Scott Walker - from teen pop to avant-garde

The legendary singer Scott Walker died recently. William Dart looks at a singer hailed as everything from existential chansonnier to avant-garde pioneer.

The year is 1957. Singing this cute popsicle for youthful liberation is Scotty Engel. He was a hopeful Californian teenage star and all of 14 years of age.

Scotty Engel became Scott Walker and by the time that he died, in March 2019 at 76, he had radically tilted his musical compass:

That agonized mantra worthy of St Teresa, comes from his 2012 album Bish Bosch.

By now, the man had become something of a cult hero, having left pop charts well behind him, joking at the time that perhaps one of the Bish Bosch tracks, all 21 minutes of it, might have the potential to become a hit single. More of that later.

Yet even in 2012 as a reclusive artist about to enter his eighth decade, Walker had retained some affection for those chart-hopping days with The Walker Brothers. When this 1966 song came up in an interview, he admitted that it was a great pop single for its time, with a lot of beauty in it.

"The sun ain’t gonna shine anymore" was co-written by the same Bob Crewe responsible for the rather frothy songs in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella movie, two years later. 

But when Scott Walker was on writing roster for the group, the music started to venture into strange and unexpected places. In 1966, a number like "Archangel" had him wrestling with death, tombs and an archangel rising on the moon, to the accompaniment of a rather gothic church organ.

Here in New Zealand, we had our first taste of Scott Walker without the Walker Brothers in 1967 and I remember being frustrated that it was one of those local releases that only came out in mono.

But what it did have was fulsome and fruity liner notes by Keith Altham, ending with a significant quote from the nineteenth century poet John Keats equating truth and beauty.

Altham set off with a warning: “This is the album which Scott called 'my obsession', an LP for which you must open not only your ears but also your heart and your mind.”

Well, it was also the first time that we would hear Scott Walker in the songs of the Belgian chansonnier Jacques Brel, a year before they would fuel the off-Broadway hit, Jacques Brel is alive and well and living in Paris.

Walker took us to meet the sailors of Amsterdam, complete with quayside squeezebox.

By now a free and solo artist, Scott Walker would build up his own fan base through a succession of albums, simply titled Scott 2, Scott 3 and Scott 4.

By 1969, one already sensed streaks of disillusionment. Walker was a regular pin-up boy in magazines like Fabulous and Rave, the heart-throb of teenage girls who might have thought that Brel was a hair shampoo. And, I suspect, of older gentlemen who probably wondered why Walker wasn’t singing his Brel in the original French.

There were only three Brel songs on Scott 3. The rest were all originals, in which one can sense the influence of his favourite European chansonnier.

"It’s raining today" is the stand-out song of the set. Introducing a live performance some years later, Walker described it as a reflection of his teenage years, having grown up in the beatnik era, reading Kerouac and digging progressive jazz.

For me, it’s the song’s billowing graceful line that has always marked it out, complete with those spine-tingling downward leaps.

Here the progressive touch comes in the string backing, shimmering around his voice like a swarm of bees ... or maybe like a piece by a composer such as Penderecki or Ligeti. But mid-song, the mood changes.

By 1969 Walker had a six-week TV series on the BBC, putting his own songs aside for more standard fare from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Bacharach and David.

He ended up being extremely unhappy with a 1969 album of hits from the show, so much so that you’re forced to venture onto LP (or to YouTube) to hear him cover this Nancy Wilson ballad:

Just months after the disaster of this album, Scott Walker produced his fourth collection, ten original songs with a cover that brandished a worthy quote from French writer Albert Camus:

“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

Well, simple is not a word one might have immediately associated with Scott Walker, but the arrangements are slightly toned down, even if the subject-matter is resolutely high-flown.

The opening song, "The Seventh Seal", was inspired by the Ingmar Bergman film of the same name. Another, "The Old Man’s Back Again" critiqued the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia, while "Hero of the war" was non-specific as to just where Walker might be aiming his word missiles.

Some of us were not prepared for the direction that Scott Walker's career was going to take in the 80s and 90s.

We should have been. British singer Julian Cope had, in 1981, alerted us to the fact that too many had missed out on this music.

Cope’s anthology of 12 Walker songs said it all in its title Fire Escape in the Sky: The God-Like Genius of Scott Walker.

It was a legend that I suspect Scott Walker himself put some store in, and perhaps the brave writing in his 1984 album, Climate of Hunger, found re-assurance in Cope’s encouragement.

Climate of Hunger didn’t exactly leap off the shelves in record stores. Yet it scored fifth place in the NME’s best album listings for that year, nestled between Womack and Womack and Billy Bragg, pushing both Prince’s Purple Rain and The Smith’s Meat is Murder further down the line.

Nevertheless, it would be the last Scott Walker album for 11 years, until 1995’s Tilt.

Tilt was a collection that really did demand total immersion, giving over ears, heart and mind to Walker’s often cinematic soundscapes.

Literally so when he tributes the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini in the song "Farmer in the City", reaching a heartrending climax against stuttering drums and lush strings.

Scott Walker’s music since 2006 is hard to sample within the confines of New Horizons. And it’s music in which you’re not necessarily going to hear the man himself – there are the various soundtracks, and a dance work for disabled dancers titled And who shall go to the ball and who shall go to the ball.

But there’s also the extraordinary Bish Bosch album from 2012.

The 20-plus minutes of a track titled "SDSS1416+13B, (Zercon, a flagpole sitter)" is not for the unwary. This is the piece that Walker suggested might have potential as a single ... well, maybe so, but only when things have loosened up enough to have Schoenbergian cabaret and chattering Ligeti-like vocals zoom up the charts.

Over the last month, big names have paid tribute to Scott Walker.

For Midge Ure of Ultravox he was “the man with the mahogany voice”; for Neil Codling of Suede, he was much more than that: “an all-American pop star, existential chansonnier, avant-garde pioneer, a true Europhile and a cracking bass player”.

I’ll close today by remembering one of Scott Walker’s loveliest songs, here covered by Susanna and the Magical Orchestra ... an appropriately heavenly peak of her 2006 album, Melody Mountain

Music Details

'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)

'When is a Boy a Man?' (Parker et al) – Scott Walker
Looking Back with Scott Walker
(Repertoire)

'Phrasing' (Walker) – Scott Walker
Bish Bosch
(4AD)

'The Sun ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore' (Crewe, Gaudio) – The Walker Brothers
The Singles+
(BR Music)

'Archangel' (Walker) – The Walker Brothers
Scott Walker in 5 Easy Pieces
(Mercury)

'Orpheus' (Walker) – The Walker Brothers
Scott Walker in 5 Easy Pieces
(Mercury)

'Amsterdam' (Brel) – Scott Walker
Sings Jacques Brel
(Fontana)

'It’s Raining Today' (Walker) – Scott Walker
Scott Walker in 5 Easy Pieces
(Mercury)

'The Look of Love' (Bacharach) – Scott Walker
The Collection
(Mercury)

'Only the Young' (Ahlert, Fisher) – Scott Walker
Scott Walker Sings Songs from his TV Series
(Philips)

'Hero of the War' (Walker) – Scott Walker
Scott 4
(Universal)

'The World’s Strongest Man' (Walker) – Scott Walker
Scott 4
(Universal)

'Track Five' (Walker) – Scott Walker
Scott Walker in 5 Easy Pieces
(Mercury)

'Farmer in the City' (Walker) – Scott Walker
Tilt
(Fontana)

'Darkness' (Walker) – Scott Walker
Plague Songs
(4AD)

'SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, a Flagpole Sitter)' (Walker) – Scott Walker
Bish Bosch
(4AD)

'It’s Raining Today' (Walker) – Susanna and the Magical Orchestra
Melody Mountain
(Rune Grammofon)