Walker Brothers. - The curious life and work of Scott Walker

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EISBN: 978-0-85712-854-6

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I am a formalist. I believe that an artist must work within walls, within boundaries. Greater originality emerges from this rather than from sporadic leaps.

Scott Walker, 1968

Im not really interested in creating tranquillity. Theres far too much of that going on in popular culture today you dont need me for more of the same. I see the work as many layered, not just unsettling.

Scott Walker, 2012

They cant be the same guy.

Can they?

The name Scott Walker always denoted a rumour an absence even a spectral presence, as far back as I can remember. But then some of us were just about old enough to start taking notice in the seventies, a full decade after the reputation that cemented the legend (that much debased term).

He was man who sang Amsterdam, that beer-stinking ballad of whores, piss and fish heads, even before Bowie did it. In fact a letter in Record Mirror said he did it years before, and spoke about another Jacques Brel song, Jackie, that was so familiar with subjects us kids liked to think we knew about (authentic queers and phoney virgins), although we didnt, that they wouldnt play it on Radio 1. And he did it all in the velvet tones of a real grown-up singer, a crooner, that put him almost a decade ahead of Bryan Ferry.

Some of us were seriously impressed, even though we only had a faint recollection of catching one or two of his tunes. So where was he now when we needed him, in this post-hippie pop world?

That was where our musical education began. He was in The Walker Brothers, some of our barely elders told us, they sang The Sun Aint Gonna Shine Anymore and it was the best thing he ever did. We remembered it from when we were toddlers, and it was kinda cool: a sad ballad with a cowboy-ish guitar intro, more sulky than mournful, like it was enjoying a good mope but on the verge of leaping up and down.

It also gave you a vague sense, in that one phrase, of what it must be like to be Scott Walker: the best thing he ever did. Like they knew everything hed ever done and ever would do, and their memories could keep him imprisoned in that one 45rpm groove.

He had a late-night programme on the telly I think my mother might have told me that, as anything approaching pub closing time was deemed late night in those black-and-white late sixties days. He sang some sophisticated barroom ballads, like the Tony Bennett records our dads and uncles had; in fact some of them were the same songs songs for world-weary men who expressed their sentimentality by equating years and seasons with the names of girls theyd once known.

Except he didnt look like them and he probably didnt smell like an aftershave-drenched hangover in the morning either. He was still pop-star age, with a slender frame and pop-star looks.

(I really do think that I was too young recording them, Scott would later tell the Irish rock journalist Joe Jackson, maybe there is something there to listen to more so for other people than myself.)

And then, in the mid-to-late seventies, there was another Scott Walker: the MOR and country covers artist looking denim-clad, laid-back and distinctly Californian. When I found one of these albums in the salvage warehouse where I worked as a kid, I didnt even bother to purloin it that guy surely wasnt the purveyor of overwrought Euro-ballads on solo records you couldnt even buy any more?

***

English music fans have long held Noel Scott Engel, the artist known as Scott Walker, in high esteem for dignifying our pop music with a certain gravitas. Even some of the lesser moon-in-June ballads he sang with The Walker Brothers sounded like a matter of life and death when the young American applied that precocious baritone.

But then, it seems he didnt want to be an American anyway. Portrait, the second Walkers album, included a cheesy sleeve note that claimed Scott was the existentialist who knows what [existentialism] means and reads Jean-Paul Sartre. Even then it must have made him seem like a leftover from the fifties bebop era, evoking not Albert Camus philosophical treatise The Rebel but Tony Hancocks Brit comedy The Rebel. (Why live for tomorrow when you can die today? asks the confused beatnik chick in the Breton striped T-shirt.)

As an attitude for living rather than an intellectual fad, however, Engel has maintained the ethos through all his fluctuating fortunes. A person who needs no other people a world in himself, is how he defined it for Keith Altham, an NME journalist and (later) music PR man who saw the depths in this lanky young drink of water from the get-go. A belief in existence rather than essence.

The religiosity that can be detected from the time of Engels earliest compositions, like the neo-gothic love song Archangel, with its swelling church organ tones, is no contradiction. Whether or not the lead Walker Brother (as Scott quickly, and inadvertently, became) had read The Outsider by Colin Wilson, the closest thing to existentialism we ever had in a nation that regards intellectual ideas as an embarrassment, he fitted that writers definition of a man who applies the same serious devotion to existence that the faithful devote to a pie-in-the-sky afterlife. Research by this author has detected a Zionist Lutheran (Old Testament-quoting Protestant) lineage in his family that Engel (angel in German) appeared to shrug off. But the seriousness remains.

How can you relate to something unless you have felt it emotionally? he asked near the release of his first solo album, 1967s eponymous Scott, insisting that all song lyrics had to be extracted (and indeed earned) from personal experience.

Its a strict literalism that he might shun today, when Engel considers internal images and ideas as valid a starting point as the autobiographical approach he seems to totally reject. But for a while in the cinematically influenced big pop of Scott 1-3 it worked beautifully. Fragments of genuine emotion and experience among the orchestrated angst made it all seem so personal, as much for the listener as for the performer.

There was also a studied realism that gave an intentional one in the eye to that phoney love and flower power scene. When we look back at the commercial success of the first three solo albums, we can see how the popular music of the sixties was the broadest of churches, only partly in thrall to acid-addled smiley faces.