: his painful, magnificent labor landed as silently as a feather on water.

It's no surprise, then, that 'Til The Band Comes In (1970), the first album to break the numbered sequence, immediately feels more half-hearted, a far cry from the intensity of its illustrious predecessor. Written entirely with his manager (!) Ady Semel - who doesn't hesitate to use the occasion to promote his protégée Esther Ofarim (who sings the forgettable "Long About Now") - it's a vacuous, superficial record, propped up by barely sketched melodies ("Little Things That Keep Us Together") or hazy, intangible ones ("Joe", "The War Is Over"). Besides the inspired title track, the album is lifted somewhat by the languid, drowsy bluesy ballad "Time Operator", perhaps the only not entirely negligible track in this watery stew.

The first half of the '70s would be a historic low point for Scott Walker: consumed by drugs and alcohol, unable to satisfy his audience, let alone please himself, he was forced to take refuge in a repertoire lazily cobbled together from covers alone, in albums for which "negligible" would be a genuine compliment.

While The Moviegoer (1972), a sort of collection of reinterpreted film themes, has going for it a passionate and effective rendition of "Glory Road", there's little to salvage on Any Day Now (1973), an album as anonymous and insipid as any he'd made. Stretch, also from 1973, is even worse, demolishing Scott's image too, as one can easily tell just from the cover.

We Had It All (1974), which would temporarily put an end to Scott Walker's solo career, is the least disgraceful record of this dark period: Scott moves increasingly toward country, which helps freshen up his sound, giving us a couple of notable moments ("Low Down Freedom", "Black Rose") and, all things considered, a batting average higher than the albums immediately preceding it.

Close to bankruptcy, crushed by his artistic and commercial failure, Scott agrees to take part in a reunion of his old band: the Walker Brothers, more languid than ever, are reborn in 1975, and with them a half-hearted Scott Walker nonetheless manages to land a sizable hit with "No Regrets" (taken from the repertoire of singer-songwriter Tom Rush).

The album, titled simply No Regrets and thrown together in a hurry to cash in on that fleeting success, is a mediocre, lukewarm mush of saccharine tones, but given the singer's condition over the previous five years, it's a clear improvement.

Lines (1976) shows more of the input of John Maus (apparently the most motivated of the three), who steers the sound toward territory more congenial to him, closer to his beloved country-pop ("Taking It All In Stride"), but it's nonetheless a weak, ethereal album, with few sparks (the title track, "Hard To Be Friends"), and it was met with little enthusiasm from the public.

Given the circumstances, all the more unexpected is Scott Walker's extraordinary parting shot, on the third album by the reunited "brothers".

Nite Flights (1978) in fact contains the first four original songs written by Scott since way back in 1970: the tetralogy, inspired by the Berlin experiments of Eno and Bowie, cuts all ties with everything Walker had produced up to that point. Abandoning the heavy use of orchestration that had defined his solo career, Scott lays sharp guitar solos over a fierce, relentless groove on "Shutout", topping it all off with an alienated, doubled vocal, a technique that reaches its extreme consequences in the lopsided, clownish blues of "Fat Mama Kick".

The title track, a splendid, ethereal journey through nocturnal atmospheres steeped in a perfect melancholy, is perhaps the most lyrical moment in this fabulous sequence; it flows into the full-blown operetta of "The Electrician", which stretches and opens up a bare, chant-like verse into an airy, Mitteleuropean-flavored chorus (it's no coincidence that Midge Ure would later admit to drawing on this song when writing "Vienna" for Ultravox).

Unfortunately, one can't forget that this is a Walker Brothers record, not a Scott solo effort: the rest of the album, with substantial contributions from Leeds and Maus, is decidedly subpar compared to that opening sequence. Although the two try hard (sometimes with laughable results) to keep pace with their imposing bandmate, with titles like "Death Of Romance", "Disciples Of Death", "Child Of Flames", the content is really the same old thing: lightweight ditties, arranged less pompously than usual, but no more worthwhile or substantial for it.

The Brothers' reunion falls apart not long after, without much fanfare: Scott takes the opportunity to retreat into a comfortable oblivion, where he can rethink his identity as an artist and composer. The fruit of six years of considered work is the astonishing Climate Of Hunter (1984), which extends and develops the ideas of Nite Flights with a denser, more operatic emotional charge, yet turns out to be the most "solid", tangible record of Walker's entire career.

There's certainly no shortage of splendid, drawn-out mid-air strolls (the gorgeous "Sleepwalkers Woman", the hushed atonality of "Dealer", the lazy yet swirling opening of "Rawhide"), but the dominant tone is dark, skeletal, hypnotic and hallucinated - as in the single "Track 3" (which offers a highly effective vocal duet with Billy Ocean), or its mirror image "Track 7", in the furious, unexpected drive of "Track 5", or in the crazed flocks of strings and synths that dominate "Track 6".

The record is sealed by a splendid "Blanket Roll Blues", quietly pilfered from Tennessee Williams, set over a delicate guitar carpet offered up by a Mark Knopfler in a state of grace. A splendid record, foreshadowing the glories to come.

Scott Walker, by now virtually without an audience and increasingly uninterested in commercial success, withdraws into his cocoon for another eleven years, to bring forth the album that, in spite of himself, would definitively carve his name into the history of modern music.

Tilt (1995) is an immeasurable work, a flow of viscous, icy, stinging lava that destroys every convention and every expectation: Scott Walker has killed himself many times over, but never so sadistically and painfully. His ethereal, dreamlike voice stands out against landscapes of post-industrial desolation with unprecedented toughness ("The Cockfighter") or dissolves into nocturnal sketches of innate, fragile beauty ("Farmer In The City", dedicated to Pasolini), while a dusty gust drags from afar the jagged sinuosities of "Bolivia '95", and from the scorched, putrid earth a dry, sickly larva of country music is reborn from its own roots ("Tilt").

Terrifying and magnetic as never before, the high priest Scott stages an ecstatic abduction into the negative zone of human anguish: little remains to hold onto, just as on the cover — fleeting likenesses shipwrecked in a sea of dream and mud, illusions and tar. An experience of this kind cannot leave one indifferent: with the opening of this immense existential chasm, Scott Walker's "avant-garde" period begins.

Except for the confused and non-essential soundtrack to an obscure French film (Pola X, 1999), one has to wait another eleven years for a follow-up.

From the very first notes of The Drift (2006), Scott seems to strive to compress the innovations of the previous album into a more solid and compact work, and for that reason an even more forbidding one: not that The Drift is a static or stagnant album, far from it. Its caustic, torrential drive seems channelled so as to exert the greatest possible pressure (and the harshest impact), whether in the lashing earthquake of "Cossacks Are", or in the exasperated, mood-laden theatricality of "Clara" (dedicated to Claretta Petacci) and the icy "Jolson And Jones", in the dense, dizzying darkness of "Jesse", in the intermittent, restrained tragedy of "Buzzers", in the misty mystical suggestions of "Psoriatic", right up to culminating in the intimate revelation of the exquisitely delicate "A Lover Loves", carried by voice and acoustic guitar alone.

Scott Walker's mysterious art has forged another impenetrable masterpiece.

Only a year later, Walker made a surprise return with And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And What Shall Go To The Ball?, a soundtrack for a ballet by the CanDoCo Dance Company (based in London, whose members include disabled performers), staged on 26 April 2006 in an absolute exclusive in Manchester, choreographed and designed by jet-set darling Rafael Bonachela.

Entirely instrumental, the (brief) score unfolds across four movements following a scale of rising sonic density. At the start there is only a very dark oscillating vibration at sub-frequency, disturbed by gurgling, aleatory, rarefied props (replaced, towards the end, by even more elusive, rarefied cello notes). In the second part the strings step forward, immediately sending the tension sky-high (horns, rattles, bass drum) and then modulating it into tremulous horror-film notes, estranged duets of instruments thrown together at random, and fresh fortissimo explosions. Here Walker comes across as an amateurish hybrid of Penderecki and Herrmann's "Psycho".

The third part starts again from low frequencies, which are then set resonating against one another, making room for dynamic surges and lyrical forays from the solo strings. The final part gives way to relay races between tears and horror-film sprints (high and low), progressively thickening the texture until moments of real, violent cacophony (somewhere between folk-noise and Oneida's "Up With People"), before forcibly carrying it toward a new relay with concertina and electronic devices, a schizophrenic band (at times orchestral, Stravinsky-like) and a stunned, almost purifying conclusion.

With the following album, Bish Bosch (2012), at nearly 70 years of age, Walker continues to feed on art and holy terror, far from at peace, enlivened by a kind of active disquiet. Hyeronimus Bosch unfurls the negative of an eternal, mythological, fearsome feminine — that "bish", slang for "bitch" — generating a majestic, awe-inspiring chaos.

Begun in 2009 and recorded over the following three years, the album, which continues his relationship with 4AD, is the work of a spirit exalted by the overflowing intensity of the cosmos, who tries to visionarily pull its threads together through writing that is highly learned, hallucinated, lucid and, at times, merciless. The sonic fabric — a complex architecture of violated guitars, synthesized clangs, tribal percussion, martial horns — absorbs and ensnares the listener, hurling them into a vision too intense for a one-directional approach.

"'See You Don't Bump His Head'" introduces and sets the scene for the start of a journey to the end of the universe: almost thirty seconds of sun, pneumatic percussion, and then the arrival of the narrating voice, which peremptorily begins to punctuate the tale like a riddle; right after, one seems to hear an angel of ashes who, a cappella, as in a stream of consciousness, apologises to God for his own cosmic clumsiness, before giving himself over to a delirium punctuated by animal, industrial, infernal noises, broken by an oracular little western guitar, around the 4'40" mark, and finally celestial violins suppressed by fresh, dry creaks ("Corps De Blah").

"Phrasing", introduced by the humble, sublime poetry of the line "Pain is not alone", repeatedly intoned with a baritone modulation that mesmerically intertwines with a percussive tropicalism, is perhaps the track closest to song form, as magnetic and piercing as a feverish pin in the head. And what follows immediately after is "SDSS1416 + 13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)", a near twenty-two-minute flow of astro-history, in which Attila becomes a pretext for a web of coincidences between past and present: the scientific discovery of the sub-stellar body SDSS1416 + 13B, also known as the Brown Dwarf, identical to the derogatory name by which a dark-skinned dwarf, Zercon, was mocked at the court of the king of the Huns, together with the twentieth-century, fictionalised figure of the Flagpole Sitter; twenty-two minutes suspended between ritual silence and sacral noise, in a dreamlike carousel of liturgical horns (the shofar) and ceremonial ones (the kudu).

"Epizootics!" is the single chosen to mark the dividing line between the first and second halves of the album: Hawaiian instruments and effects and implosions exploded into sacrificial dances, through which Scott's voice cuts, a masterly interpreter of a civic psychodrama.

In the final tracks, the haze is still thick: from the lyrical peaks of “Dimple” to dilated, slowed-down, aching nightmares, skeletal and stripped to the essentials over a backdrop of sharpened blades (“Tar”), to the obsessions of a zoomorphic primitivism (“Heya, heya, heya, heaya/ Room full of mice. Room full of mice. Room full of mice. Room full of mice.”). “The Day the *Conductar* Died (An Xmas Song)”, dedicated to the possible humanization of a confused and schizophrenic inhumanity – that of Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania who proclaimed himself conductar, tried and killed on 25 December 1989 – is the masterpiece-ballad that closes, with mournful and paradoxical sweetness, these human and more-than-human affairs.

Not even two years later comes the announcement of a collaboration between Scott Walker and the new darlings of drone-metal, Sunn O))), who among their traits also have that of pairing up with a multitude of artists. On paper, for Walker it's a cult event and a shock, given the essentially solipsistic nature of his artistic persona. But on listening, Soused sounds like a formula, a repeated pattern: O'Malley's quavering drone of distortion often stays in the background, doing little more than setting a mood, and the great expressionist flights of the previous trilogy of albums sound muted and predictable here. The long running times and Walker's constant baritone warbling don't help either. The sounds, however, remain fascinating and skillfully interlocked thanks to the ever-reliable producer Peter Walsh.

The soundtrack for the political-fiction thriller The Childhood Of A Leader (2015), directed by debut filmmaker Brady Corbet, is Walker's best work since Pola X and And Who Shall Go To The Ball: a partial but, in places, potent instrumental-only distillation of the hallmarks of his late style.

Depression and reaction, panic and psychic tension, hallucinations and spiritual skirmishes, human and inhuman beings, animals and beasts, proto-past and post-future, sidereal distances and abyssal depths, nihilism and emotion: can the circle truly be closed?

What more can we expect from Scott Walker after works of such depth? Will he manage to keep the quality of his songwriting and his musical exploration at such a high level? Will he manage to surprise us, to shake us, to deepen his fascinating, eternal enigma?

Sadly, the question will remain unanswered: on the morning of Monday 25 March 2019, record label 4AD announced via a post on its social media channels the death of Scott Walker. He was 76 years old.

Contributions by Michele Saran (“And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And What Shall Go To The Ball?”, “The Childhood Of A Leader OST”), Mimma Schirosi (“Bish Bosch”)

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