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At the height of their mid-1960s fame, at a time when their fan club had more members than that of The Beatles The Walker Brothers were quizzed on their personal ambitions by groovy teen-mag Fab 208. ''To become an international entertainer in all fields,'' said guitarist John Walker (nee Maus). ''An international star,'' agreed drummer Gary Walker (nee Leeds). Lead singer Scott Walker (nee Engel) had other ideas. ''To become a human being,'' he said.
The journalist from Fab 208, one imagines, moved swiftly on to the question about their favourite dessert. Scott Walker moved nearly as quickly on to break up the band and forge a solo career which reaped ever-diminishing commercial returns. Scott Walker hasn't had a serious chart entry for two decades; he hasn't released a record at all since 1984; yet he remains one of pop's great cult figures the epitome of cool.
There are probably four ways in which a pop or rock musician can qualify as a cult figure: their music must be completely unfashionable at the time of initial release and only recognised as the work of genius some time later (Brian Eno); they can prove emotionally unable to cope with stardom and become a recluse (Syd Barrett, Peter Green); they can die at the height of their powers (Jimi Hendrix, Ian Curtis, and very probably Kurt Cobain), or they can simply have beautiful hair and look great in shades (Brian Jones).
To be a bona fide pop music cult figure you need meet only one of the above criteria. Scott Walker meets three and a half of them. The hair and shades? Obviously. The unfashionable musical taste? Well, Walker's two main musical collaborators were Johnny Franz and Ady Semel. Franz was a record producer whose other clients included Shirley Bassey and Harry Secombe; and before working with Walker, Semel was mainly known for producing Esther and Abi Ofarim's Cinderella Rockafella. Walker's musical taste was planted as firmly in the middle of the road as a cat's eye.
Walker certainly had problems with fame. In the mid-1960s he would don a crash helmet and goggles for the few yards' dash between the backseat of his Jaguar and the door of whichever venue he was playing at. If he didn't, he would lose a lot of flesh to the clawing fingernails of his fans. Walker was stunned by the strength (an unintended hostility) of the fans' reaction; and, added to his already chronic stagefright, it led him to appear less and less, and to develop a severely paranoid state of mind.
Walker didn't die at the peak of his powers; but he nearly did. He was a solitary drinker with depressive tendencies, and on at least one occasion in the Sixties he tried to kill himself. According to Jonathan King, he tried several times. King, surprisingly, was Walker's closest friend. More surprisingly, their friendship gelled when they discovered a mutual admiration for the works of Jean Genet.
In Scott Walker: A Deep Shade of Blue, authors Watkinson and Anderson have talked to King and many more of those who were as close to Walker as he would allow another human being to get. Unsurprisingly, Walker himself refused to be interviewed. The authors certainly get to the heart of his basic career problem: his music was too serious for a pop audience, and far too pop for a serious audience. Even while still with The Walker Brothers, he would say of one song he'd recorded, "Genevieve," ''I always write from experience. It's the only way an artist can get any sincerity in his work,'' and then happily record, as the very next track on an album, a song by Tony (Crossroads theme) Hatch.
Walker said of his fourth solo album, ''Scott 4 tried to link lyrics by Sartre, Camus and Yevtushenko to Bartok modal lines, but nobody noticed''; and that pretty much sums up the last 20 years of his career although you can read that sentence in two different ways. Either he was doing groundbreaking work in a medium whose fans didn't appreciate it, or he was dabbling in areas way beyond his actual talents (which amounted, basically, to having a wonderful voice, and knowing how to arrange a string section), and the public wisely let him get on with it without any interruption.
Watkinson and Anderson offer a comprehensive overview of Walker's career, but they see it as ''a catalogue of missed opportunities'' (that is, opportunities to have consistent commercial success in the pop world), while Walker has made it quite clear that that wasn't the goal he was shooting for. The hell with fame, he was trying to become a more complete person.
A really good Scott Walker biography would, obviously, involve the writer(s) having a conversation with the man himself. Most importantly, it would involve the writer(s) asking him the vital question: ''Okay, Scott, John Maus isn't an international star in any field at all, neither is Gary Leeds. Have you managed to become a human being?''
A Deep Shade Of Blue never gets round to answering that question. As a result it remains excellent as a piece of pop history, full of fascinating period detail, but finally unsatisfying as a portrait of Walker himself.