The French philosopher Albert Camus once wrote – and the American singer Scott Walker – “The life of a human being is a single attempt to use the detours of art to awaken the few minutes in which his heart opened for the first time”. had these lines printed on one of his record sleeves in 1969.
The singer, who was born in Hamilton/Ohio in 1943, was actually not called Scott Walker, but Noel Scott Engel. And from a young age, when he was the singer of the existentialist boy band The Walker Brothers (Scott revealed himself in advertising texts as a Camus reader and a fan of Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman), he lived up to his birth name, staging himself in the the trio’s second US #1 hit in 1966 as Angels of the Apocalypse and sang “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” a song the Four Seasons’ Frankie Valli had previously failed to sing. The Walker Brothers mostly sang the songs of others – Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Bob Dylan, Randy Newman, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman – but they gave them not just orchestral punch but a dark romantic secret, and baritone Scott Walker left deep into the underworld for his own pieces like “Archangel” and “Orpheus”, which are uncanny for 60s pop ears.
He sang “My Death” at lunchtime
The Walker Brothers were particularly loved in England, and their fan club is said to have been larger than that of the Beatles. It was a young German woman working as a bunny in the Playboy Club who introduced him to the dramatic chansons of Jacques Brel. While fellow bandmates Gary and John wanted more hits, fame and attention, Scott wanted to emulate the great Belgian singer, and rupture ensued. His first two solo albums still worked according to a principle similar to the trio’s records: a few of his own songs and many covers, but the selection became a little more idiosyncratic – Jacques Brel, Tim Hardin, André Previn. At lunchtime he sang “My Death” – the English version of Brel’s “La Mort” translated by Mort Shuman – on the British radio show “Billy Cotton Band Show”, which is appreciated for its light entertainment.
By early 1969 he was at the height of his fame, the BBC gave him his own TV show and he released three albums. For “Scott 3” he had written ten of the 13 songs himself, “Scott: Scott Walker Sings Songs from his TV Series” consisted of ballads and standards, both of which made it into the British Top 10. His dark opus magnum, “Scott 4” , which consisted entirely of original songs about death and devils and began with the Ingmar Bergman-inspired “The Seventh Seal,” was significantly released under his birth name Noel Scott Engel at the end of the year – and died out entirely. Seeming discouraged, Walker did the half-hearted “‘Til The Band Comes In” with a brilliant first side and a pretty mediocre second side, and then gave it up artistically, singing movie songs, middle-of-the-road pop and country. He himself later called this phase his “lost years”.
Odes to Sadomasochism
It was, of all things, the reunion of the Walker Brothers, which actually only came about due to lack of money, that brought about the artistic change. After the chart success of 1975’s cover record No Regrets and the failure of the similarly conceived follow-up, Lines, a year later, no one seemed to believe in the trio, least of all the trio themselves, and so the Walker Brothers shared it last contractually guaranteed album: John Maus/Walker was allowed to contribute four songs, Gary Leeds/Walker two, and Scott Walker/Engel was allowed to open the album with his four compositions. The old fans couldn’t believe their ears when they were thrown into the disturbing soundscapes of synthesizers, Robert Fripp-like guitars and driving rhythms, which were probably inspired by Brian Eno and David Bowie but went beyond them. And Walker’s comforting baritone had given way to an ominous tenor – culminating in the symphonic ode to sadomasochism, The Electrician.
“If I had to describe that style,” Walker later recalled, “I’d say it’s the sonic equivalent of the drawings HR Giger did for ‘Alien.'” At 35, the former pop star had found the thread that would lead him out of the maze of his lost years to his glorious late work. It was a long way, which he also walked very slowly. One album per decade: “Climate Of Hunter” (1984), “Tilt” (1996), “The Drift” (2006), “Bish Bosch” (2012), alongside fantastic soundtrack work on “Pola X” by Léo Carax (1999) and Brady Corbet’s The Childhood Of A Leader (2016) and Vox Lux (2018), the dance music And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball?” (2007) and last but not least, Soused (2014), the collaborative album with drone metal band Sunn O))), a pounding hellish music with lyrics about guilt and perversion, totalitarianism and biblical infanticide, slavery and (of course) sado-masochism.
Walker’s songs became increasingly abstract throughout his career, revolving around the grotesque and the catastrophic. “We’re getting closer and closer to my character,” he told me about working with his loyal producer Peter Walsh on the release of “Bish Bosch” in London. “You have to find the right people to do it. The last three albums have done that very well. And we furnished ourselves in this style. It’s a bit like the late style of Beckett – all his pieces basically have the same atmosphere, there are only minimal changes.”
We talked about his work for an hour, he seemed relaxed, didn’t take himself too seriously, laughed a lot and kept explaining how important humor was to him in his music. The fact that this was not obvious to everyone, but that everyone tried to interpret his works with great seriousness, seemed to disturb him a bit: “It reminds me of Kafka, who always read his stories to his friends, and when they weren’t laughing, he was pissed off That’s how I feel too.” It was probably the absurd humor of a Camus reader.
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