Scott Walker - Nite Flights

By the time the Walker Brothers started recording their third album since reuniting, the momentum was gone. “No Regrets,” the first single of the reunion, had kindled some nostalgia and interest but the subsequent albums left critics and the public unimpressed. Scott’s work on those albums was at least more consistent with his musical persona and he sounded marginally more engaged without being the least bit inspired. It seemed that the reunion would simply peter out.

Instead, Scott put out a dazzling set of songs completely in line with the most cutting edge rock of the era and, in fact, ahead of them. And after releasing them to the world, he disappeared for six years.

Nite Flights was a contractual obligation for both the band and the record label. GTO Records was falling apart and facing bankruptcy. Scott realized that the group would receive almost no attention from the executives and certainly very little publicity--why not record whatever they wanted? They decided to record their own songs, each member alotted a portion of the release.

Surely, there must have been a few Walker Brothers fans--what few of them remained--who had enjoyed the previous two albums of country-flavored MOR and vanilla-fied rock. I like to imagine their surprise when they dropped the needle on this:

What the hell is this? Driving drums and bass with a guitar solo? Then:

What are these weird sounds? What is Scott singing about?

That’s the creepiest Solid Gold number I’ve ever heard.

But it’s not as creepy as that.

Obviously, Scott’s wheels were turning while lost in his “wilderness years.” The tracks here are so different from his previous work that, had someone else sung them, one wouldn’t suspect that Scott had made them.

One difference is that they are clearly rock tracks, founded on high-in-the-mix drums and layered with guitar. Scott had never been a rock artist, at least since his Sunset Strip and session days.

The lyrics are, at best, cousins to Scott’s earlier compositions. One of the charms of Scott’s solo years is the lyrical tension between matter-of-fact descriptions and self-consciously “poetic” figures. Like Hemingway’s prose, the immediate effect is of eccentricity, which eventually feels consistently unique. Here, he’s abandoned that direction; these lyrics are abstract, with “glass traps” opening and closing and “sunfighters” and “bloodlites.”

For comparison, consider another great alt/art-rock artist, John Cale. Biographies inevitably mention that his first language was Welsh and that he often uses English words as sounds and not for their meanings. Scott appears to be describing things using only expressionistic details--the words mean something but we’re never given the complete picture.

I love these tracks but I was curious why critics and Scott mythologists thought they were so important. The answer lies in David Bowie and Brian Eno’s collaborative work for the so-called “Berlin Trilogy,” the three albums Low, “Heroes” and Lodger.

This article by Chris O’Leary is an excellent thumbnail of Walker’s career and an even better report of the artistic dynamic between Walker and Bowie.

In late 1978, Eno brought Nite Flights to Montreux, where he and Bowie had started recording Lodger. Bowie was stunned. One can’t blame him. Imagine if a great stone face to whom you’ve been making offerings for years suddenly rumbles up a response, in an approximation of your voice.

But what was Walker doing on these tracks to respond to Bowie that was so important? For that, we have to look at the modus operandi of rock genius Brian Eno.

Here’s an excerpt from an article he wrote for Details Magazine over 20 years ago (emphasis mine):

What [music theorists] failed to notice, or at least attach any importance to, was that their language, the language of classical written composition, simply didn't have any terms to describe Jimi Hendrix's guitar sound on "Voodoo Chile" or Phil Spector's production of "Da Doo Ron Ron" - arguably the most interesting features of those works. Rock music, I kept saying, was a music of timbre and texture, of the physical experience of sound, in a way that no other music had ever been or could have ever been. It dealt with a potentially infinite sonic pallette, a palette whose gradations and combinations would never adequately be described, and where the attempt at description must always lag behind the infinites of permutation.

Nite Flights came in between "Heroes” and Lodger (the latter has a song called “African Night Flights,” which in production style is clearly influenced by Walker). The Walker Brothers’ engineer said that ”Heroes” was the reference album for the recording. The three artists are in dialogue.

Bowie’s legend for this era is that he was rebuilding himself professionally and personally. His glam-rock period starting with Ziggy Stardust put him on a trajectory of self-destruction through excess. The nadir was the time around Station to Station (my favorite Bowie album), when he was heavily into drugs and made a spectacle of himself by flirting with fascism. He retreated to Berlin to work on Low, not expecting the songs to be commercial enough to be released. Eno joined him later in the project and their collaboration continued through the next two albums. Low is the rock-nerd favorite, as it’s the most experimental.

“Experimental” is the right word because that was Eno’s method at the time (and still is to some extent). Using his “Oblique Strategies,” playing cards with methods of breaking old habits, Eno’s technique was to create chaos with the work in order to make creative discoveries. For example, at one point during the recording of Lodger, he had Bowie sing to a track playing in reverse. In addition, Bowie himself has long been a fan of William S. Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique, creating lyrics by pulling random word combinations from a hat.

Combining their interest in finding inspiration in chaos and Eno’s particular interest in timbre and texture, we can see what was so “stunning” about Nite Flights. From Low to Lodger, we can hear the sonic chaos approaching order. In Scott’s contributions to Nite Flights, we hear timbre and texture completely and assuredly integrated with the song. That is, the interesting production elements in Bowie and Eno’s work sound accidental while it sounds as though Walker knew exactly what he was doing. It’s like working on a Rubik’s Cube and someone who’s never seen one before takes it out of your hands and solves it. “Is this what you were trying to do?”

Take another listen to any of these tracks, but especially “Nite Flights”--they sound somehow fuller. Even the background accents are either in harmony or in the almost-harmonic style that Walker favored. When Eno listened to the tracks again for the filming of the documentary, he got exasperated, asking why no one has gone beyond Walker’s work here and why young groups were content to mimic Bowie and Roxy Music.

The album was another flop, although critics liked Scott’s songs a great deal. But, after years as a failing interpreter of mediocre songs, Walker had reminded people of his unique vision and shown that, rather than being left behind, he was way ahead of pop music. Then he disappeared for six years.