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© The Irish Times - May 5, 1995
IT was 1984 when Scott Walker released his last album, Climate Of Hunter, which closed with Blanket Roll Blues from the Tennessee Williams-scripted movie The Fugitive Kind. In a review at the time I wrote that Williams, who had died the preceding year, once defined the fugitive kind as those "who continue to ask the unanswered questions that haunt the hearts of people" as opposed to those "who accept the prescribed answers that aren't really answers at all". Obviously, it's a quote that should be burned into the brains of all artists and, indeed, journalists. In that review I also asserted that "Williams may be gone, but Walker is still asking those questions of himself and of us
Eleven years later, on his new album Tilt, he is doing likewise, with a greater ferocity than ever before.
Sadly, as with Climate Of Hunter, his previous album, Nite Flights in 1978 and Scott 4, in 1969, the one word most listeners seem to be mumbling as they turn away from his latest work is "impenetrable". Whether that refers to the music itself or the truths at the soul of the music no one seems to be saying. Tellingly, tracks such as the seminal Boychild, which were deemed to be "impenetrable" in 1969, were rather belatedly rated as "startlingly innovative" by rock critics when the albums Scott to Scott 4 were reissued in 1992. Similarly, the apocalyptic Climate Of Hunter has been described as "ahead of its time". No doubt, in time, the same will be said of Tilt.
Rather than wait another decade to fathom Tilt's deliciously labyrinthine mysteries, why don't we begin right now? But a word of warning, Although Scott Walker chose-this writer as his sole emissary from Ireland, as a result ft that set of articles I had previously written about his music, he stated from the outset that he "doesn't want to talk about the songs in depth" and would prefer it listeners interpret them as they will". Walker also is, at times, an almost paranoically private, coldly cerebral individual who obviously hasn't even attempted to communicate with the press for at least 12 years and whose utterances as a consequence, normally move on a slowly-sliding upward spiral from monosyllabic to minimalist at most, like his current music. But one accusation that raises his temperature, and pace of expressions that "impenetrable" tag.
"I think that is an absurd thing to say, with all the music that is around now. If you listen to a Michael Stipe lyric. I'm lucidity itself! And, at least, I am trying to connect," he responds, in cello-like tones as sensuous as his singing voice.
"Obviously my lyrics are not linear. They're working more with maybe different concepts of time and such, yet are connectable, on, say, single lines like 'Remember the dream we talked about?' That, in itself, could be a point of entry which will lead listeners to form their own internal impression of a song. And, God, if you guys in Ireland can find your way around Joyce's Ulysses, then Tilt is child's play!"
For a precocious child, perhaps. The parallel with Joyce, on the other hand, is appropriate particularly in terms of the aesthetic implied in "only connect". As with Joyce's transition from naturalism to modernism, Walker's songs have also evolved from being linear and representational to being relatively avant-garde, filled with seemingly heterogeneous images attempting to abstract some hidden, unifying law from reality. Not surprisingly, casual references to such concepts, and artists, have often led to Scott Walker being labelled the most pretentious prat in pop, rather than recognised as a postmodern aesthete. In 1966 he claimed his goal was to blend "Gil Evans arrangements with Kalka" a decade later it was "Snyder and Schoenberg". So is Scott a pretentious prat, an aesthete or, like many, a mixture of both?
"Probably a prat!" he says, smiling, before quickly adding "I'm only joking", then elaborating on these influences. Evans, of course, worked with Miles Davis during the 1950s on albums like Miles Ahead and was compared to Stockhausen in terms of the freedom with which he used an orchestra. "That's exactly what it was about Evans, the fact that he allowed the orchestra to breathe, which is an approach that has become more important to me down through the years and which is central to the new album the use of space, he says.
"Rock is always rather crammed, as were the original records I made with the Walker Brothers, where we piled on layers of sound. But, over the years I've moved away from, yeah, that kind of garrulous form of self-expression, which is probably also what made me appreciate Snyder, as a Beat poet, rather than Alan Ginsberg. Ginsberg is not a great poet, Snyder is more considered. And that minimalist approach to a lyric is definitely what I'm committed to now, honing it all down to the bare bones."
Gary Snyder also sought to "eliminate the subjective self" from poetry and achieve more of a "positive sense of quiet" in his work, which Walker also identified and realised could work in music, as have many of the ambient composers of the Eighties," he suggests.
However, in contrast to Snyder and most ambient composers, Scott Walker's music has a ways projected a sense of positive terror, as in the decidedly dissonant The Plague, his 1968 reworking of Camus's novel of the same name. In songs such as this, which are clearly Climate Of Hunter and Tilt in embryonic form, Walker took the neurotic romanticism that was the hallmark of his earlier work with the Walker Brothers and pushed it deeper into that emotional and musical terrain where Kata's The Trial meets Schoenberg's Transfigured Night.
"But I stopped short of incorporating atonality into my music, in the broader sense, because it's hard to get that to work in a rock context. As such, Bartok probably was more of an influence, and Beethoven's late quartets," he explains.
That said, there is a certain atonal sense to the way in which Walker sings on his latest album, distort in his much praised beautiful voice, physically and electoncially during Cockfighter for example. Previously, one could compare his singing to the German style of lieder, and later, speech-song, but this hauls his vocalising nearer the territory of white noise activists Nine Inch Nails, a band Scott "really admires", he says.
"I remember the article you wrote about Climate Of Hunter and you were right to say it was most like a lieder approach, which helped me describe the way my music is," he explains." But the reason my voice, at times, is now working in a higher register is because Tilt is lyric-led and I want it up there, so I get that febrile aspect to some of the songs. I also don't tend to do vocals more than once or twice, because I'm basically terrified of singing and I want my own terror to come across on the records. Though, why I'm terrified of singing, I don't know."
Talking to, Walker, and thinking of Gil Evan's claim that all forms of music "originally came from someone's spirit" one suspects that what he may be terrified of is self revelation, that perhaps his Snyder-like elimination of the "subjective self" is a psychological cop-out, a manifestation of Scott Walker's fear of revealing some secret he believes his audience could never accept. Madness, drug addiction, alcoholism and guilt ridden homosexuality are some of the alleged reasons given to explain the sense of alienation that defines and, some would say, discolours his work, making it inappropriate for application to the world at large. Questions about his sexuality will undoubtedly be read into the fact that Tilt opens with a dedication to Pasolini, just as Climate Of Hinter closed with that homage to Tennessee Williams both of whom probably perceived themselves as alienated because of their sexual inclinations and shaped their art accordingly.
"I'm trying to unfold the self through the material. Find, rather than hide, the self before anything else," says Scott, carefully considering such questions. "My early songs were directly autobiographical but, after the third album, I pulled back from that form of writing because it's terribly limiting, to say the least. But when I spoke about madness recently I meant that some of the people I work with think I take mad risks in my music, that's all. Though some do think I am mad. As for drugs and drink, there were years of over-drinking, though I'm not going to say I didn't also do drugs. Yet I'm really not worried if people read the gay connotation into the Pasolini dedication. And if, to some, I am a gay icon, I've no problem with that."
SCOTT WALKER married his long-time girlfriend, Mette, in 1972. They have a 22-year-old daughter, but have since separated leaving Walker living alone in London. His legendary tendency towards monosyllables becomes most obvious when the conversation turns to his private life. He is much more relaxed talking about Tilt and how songs such as Cockfighter draw together many of his artistic influences, including painting, which he recently returned to study at night school in London alter having abandoned his Art College course in California in the early Sixties, to become a musician. Breaking his own rule, he will talk in-depth about this song, which obviously is a track as brave and challenging as the album itself, and as innovative as much of Scott Walker's work. A sound collage, it includes excerpts relocated from the respective trials of Queen Caroline and Adolf Eichmann.
"The Cockfighter has already been misread. All my songs are about characters, whether they are extensions of myself, in the worst kind of moment, or all of us, in such circumstances," he says.
"But Cockfighter also is a crude, erotic image, as in nudge-nudge, wink-wink with animality and all that involved. Yet, basically it's about a trial within one man and when you get to the end it talks about the Holocaust, though not in a knee-jerk sense. As such, it's an attempt to discuss things that can't be discussed, because we don't have a language for discussing the Holocaust. So I take a trial that was a scandal in the collective conscience in England in 1820, and the Eichman trial, which was in the collective conscience in our time, and layer those two external forces on top of the man's personal struggle, by placing the questions from one trial alongside the answers from another. In that way, I make internal everything that is external and, consequently, do discuss one of those things that can't be discussed. And, in the end, that is what I've tried to do with much of my music."