In the early 70s, Scott Walker the artist disappeared, replaced by Scott Walker the singing check-casher. He went through the same paces when reuniting with his original group, The Walker Brothers, until 1978, when the group released Nite Flights. It contained Scott’s first original songs since Til the Band Comes In and they were unlike anything he’d written before. His four tracks on that album were critically praised.
Then Walker disappeared from the music world completely.
As I’ve said before, Walker’s artistic progression couldn’t have been more ripe for legend if he had planned it. Stardom as a unique, dark and tortured figure. Challenging and out-of-fashion solo work. Commercial failure and retreat into puerile work-for-hire. A tiny flash of genius and then silence.
It was the right formula to kindle interest in his work. In 1981, one of Britain’s many eccentric pop geniuses, Julian Cope, released a compilation of Walker originals. The album was titled Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker and focused on original songs from his first five albums. Two more compilations quickly followed and Walker was signed with Virgin Records.
The album he produced was Climate of Hunter, released in 1984.
It’s probably best to consider it a transitional album. A few of the melodies have traces of his earlier, more somber ballads but none of the incredible bombast. One may hear an echo or two of his tracks on Nite Flights, but very little. At the same time, there are just as few hints of the style he would develop on the next three albums.
This article from The Quietus does a good job of appraising it in the context of his other work and gives us a label to hang on the album: art pop, that sideways little genre that could only have emerged from the 70s.
No discussion of the album is complete without quoting the first line from the opening track, “Rawhide:” “This is how you disappear.” It’s taken autobiographically, of course, but the song really is remarkable, with its rising tension leading to a frenzied gallop followed by a slow release:
This was 1984, so of course Virgin produced a music video, for “Track 3" (Starts at 5:18):
This is the most obviously pop track, even with lyrics about washing “the murder away” and a messianic tilt. A catchy melody, too.
“Sleepwalker’s Woman” is the track most similar to his earlier work, a languorous ballad. The difference is in the indirectness of his lyrics; as with Nite Flights, Walker is no longer straining to describe things exactly. He’s content with expressionistic abstractions.
“Track Five” gives us the best picture of the production style Walker practiced on the album. He kept the vocal melody a secret from his session musicians and nowhere is the contrast more obvious than here. The live backing band sounds almost like an instrumental bed for a Miami Vice chase. When Walker’s vocals come in, it throws the band and his voice against one another.
“Track Six” is the clearest bridge between his older work and his future albums, even if it is the oddest sounding track on the album. A little crooning in combination with frightening tones. Walker would leave behind the former and explore the power of the latter as he progressed.
An album like this is almost critic-proof and it’s a shrewd move for Walker, even if that wasn’t his intention. To attempt to remake Scott 4 would only invite comparisons and Walker had gone through a lot in those fifteen years. It’s surprising that he didn’t follow through with the sound he created on Nite Flights, but it’s also evidence that Walker had returned to following his muse and doing so with even less compromise than before.
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.
If you are new to the work and story of Scott Walker, I have a unique opportunity to introduce you to the debunking before you hear the myth.
Paul Mark Phillips was a music journalist, A&R man and composer/producer in the British music industry from the late 60s on. One of his artists was Scott Walker in what the artist terms his "wilderness years."
At the time, I thought of him as blessed with an exceptional voice. Beyond that, I found him embarrassing, a precocious child who felt he was not getting the attention he warranted.
Phillips hints at an angle that is less available to us who are discovering Walker, rather than living through his career. Maybe it was very important to Walker that he be considered a genius. Phillips says, "The whole Jacques Brel thing lacked authenticity for me."
Phillips issue with Walker is personal. The story at the link is about how Walker hardly cared about which songs he sang and, when the albums failed, he blamed the record companies. Since Phillips was the company rep responsible for bringing Walker material, he feels personally slighted.
Phillips may believe that he's undermining Walker's legend but my opinion is that he's simply shading it with more detail. The myth is that Walker, finding that the public wasn't interested in his genius, gave up and gave the public and the record companies what they wanted. His heart wasn't in it, though, and the material is weak.
The legend's image is of depression, despair and heavy drinking. Phillips' story sounds like that condition as it plays out day by day, not a refutation of the myth. Walker, judging by the fact that he put out several albums during that time, seems to have been a functional depressive. Chances are, he spun between trying to make the best of things and making bad decisions, thinking, "Who cares?"
And these were bad decisions. Take a listen to this track from Any Day Now, "We Could Be Flying:"
It's clear this is a 70s-era Frank Sinatra reject and it points to the fundamental problem with this period of Walker's work. A hopeful Scott Walker is uninteresting and, more importantly, sounds false.
A comparison with Sinatra is helpful. While both have distinctive, powerful and note-perfect voices, Sinatra has a talent for phrasing that Walker doesn't. This points to why Walker is a successful songwriter (successful through the lens of history, that is) and less so as a song interpreter; he's less able to make something of a song unless it's written to already fit his style. Brel's work, for example, is both dark and theatrical--where Brel applied a hurried, panicked tone, Walker could make the notes soar with his powerful voice. Walker is limited as an interpreter but an able writer for himself.
That limitation means that, since Walker was no longer writing songs, he had to be very particular about which songs he picked to record. As important as the musical style was the topical style. Sinatra established a musical persona that ranged from celebratory (though less so than Dean Martin) to heartbroken (though not desperate). By the end of the 60s he had added a strain of wistful humility, the tone of an older man looking back at life and the world.
Walker's musical persona had contempt for the world and felt that love was only a temporary salve against the horrors of life and made it worse once it inevitably ended. To sing what he does on "We Could Be Flying" is so out of character as to be jarring.
A disregard for his own limitations and his persona is the strongest quality of the "wilderness years" albums. Listen to the mind-boggling choice of covering Bill Wither's "Ain't No Sunshine" on the same album:
I mentioned, when comparing the Walker Brothers with the Righteous Brothers, that Walker has absolutely no soul in his voice. Why then, does he cover a song that is arguably all soul? Wither's original is stripped down to its expressive basics, putting the spotlight on Wither's vocal styling and emotion. Walker's sounds like Tom Jones' Las Vegas opening act. He compounded the mistake by covering Wither's "Use Me," as well.
Thankfully, Walker's primary output was denatured countrypolitan, taking an already plastic production style and mainstreaming it even further. I say "thankfully" because it doesn't inspire the listener to reach through the speakers to clamp a hand over his mouth. Jerry Reed's "You're Young and You'll Forget," from We Had It All:
Even more than improper song choices, Scott's lost years output is marked by his disconnection from his work. What we are hearing is pure singing skill with zero passion. "Sundown," made popular by Gordon Lightfoot, from the same album:
Walker's first album without originals from this period, The Moviegoer, has a few tracks in which he sounds engaged but it's cold comfort to fans of "Such a Small Love," which shows his vocals at their most dramatic.
Walker is also a bit more lively (but nowhere near his peak) on the first two albums he recorded with for the Walker Brothers reunion in 1975. Here's the title track from the first album, No Regrets:
What an odd song. It sounds as though the band, even when the guitar solo starts, is in a room next door, while Scott is crooning right in one's ear. It sounds like he's barely opening his mouth.
But at least it's a proper Scott Walker song. He's singing about waking up in an empty home alone and waiting for the dawn, which is about as Scott Walker-y as it gets.
The next Walker Brothers' album was Lines, a weaker collection than No Regrets. He sounds more engaged than in his previous three solo albums. Here's the title track:
Alienation, regret and some actual belting--it's not much, but we'll take it.
The Walker Brothers reunion got a good deal of attention but the releases were not interesting enough to keep it, especially consider what kind of years those were for British pop, with David Bowie and Elton John at their full power. By the time they started their third reunion album, no one cared.
Which is the reason Scott was able to do something so remarkable with it.
In 1967, the pop music world was set ablaze. The most important album of the rock era had been released and no one could believe what they were hearing. Journalists report that, wherever one went in London, one was sure to hear its music coming from the apartments one passed. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band's only drawback is that it's been played too many times for anyone to be amazed by it again.
Oh, a half-year later, Scott Walker's first solo album, Scott, was released. It had nothing to do with The Beatles whatsoever.
That's exciting all on its own. The Beatles' influence drapes over pop history like a psychedelic hair shirt. Combine them with Bob Dylan and you've got the source for three-quarters of the rock music produced since 1965. Scott Walker sounds nothing like them or their influences. He doesn't fit into the history of pop as we usually understand it.
One reason that he's a cult artist is because he was based in Britain. The UK, of course, is not some distant outpost of culture but it's not always easy to remember that their pop scene, as transformative as it was for American listeners, came from very different sources than the rock'n'roll of the States. Rock'n'roll's origins were more or less spontaneous, a combination of high-energy R&B and similarly peppy proto-country music. When the sound came to the UK, it was just that--another sound. The older pop forms of music hall and the singer-with-a-big-band style took longer to fade.
Since this orchestral pop is what interested Walker, it makes sense that he found a home in England, staking out a claim to a fading genre. Keeping the flame of a dying style alive is not the only reason he's a cult artist. Like Frank Zappa, or Love, or the Velvet Underground, the individual parts of his music fit together in a way fundamentally different from that of the mainstream.
That lack of Beatle's influence is one part of the alien quality of his work. As written in the previous post, Walker's primary songwriting influence wasn't Chicago blues or Buddy Holly but Jacques Brel, the French chanson singer whose songs were semi-theatrical performances. Here's Walker's most Brel-like piece, "The Girls From the Streets," from Scott 2:
Not only is the piece far removed from the likes of Dylan and The Beatles, its removed from its next-closest Anglophone kin, the works of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. The documentary 30 Century Man discusses the interest 60s-era Scott had in modern classical composition but that's something I know very little about. What I do know is that Walker takes a lyrical position that is profoundly horrified and disgusted at what it's portraying, a wealthy man taking a younger one out for a night of debauchery in a world where the poor are both desperate and depraved. It's not "She's Leaving Home."
Prostitution is central to another piece, "The Amorous Humphrey Plugg," which details the joy the titular Humphrey takes in escaping from his family to take up with whores, from the same album:
Take note of how Walker's music creates the sound of ecstatic rapture in the first song and joyous pride in the second, just as the johns are in the midst of their transgressions. Putting the darkest elements in the most thrilling and melodic points of the song is a technique Walker uses brilliantly in "The Electrician" a decade later.
The documentary makes a point of telling us that one key to Walker's success at this time was that his songs often depicted the parts of England that weren't Swinging London. He sang about the lives of sad middle- and working-class people whose illusory brushes with happiness damage them forever. Here's "Rosemary" from Scott 3:
It appears that the only happy moments in Rosemary's life is remembering the travelling salesman who bedded her, perhaps echoing the line in the Walker Brothers' "Orpheus:" "Remember me/I've already forgotten you."
Even when the romance is at least intimate and ongoing, it's surrounded by dirty vulgarity. In "Montague Terrace (In Blue)," from Scott, the couple shares an apartment building with a "bloated belching" man upstairs whose stomping "tear[s] the night," and a woman across the hall whose "thighs are full of tales to tell." The feeling one gets is not that their dreams of Montague Terrace are a future they expect but a fantasy shielding them from the filthy world around them.
Walker turns his everyday portraits of escape into the absurd with "Plastic Palace People," from Scott 2, in which young Billy floats above his town, held back by a string to his underwear. Beneath him, the "plastic palace people" dream too long and "Rip your face with lies:"
The theme that runs throughout Walker's work is that life is generally empty, with only waves of sexual rapture, memory, pain and existential dread punctuating the numbness. Take non-album B-side, "The Plague:"
Awake at night (another long-running theme), Walker's protagonist tries to remember "Lips on lips/And hips on hips/And ice and fire and gloom and glow." "When did they leave the man?," he asks.
With this attitude, it makes sense that Walker writes a song retelling the story of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, albeit taking an amusing spaghetti-western musical approach:
"The Seventh Seal" is the opening song on Scott 4, generally considered to be his best album of this era. The previous albums (including one compiling music from his television series) were all very successful; Scott 2 was number one on the British album charts, temporarily displacing Dylan's John Wesley Harding.
Scott 4 was a flop. Many attribute this to it being credited to Walker's real last name, Engel. There's no denying that it was a serious personal blow to him. It was the first of his albums to be entirely original. Like the others, it's stylistically diverse. One standout is the jaunty "Hero of the War," detailing the pointless misery of a man who's been paralyzed in combat from the perspective of his mother:
One of the oddest cuts is "The Old Man's Back Again," a slinky number about the Soviet invasion that crushed the Prague Spring:
And here we start to see the legend of Scott Walker form. What the uniqueness of his solo work hides from the contemporary listener is that Walker was a fixture of British entertainment. The aforementioned television show was a variety program in which Walker sang duets with guests in front of stage sets. While it wasn't crass sensationalism of Sonny and Cher or the schmaltz of Andy Williams, Walker's show was in step with mainstream entertainment.
As one can imagine, the trappings of show biz success were troubling for a man prone to laying awake at night, trying to remember some moment of joy in his life. The failure of his first completely original work shook his confidence in his art.
He was able to write two-thirds of the next album, Til the Band Comes In, as he reexamined his career. Here's "Joe," a cocktail-lounge piano ditty about an old man dying alone:
The cheerfulness continues as Walker dissects all the shared misery that keeps humanity together as a war rages:
One of the most remarked-upon elements of the album is the way the Walker the man seems to vanish from the picture early on the second side. After one original tune after another, the last five songs are interpretations and of much lesser quality than his previous work.
This is what makes Walker's story so interesting. While his confidence was shattered and he turned to drink, he didn't disappear from the public eye. He simply stopped caring about what he was doing. He went through his paces, cutting albums of string-heavy MOR covers, holding a mid-level presence on the radio and obscuring the originality of his previous work with a thick layer of treacle.
The proper foundation required to understand the Scott Walker story is to know that he was known originally as an interpretive singer, in the manner of Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett. The category most often mentioned about the period from 1967-1978 is "MOR," middle of the road--old ladies' music.
This song, "Through a Long and Sleepless Night," from Scott, is a good example.
This style, string-heavy balladry, was Walker's bread and butter until his late-70s reinvention, but that's not the reason that his first solo run is so highly regarded. The albums, Scotts 1-3 and his sixth 'Til the Band Comes In, are peppered with interpretive covers. What's attracted cultists, however, are his originals and his discovery of a songwriting model.
That's not to say that the works by other songwriters aren't sometimes interesting. "Angelica" is a fine showing of Walker's baritone. "The Big Hurt" has a hyperactive arrangement. But mostly they stand as a contrast to Walker's solo work and his interpretations of Jacques Brel.
Brel deserves a post of his own but, as a non-Francophone, I couldn't do him justice. Suffice it to say that he was a leading singer-songwriter in France from the end of WWII to the early 70s and his songwriting is stereotypically French, focused on sex, death, passion, misery and doom. In other words, right up Walker's alley.
Here's a Brel original, translated into English as "Next:"
Just as Brel was retiring from the stage, he was discovered, separately, by songwriters Mort Shuman and 60s-kitsch-icon Rod McKuen. It's Shuman's translations that dominate Walker's interpretive work. Here's his version of "Next:"
In the first part of Walker's story, I said that his work with The Walker Brothers was bombastic rather than dramatic. With Brel's work, Walker was able to find songs in which there is no difference between the two:
It's easy to see how important Brel's work was to Walker. Just as his original songs with his band seemed to be take-offs of their covers, the Scott albums show Walker writing in the Brel vein. By Scott 3, Walker had grown more confident in his own songwriting--all but three of the songs were originals, while the rest were Brel covers.
With Scott 4, all of the tracks were written by Walker. Considered the masterpiece of the era, it was the beginning of the end for the brilliance of his first solo run.
But more about that later. Since this walk through Scott's work is more a set of my personal favorites than a collection of critical highlights, I'll end with the Brel song I like the best, "Jackie:"
(Repeating myself) One of the best music documentaries out there is Scott Walker: 30 Century Man. It's also something close to necessary if one is looking to gain an appreciation for the artist. His career is so extremely varied that no one album gives a good idea of what his work is about.
Not covered much in the film is Walker's earliest work. He had a run as a would-be teen idol in the late 50s, as Scotty Engel (his real name is Noel Scott Engel). The following are presented more for historical value than entertainment:
For fans, these bring a chuckle just to hear a youthful version of Walker's baritone. They also lay some groundwork for understanding his modus operandus.
Walker was a performer in the style of Bobby Darin in that he was a pop artist, assuming all the styles in the pop world from rock to cabaret. This makes his early albums puzzling to modern ears.
At the end of his first stab at stardom, Walker lived in Los Angeles. He supported himself as a musician-for-hire, playing at Whisky-A-Go-Go-style clubs among other things. He met John Maus, and then Gary Leeds, and formed The Walker Brothers, each taking the "Walker" surname.
The band settled in Britain in the mid-60s and became a big hit playing songs by professional songwriters. For a time, they were one of the many bands lauded as "bigger than The Beatles." Here's their first big hit, "Make It Easy on Yourself:"
After an uninteresting follow-up single, "My Ship is Coming In," The Walker Brothers had their second and last number one hit, "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore."
These two songs show what vein the band was mining, the Righteous Brothers/Wall of Sound style. There are a couple of differences. For one, where the Righteous Brothers are dramatic, The Walker Brothers are bombastic. For another, Scott doesn't have an ounce of soul in his body.
So, it makes sense that The Walker Brothers found success in Britain when they couldn't in the States. The British pop audience doesn't make a fetish of authenticity--a trait that has made their musical output more interesting. If they worried about how "real" a performer was, The Rolling Stones couldn't have played old Chicago blues songs and David Bowie couldn't have assumed so many personas and rock history would be a lot less inspired than it is.
One of the most amusing parts in the documentary is when he tells us that he came to Britain excited that he could now discuss the Ingmar Bergman and French New Wave films. When he arrived, he found that all anyone wanted to talk about was Hollywood westerns.
Scott was a post-beatnik intellectual, full of existential philosophy, avant-garde film and wine. Just as early Dylan dazzled the press with his absurdity and hostility, Walker did the same with his earnest discomfort and good looks. Here's an interview from somewhere around that time:
The substance is less important than watching him self-consciously consider the interviewers questions and answer them as truthfully as he could, all the while with an air of quiet desperation. We can apply red-pill wisdom here: the more Scott looks unwilling to engage with the public, the more the public wanted to engage with him.
The band was formed by John Walker (nee Maus), who was its original lead singer. The public, though, found Scott fascinating and the power shifted within the band. You can see why in the video for "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore." John, though he appears to think he's hot stuff, isn't nearly as interesting as the slightly uncomfortable moptop with the huge voice.
However, it's unfortunate that so little footage of that period remains, because Scott, while the urbane intellectual that appeared to be above all the hoopla, was deeply enmeshed in the pop idol business. Within a couple of years of his Walker Brothers' time, he had a variety show on the BBC.
It's even more strange to consider Scott as an entertainment figure when one thinks about his material, especially his original work. As The Walker Brothers grew more popular, Scott took a larger role behind the scenes, contributing to the arrangements and song selection. He began writing his own songs, as well.
The only one released as a single was the title track for the film Deadlier Than the Male:
This isn't Scott's typical sound which points to his skill as a songwriter. Tasked with creating a James Bond sound for an action film, he hits the nail right on the head.
The B-side "Archangel" is another Scott original and an unfiltered version of what he was getting at:
It appears that Scott's original Walker Brothers songs are revisions of other tunes they recorded. "Archangel" has the same themes as this great one, "After the Lights Go Out:"
The latter, written by John Stewart, is about facing the night while missing a lover, colored with a lot of mundane details about living in an apartment building.
"Archangel" is the same, only the misery and drama levels have been cranked high. The woman in question is no longer "just a girl/Whose memory will be wiped away with time"--now she's an archangel, whose arrival will "save me from this tomb."
Likewise, Scott's "Mrs. Murphy" is similar in subject matter to the brothers' version of Randy Newman's "I Don't Want to Hear it Anymore:"
Where the former is about a man unwilling to hear the neighbors gossiping about his woman's infidelity, Scott's piece starts with the gossiping, includes a cuckoo-egg baby and quotes the neighbor,"Poor Mr Johnson being married to a wife who should be caged."
In his earliest songs, we already see Scott's perspective emerging. Sex, death, pain and misery are his subjects, and they all ooze forth in everyday life. He takes the perspective of a pump-and-dump lothario in "Orpheus," telling his target, a Mrs. Blear, that he will "harpoon you like a whale / With a bent and rusty nail." When the dalliance is over, "I've already forgotten you."
The band broke up for the usual reasons. Scott's new leadership, co-producing and choosing the songs as well as being the band's face, caused tension with John, the original frontman. Scott went solo. It's there that he made his name.
But here's the key question posed by anyone looking at Scott Walker's career. How (and why) does a teen idol go from crooning pop hits to making some of the most extreme and original music of the last two decades?
Between The Guardian and its readers, one gets a fairly good impression of Walker's progression. I started writing about him but it's going to take more than a single post to get through it. Stay tuned.
[T]he documentary’s subject: Detroit native Sixto Rodriguez, better known as simply Rodriguez, a singer-songwriter who recorded two obscure albums in the early ’70s before effectively disappearing from the music scene. --- [T]he gist of Searching For Sugar Man is how the forgotten Rodriguez experienced a huge revival—unbeknown to Rodriguez himself—in, of all places, South Africa.
Heller's argument is against the trend of music documentaries over-lionizing their subjects. In this case, the talking heads describe Rodriguez as being on par with Dylan.
One would hope that by we as a culture would be tired of searching for a novelty that changes everything. For one, it's not realistic. For another, it causes a lot of ballyhoo that inevitably disappoints.
Take this year's most-hyped rediscovery, featured in A Band Called Death:
But the narrative that resulted from the film was that Death invented punk, which is as overreaching a claim as saying Rodriguez was second only to Dylan. Proto-punk, as it became retroactively known, was embodied by many bands that formed slightly before, or at roughly the same time, as The Ramones in the early ’70s. That fact doesn’t make Death less interesting—it makes the band more so, part of a proto-punk continuum rather than lone outliers.
I got wind of the band a couple of years ago. I now assume that this was a bit of underground advance publicity, leaking a digital copy of their album to the grey-market mp3 blogs. I wasn't especially impressed. Heller sums it up nicely; if you like that sort of thing, Death is the sort of thing you'd like.
The larger issue is that the media documentary in general is in decline after a great run. It's mainly because of this tendency to present their subjects as the greatest whatever you've never heard of. The reason these subjects are obscure is because--can you figure it out?--they deserve to be obscure.
That's not to say that they're bad but that they don't fit into mainstream tastes. The greats of music are fascinating because their progressions could be said to dictate changes in the mainstream. Dylan going electric or The Beatles becoming a studio band, for example. But this kind of narrative isn't appropriate for an also-ran whose work wasn't appreciated when it came out.
Heller highlights an older documentary that got it right, the Klaus Nomi doc The Nomi Song. I found it enjoyable because it places Nomi in his context as a part of the New York New Wave scene that broke out, however briefly.
New Wave was driven less by philosophy, like hippie or punk culture, and more by the thought, "Hey, we're a new generation. We should be doing something different!" Nomi was a male soprano and had a fey and alien look and presence that was heightened by his foreignness. He was presented in manner that emphasized his strangeness and had some success on the pop charts.
The Nomi Song does it right. There's no reason to pretend that Nomi changed music forever or that he's a neglected genius. He had unique body of work and sprung from a unique movement. The best music documentaries give us an understanding of the artist, his goals, influences and life. This lifts them out of footnote status and gives potential new fans a way to think about them.
One of my favorite artists is Scott Walker but I wouldn't have pursued his work if I hadn't seen Scott Walker: 30 Century Man. He's the perfect subject for a rediscovery-style music documentary because his work and career went through so many changes that it's difficult to find an entry point for newcomers. In the same respect, Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?) is good as well.
The problem with this kind of hyperbolic filmmaking, ironically, is that it overshadows the best qualities that obscure artists truly possess. While these artists sometimes live tragic lives, their obscurity isn’t a tragedy in and of itself. They’re usually obscure for a reason: They didn’t make music that was palatable to people at the time, or they weren’t able to devote the relentless energy it takes to become famous, or they simply did what millions of musicians do every day: create music for the love of it. By elevating them to the dubious status of noble losers, this new wave of documentaries perpetuates an empty myth that doesn’t do them justice.
