© The Independent (London) - April 21, 1995, Friday
Romantic loner, reluctant star, the one-time lead singer of the Walker Brothers has made his first album in a decade. He sighs about it to Richard Cook.
It is many, many years since adoring young girls camped on his doorstep and made his life miserable. Still, Scott Walker remains nervous of being recognised, perhaps even of the daylight. This isn't a very sunny morning, and he is sitting indoors, but he still hides his eyes behind dark glasses. Otherwise, though, one of the last real legends of popular music is affability itself.
Thirty years after "Make It Easy on Yourself" inscribed the Walker Brothers on British pop history, the bottomless baritone voice that sang the lead on the record remains largely untouched by his many years in England. Scott Engel (his real name; they were never really brothers) still has the mellow burr of his native Ohio, and the slim frame and handsome looks of yore: only the hair is a little thinner. What's very different is the kind of record he's interested in making now. Tilt, his first album for a decade, is not only remote from his old music, it's as uncompromising and dumbfounding a record as any major label will release this year. Walker's composing, hatched almost in secret, results in a cryptic, intensely- worked sequence of pieces.
Confounding expectations has been part of Scott Walker's history. While the Walker Brothers amassed a following of pop fans that, for a while, was almost as intense as Beatlemania, Scott protested and wrung his hands at each new commitment to the pop star life. If his fellow Walkers enjoyed the limelight, their lead singer felt tormented by the attention. He stayed in a monastery, faked a car crash to get out of a gig, even allegedly attempted suicide. When the group fizzled out in some acrimony in 1967, the house producer at Philips, John Franz, saw his chance to make Walker into the greatest ballad singer of his generation, and embarked on a series of solo records with the vocalist.
The four albums, produced in barely three years, are painfully beautiful, and Franz's Svengali touch sustains what might otherwise be period pieces today. He hired the finest arrangers - Wally Stott, Peter Knight, Reg Guest - and their orchestral work surrounded the voice in weeping splendour. Walker responded with singing that fulfilled all the promise Franz had heard in the early Walker Brothers demos. He had terrific control, and could deliver big barnstormers and tender grace notes with the same facility.
If it had been expended on the kind of standards that filled up half of Scott, the first album, that would have been sufficient to have kitted Walker out as the new Jack Jones, a singer he particularly admired. But he was more interested in singing his own songs and those of Jacques Brel, the French songwriter whom Scott recognised as a kindred spirit. It's hard to square the demands of a piece of fluff such as "The Windows Of The World" with Brel's ravaged "Next" and the singer's own extraordinary tale of adultery, "The Amorous Humphrey Plugg", but they were all side by side on the second album. By Scott 3 and Scott 4 Walker concentrated solely on his own work. The fourth record is a rich and disturbing work. After three commercially successful albums, though, a large part of his audience had had enough. The record was in the catalogue for less than a year. It took more than 20 years for it toreturn on CD.
Walker says: "I never listen to them. The only time was when Phonogram did them complete on CD. I listened to a little and that was it."
It's in those records, though, that Walker's cult reputation was born. There are few evocations of the romantic loner as poetic and mystically eloquent as "Always Coming Back To You", "Boy Child", "Winter Night" or "It's Raining Today". When he turned to third-person portraiture in "Rosemary" and "Big Louise" it was similarly disarming. Never mind the more rockily credible Tim Buckley or Nick Drake or John Martyn; their folk-derived musings seem Lilliputian next to Walker's grand designs. Too bad that his disappearance from view was comprehensive enough to lose him his place with a generation that would venerate singer-songwriters.
When Julian Cope compiled a selection of Scott Walker favourites for his own label in 1981, he chose to call it Fire Escape In The Sky: The God-Like Genius of Scott Walker. Did they meet at the time?
"No, his attitude was rather the same as mine when I had the chance to meet Brel in Paris. I just chickened out. He did for the same reason."
The Seventies were a wasteland of middle-of-the-road albums until Walker, John Maus and Gary Leeds were persuaded to reform the Walker Brothers. "No Regrets", a huge hit in 1975, seemed set to re-establish their eminence, but there was no follow-up of any standing. Then they offhandedly released a self-penned album, Nite Flights. Maus and Leeds put in unremarkable efforts, but Walker's four songs were a breathtaking reminder of his powers and the model for all his later music. The title song was recently covered by David Bowie, but it's "The Electrician" that stands out, a chilling meditation on the relationship between a torturer and his subject.
When the Brothers' reunion went nowhere, Walker signed a solo deal with Virgin in 1980. It took four years to get a record out of him, but the result was Climate Of Hunter, which more than fulfilled the promise of Nite Flights. Walker pared his lyrics down to a crossword puzzle of images and set them to a mix of driving 4/4 beats and static harmonies that sounded like a paralysed image of one of Peter Knight's old arrangements. The timbre of the record seemed unique, unprecedented, and it fell into the rather jolly pop surroundings of 1984 like a sack of stones.
The album garnered some extravagant critical praise but few sales. Virgin tried to move Scott forward by setting him up with Brian Eno for another project.
"A misunderstanding. We met and talked a little too quickly. I didn't like the studio anyway, it was way out of town, and, I don't know, it transpired that it became an irritation. He brought Daniel Lanois along and I just couldn't get along with that guy. It became too many cooks. I left very quickly before any major damage was inflicted. Except I got dropped from my record company deal."
His timetable with Mercury, which signed him in 1991, seems rather familiar. Four years on, Tilt is emerging as a finessing of the themes and methods explored on Climate Of Hunter. Walker has returned to his co-producer Peter Walsh, and assembled a cast of relative unknowns to play on the record. On the opening "Farmer In The City", where the strings of the Sinfonia of London glower behind one of Walker's most ardent vocals, the music seems to fulfil all the ambitions that the old records hinted at, binding a classical density and weight into a song that might have astonished John Franz. But why does it always take such a long time to complete?
"It doesn't. I work faster than probably anyone else in the studio. I did Climate of Hunter in a month. For this one, we'd got about half of it done and then I developed this cough on my chest which I couldn't get rid of. But when we came back, it was about two months altogether.
"I never lost the feel of working quickly, as we did in the old days. I still think it's a good way of working. You're forced to limit the choices, to make radical decisions and take chances. That shows in a record. You can tell a lazy record."
There's nothing lazy about Tilt. If anything, the record is obsessively worked and carved-out. The music is as carefully honed as the haiku-like lyrics. The percussion tracks are sifted with infinite care, while the pipe-organ of Methodist Central Hall adds a tolling, medieval note.
Against this backdrop, the great voice works with an intensity, even an urgency, that he's seldom tapped into before. For a man past 50, Walker set himself a hard agenda, singing at a higher pitch than ever before - although, as he notes, it's "higher and lower. The low sounds are very dark and there you have the contrast".
The subject matter sees a world growing dark, too. "The Cockfighter" is a disturbing sequel to "The Electrician", with its lines lifted from the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and from there the record spirals away to the numb, lights-out finale of "Rosary", which Scott sings to his own guitar accompaniment, alone in the studio.
"It's a good word, Tilt. It means so many things today. The way we might feel personally about ourselves and what we might do, radically. It covers a lot of area and that's what I'm looking for. It's like Picasso's universal face, y'know, you're always looking for one thing and then. . ." Sometimes one wonders if Walker spends too much time looking for that one thing. His story seems full of people who wanted him to do things, yet couldn't quite find the way to either rouse him or make something happen for him.
"I've become the Orson Welles of the record industry. People want to take me to lunch, but nobody wants to finance the picture."
Does he feel bad about that?
"No, I don't," he sighs. "In a sense I understand it. I keep hoping that when I make a record, I'll be asked to make another one. I keep hoping that if I can make a series of three records, then I can progress and do different things each time. But when I have to get it up once every 10 years. . . it's a tough way to work."