Reinventing Percussion with Scott Walker, with Alasdair Malloy

Tuesday 18th November 2025

Mark Warman: I don't think I ever heard Scott envision a project where “Ali” wasn't involved in some way. He so enjoyed you arriving at the studio with your “magician's box of tricks”, coming up trumps for a particular sound, whether using ingenious lateral thinking or just knowing exactly what he meant, even when he didn't quite know how to describe it!

Your connection with Scott predated when I came on board for “The Drift” in 2003. I believe you first worked with him on “Tilt” in the mid-90s?

Alasdair Malloy: I remember getting a phone call out of the blue: would I be interested in working with Scott? And if so, could I outline a little bit about who I am, my background and that sort of thing. I thought, OK, I've got to try and get across that I'm more than an orchestral player in the sense that I can do more than just play the notes on the page in front of me. I've got a creative mind, I can be inventive, I can be pushed outside any perceived envelope or comfort zone and respond to that. So, I wrote this document basically explaining that I was classically trained and that the bulk of my professional career had been around orchestras, but in addition to that, I'd worked in all sorts of other spheres,  played in bands, done all sorts of things. I'm happy to improvise.

I put all this down and I thought I better do a little bit of name-dropping, so I mentioned some of the contemporary composers that I've worked with, like Peter Maxwell Davies, Pierre Boulez, and I know for a fact that that actually caught Scott's attention because he has spoken to me about it. It was a question of just laying my background out. And it obviously worked because I had the great pleasure of working with Scott for all these years, as you know.

MW: At that point, what did you know of Scott as a performer, or his music?

AM: Well, I mean, that's such an interesting one, isn't it? Because, of course, I was aware of the Walker Brothers and the Jacques Brel stuff. I actually went out and bought that CD, just to remind myself. But I wasn't aware of the whole other direction that he'd gone in by that stage. That was new to me.

MW: Listening to “Tilt” now is fascinating, knowing where he was headed with the following albums. All the signs are there, but it’s like listening to a sepia version of the vivid chromatic colours he used in “The Drift” and “Bish Bosch”. Tell me about your experience of joining that journey on “Tilt”. Brian Gascoigne was at the helm then, of course.

AM: Brian, I’d met before, and Ian Thomas was involved, whom I knew very well, but there were other musicians there that I hadn't met before. I was coming in as somebody new, but as part of a whole raft of new people coming in.

It was an interesting experience, my starting point in working with Scott. Conversations were not really happening. It was all done through Brian. Scott didn't really engage one-on-one in the initial few days. He very much kept his distance, to the extent that the tracks had no titles. It was track B, track E, and we turned up and he said, OK, we're working on track B today. Brian would come and give us stuff and it would have no titles. We never heard any demos. We never heard any vocal lines. We weren't told anything about lyrics. It was a great sort of mystery, a great sense of discovery, yeah, in a sense, but it was “where are we going with this? What are we doing? What's this all about?”

MW: Which as a creative musician does make it difficult to suggest ideas, doesn’t it? Without that forward sense of where the destination is, you don't want to offer things that are going to be completely wrong. But you don't know what the parameters are!

AM: I know. It is very curious. And it was quite clear to me from day one that this was going to be a very exacting process. Scott's method of working is, in my experience, far from being experimental. He's done his preparation. He has a massive vision in his head. I realised that straight away. And to be absolutely honest, that really excited me.

“I thought this is great because I've worked with artists where it’s, oh, let's try this. Let's try that. Oh, that doesn't work. Don't worry. We'll sort it out in the edit. Whereas I immediately realised with Scott, he was very exacting, he was very demanding. And he was consistent in striving to achieve what he wanted from the musicians, and specifically from me. I think he got the measure of me fairly quickly and reveled in what I could give him. And then he expected that every take, every time, the whole thing.”

And I absolutely reveled in that. I thought this is great. We could be doing a take and my part might be fairly mechanical, repetitive, but absolutely crucial to the context of the rhythm track that we were recording, three or four of us together. And then he'd suddenly stop us and he'd say, Ali, you just dropped it a little bit there. And what he would mean by that would not necessarily mean that I was off the click or I was off tempo. It was maybe my intensity had dropped. And Mark, you heard him say this to me a number of times as well!

I mean, I'm only human. I knew he always wanted that intensity, and I always tried to give it to him. I knew that if I let it drop for a second, he'd stop. And so with “Tilt”, we'd be well into a track and suddenly it stopped. I had dropped my energy or my intensity, or somebody else had. And we’d go straight back to the beginning again. There was no dropping in. There was nothing like that.

My final story in connection with “Tilt” is that we were well over a week into things, full-on days, and we turned up one day and suddenly we were going back to do a track that we thought we'd finished. And he'd listened to it again and again, and he decided that it was just a couple of BPM too slow. And so it was: let's rebuild the whole thing at this new tempo.

MW: That's interesting because making tiny adjustments to the speed of guide tracks was my first job on the album, taking over from Brian when he’d had enough of the madness! He and I had done many orchestral film sessions together side by side as keyboard players, and he knew I had the right combination of skills to offer Scott. When I walked into Metropolis for my initial session on “The Drift” and I met Scott for the first time, he was still focused on getting the tempi exactly right. He’d ask, for those 16 bars, could we just drop it by…? Sometimes it wasn't even one BPM. Very often it was just one decimal point of a BPM. And that clued me into what you're hinting at, that he knew when what he was hearing was right and was his vision. And it’s wonderfully liberating, isn't it?Because you can forgive anybody anything if you know that when they're happy, they’re certain they’ve got exactly what they wanted.

AM: Oh, yes, totally. It's interesting. You - tongue in cheek, I know - used the word madness there. It was - in the sense of madness - a completely different way of working. It wasn't: “Right, this is what we do today. Here's the sheet music. Play that. If it's fine, we move on to the next thing. And if it wasn't, well, let's try something and see how we get on.”He knew what he wanted and he knew the various stages in the session where he wanted certain things to be achieved. But the fact that he was then listening back to things in such detail, once we were done, and then deciding “Let's get everybody back. Let’s set up again for that particular track.” And off we go. 

MW: Even when the technology enabled perfect “dropping in” and similar solutions, he wouldn't use them. For the take to be authentic, he would only accept it when it was part of an organic, continuous stream of music-making, performed from the very beginning again.

AM: Every time I would get ready for a take with Scott, knowing it was going to be that exacting and that he wasn't going to use technology as a quick or an easy fix. As he said in the film [30th Century Man], it's all about the moment of making the music, all about the moment of it actually happening there, there in front of him in the studio. Yeah, that was the important thing. It wasn't “well, give me something and then I'll manipulate it electronically”. For me, that was brilliant because I've done so many things like that. And you think “Really? Is that actually how I played it on the final thing?” Whereas with Scott, without a doubt, it was how it had to be.

MW: You really felt that your performance was being honoured and respected.

AM: Yeah, definitely. I felt that. As well as being critiqued and being called out when it wasn’t right.

MW: Mention of that documentary about the making of “The Drift” leads us nicely to the first Scott album on which we worked together. How can we ever forget the now legendary “side of pork”, amongst many, many other things? Memories of you relentlessly pounding that breeze block as it shed its dust left, right and centre!

AM: And the massive wooden box being built in the studio.

MW: Many of these dramatic, percussive moments immortalised in “30th Century Man” of course, which is so lovely.

When you arrived for the first day of recording, had you seen Scott since “Tilt”?

AM: No.

MW: So, eight years on, you arrive already aware that this is an exacting taskmaster you’re going to be working with. There was always a sense of drama, walking into a Scott session: one’s senses were on heightened alert, there would be tension in the air, he was focused and only there to work.

AM: I mean, it's worth mentioning from my perspective that astonishing pairing, that double act of Scott and Pete [Walsh], because you know, very often in the intensity of it all, it was looking up and seeing Pete just grinning from ear to ear because he knew that Scott was getting what he wanted. He knew, he understood the process itself was taxing and demanding. Sometimes I looked at Scott, I never knew whether what I was doing was absolutely what he wanted. But I could tell by looking at Pete, you know, and that was great! It's such an interesting pairing of characters. Of course, their history goes back well before me.

MW: It was a remarkable and wonderful partnership, wasn't it?But it’s interesting also to examine the partnership between your playing and Pete's engineering skills: an equally wonderful combination. Your knuckle hitting the dead centre of a drum on a backbeat for eight minutes, that focus and concentration would all be for nothing if it wasn't then being captured in sound by a producer who grasped Scott’s vision so completely and had the technical ingenuity to bring it to vibrant life.

AM: Yeah, I’ve got two things there, Mark.First of all, with “Tilt”, it wasn't until I actually went out and bought the album that I heard the tracks with the vocals and everything. I remember coming out of this whole intense experience and thinking, well, that was quite something. I feel very fulfilled, but I don't know what the end purpose was or whatever. And then listening to the album and hearing his voice - until then I hadn't heard him do any vocals – sounding so different from the Walker Brothers and the Jacques Brel songs. And his use of it. I mean, Scott's voice: it’s a whole other conversation, isn't it?What a technique he's got, what control.

I remember listening to the album thinking, wow, that's quite extraordinary, and listening to it a few times and fathoming out how certain things I'd done fitted in, in the context of the storytelling or the structure of the song or whatever. And then I kind of thought, well, there you are, that was that.

So when I received the call to work with Scott again,I thought I knew the situation that I'd be finding myself in again. I turned up for the first day of sessions, but it was as if these eight years had never happened. I was treated like a long-lost friend by Scott and Pete, and of course, it was great to meet you and everything. And there was a whole difference from the Scott that I'd worked with on “Tilt”. This was a different situation. I actually felt at that stage that something had moved me from the outer to the inner circle.

MW: You were now part of the family.

AM: That's right. Yes, I sensed that. I was very pleased about that and very thrilled about it, really. The whole experience then was, it felt less in the darkness or wading through the fog. I understood better what was going on, and I think Scott had changed as well.

MW: Meanwhile, I was in much the same position you'd been in on Tilt! Very much feeling my way, never quite sure whether I was intuiting accurately what he wanted. I learned quickly that he was wary of being asked direct questions about details of his music, fearful that words might constrain the ideas, and often my expectations of what constituted a good take were turned completely on their head by how Scott reacted to it. Sometimes he’d be after perfectly accurate rhythms, just as they were in his guide sequences, but at other moments my strict attempts to notate a demoed phrase of apparent rhythmic or melodic randomness proved unnecessary - he really wanted the player’s own interpretation of his example.

AM: There were some times, Mark, especially when I was in there working with Ian Thomas, putting something down with the pair of us, and we would be playing in such a way that we were mechanical and absolutely on the click, but it wasn't doing it for Scott. And we were trying to find out what was required. Between the pair of us, we decided to listen just enough to keep it mechanical, keep it exact, keep it rhythmic, but slightly loosen it up, play on the back of the click a bit, and give it a kind of lazier, looser feel. And then we'd realise, ah, now we're more in the zone. From Scott's reaction, your reaction, Pete's reaction, we knew that by playing in that manner, we were getting closer to what he was after. Once we'd got that baseline set, we could then work on the other parameters from there.

But it was that fascinating concept of time, click, mechanical, but still getting the feel right, still getting the placing right. To be that exacting, it's fantastic.

MW: Yes. And so rare. So often when playing in a rhythm section we're recording with artists for whom the vibe is everything. Your own creativity, adding to what's actually in front of you, is expected to a level where you're building up something that perhaps doesn't exist on the page. But most of the time for Scott, what he was after was exactly on the page, but to be performed in a very particular way.

I wonder whether there's something about loosening the beat in that way that gives it a patina of familiarity to the listener?The groove acquires a relaxation, if you will, even though the sound is still driven.

AM: Yes. And having worked hard like that in the studio for the conception of the pieces, what was interesting for me then was doing the live [Drifting and Tilting] shows at the Barbican, and we did runs of the pieces. I think we inhabited then a state of familiarity that we weren't in at the moment of creation. The pieces existed, and we were not revisiting, but we were reconstructing them from a position of familiarity.

And that was a fascinating experience to work like that, to set out to recreate live what we've done in the studio with bigger forces and the staging element and all of that - a definite highlight of my time working with Scott.

The times when it was just me, yourself, Pete, and Scott working and really setting out to achieve something specific and extraordinary. That was always a fantastic experience. But then when we shared it all with other musicians in the band, with the audiences for “Drifting and Tilting”, and then shared it, that was a whole other dimension.

MW: It was indeed. Before we wrap up on “The Drift”, do you have any other moments or recollections that haven't already been immortalised?

AM: I mean, I have done several interviews about the pig punching. That’s been done to death. But the one thing I will say is that from this vantage point, looking back on it, Scott and I can't think that I would have taken to it so readily for anybody else. That’s the key thing. It was because it was Scott, and I had an understanding of how he worked. And also, I felt that our relationship had moved to a different stage, that when he did ask me about it,I didn't question it, really. I thought, OK, this is something very specific that he wants and he obviously feels I'm the person to do it for him. Looking back on it, I think, well, there was a mutual trust. Yeah.

MW: Did you leave those sessions knowing what physical historical event it was portraying?

AM: No, I just remember going home that evening and thinking, well, that was extraordinary. I hope I gave him what he wanted. I know I did my best to achieve it. And I hope that what I did was good enough. But I certainly didn't go away thinking, well, there's a chapter for the memoirs.

MW: It was quite electrifying being in the control room while you were doing it, to see a different side of you. You have such a sunny, cheery personality that you bring naturally with you into situations when you arrive. But when it got to that, there was a level of almost furious concentration that I'd never seen you show.

AM: To be honest, I can't think that I've ever needed that in any other situation. You know, as I said, I would only ever have done it for Scott.

MW: The second time we worked together on a Scott project, it was for part of a song cycle called Plague Songs. A track called Darkness, commissioned by the arts organisation Artangel. Once recorded, a choir of refugees were later going to perform it in Margate.

AM: Yes.

MW: I was not involved with the subsequent live performance, but I remember wondering how possible it would be to find enough “super high” sopranos and “super low” basses to perform Scott’s challenging vocal lines!

I have a memory of you in the large live room at Metropolis, playing three tambourines sellotaped together, because no single tambourine you offered ever sounded big enough to him. I think it was a little swung rhythm that you had to play continuously through the lengthy track – something of an intensity marathon!

AM: It’s almost a knee-jerk reaction when Scott's name is mentioned to me by anybody - they might not even know that I worked as closely with him as I did - but immediately, I think: Scott was so dismissive of certain tambourines. He referred to them as “Boy Band Tambourines”!He'd say, “Oh, Ali, I don't want that boy band tambourine sound, you know?”. And that is infused in me, that's part of my DNA now!I now share with him that abhorrence. Ever since I first was aware of that with Scott, it changed my approach to tambourine playing.

On “Darkness”, he had a very specific tambourine sound in his head, very difficult to describe. But by simply saying “Not a boy band tambourine,” that immediately helped me narrow the field. And for that track, I remember bringing in a whole pile of tambourines. I started by using the biggest orchestral tambourine I've got— calfskin, with big, heavy jingles—for a backbeat for the whole track. I found a way of getting a “pop” on it. Rather than strike on the rim, I was actually using the knuckle of my middle finger in my right hand going right into the middle of the head in such a way as to bring out a pop sound, a really high-pitched sound, to offset the depth of the jingles on the tambourine. It was literally just a backbeat, two and four for the whole track, and then we added other things on top of it. But I do remember doing a pass, and I think it was over eight minutes long or something. It was a big, long track. It was just me in there and I was trying to get a consistent, specific sound from this tambourine. I’d maybe be four and a half minutes into it and suddenly he stopped me, because one of them just didn't match up to the previous line.

MW: You knew that you could have “dropped in” just before the moment where the intensity slackened and continue from there. But of course, that was not Scott's way!

AM: Oh, no. Exactly. By that time, I totally knew the world I was in. I would never even have dreamt of suggesting “Oh, come on…”I would never have dreamt of that with Scott because I totally believed and understood his whole method of working and his purpose for it and what he wanted.

And then, you're quite right, it was a question of taping tambourines together and shaking them in different ways to add to this extraordinary “massed tambourine-fest”.

MW: Well, as you said, for both of us, “Drifting and Tilting” - five years after we met on “The Drift” - was an extraordinary moment in time and definitely a pinnacle that will possibly never be equalled again. On every level, it was an audaciously ambitious three nights of concerts, hugely expensive and a magnificent opportunity for Scott to combine his vivid visual flair with his gargantuan musical vision. It does seem very unlikely that we'll ever see the like of bringing all those talents and all those massive forces together again.

AM: But it certainly didn't feel like a vanity project. I mean, vanity and Scott are two words that would never go together anyway. But it didn't feel like it was being put on for any other reason than to rightly celebrate his music. And the reaction from the audiences totally backed that up. That level of response from the audience and that level of familiarity with those extraordinary tracks.

MW: Yes, his famous sleeve notes that warn: these albums are to be listened to in the dark and with the volume turned up very, very loud. It suggests a relationship with his music that is very insular, very private and very personal. And suddenly to be in a theatre, all celebrating the genius of this man in such an effusive and extravagant way was magnificent. Happy days!

And then you played on a project with the longest title in the world (!): And who shall go to the ball? And what shall go to the ball? It was more of a chamber piece.

AM: That's right. I remember doing big boomy bass drums, lots of dark trashy cymbals and metal sounds. It was always an extraordinary world.

MW: Yes. I’m thinking of your earlier boy band tambourine comment. It’s almost like there's a parallel between that and what he always used to complain of with digital, certainly the early digital sound, that slightly brittle, top-heavy, very bright, but slightly lacking in substance quality of digital audio of that period. That really set his mind against using Pro Tools for a long time. The human warmth and intensity, the deeper colours and richness of the calfskin tambourine you were speaking of with those big, fat jingles on them. There’s almost an analogy with the whole recording to tape and its analogue recording colours that he clung on to for far longer than most other people.

AM: There were certain things I was surprised he never had me do. We didn't ever go down the road of many of the orchestral sounds, things like glockenspiel, marimbas and xylophones. That that was never of interest to him. But big clangy sounds, big weighty instruments that suggested something imposing always seemed to be what was required.

MW: When he would talk me through the orchestration ideas he had, he would often be after “a fantastic noise, a real ugly noise”. That’s so much where his sound world was. That, and high shrieking whistles - very keen on those!

AM: Well, those are sounds that provoke a reaction. You know, a lot of the things that he was asking me to do, I thought, wow. I mean, it's interesting. Ugly does sum up a lot of the stuff in the sense that it's provocative. It's not intended to be pleasant, just part of a colour in the texture. Everything was there with an important purpose. Sometimes that purpose was menacing, creating a feeling of fear or trepidation or anxiety.

MW: And then before the films, we recorded “Bish Bosch”. You very kindly allowed me to be your second percussionist on several instruments. Racks of tuned gongs, plates of metal, and I remember seeing you astride a tall ladder to play an impossibly low D tubular bell, longer than I ever knew existed.

AM: Well, because of the classical side of my work, I'm aware of the sort of things which would turn up in an orchestral context. Bass bells, so oversized, sounding a lot deeper and a lot richer. The tuned gongs, they go right the way back to “Tilt”. That’s when I first introduced Scott to tuned gongs. Big bass tuned gongs. And they're fantastic things, but… once you start playing a pattern on two or three of them, the ring, the overtones merge together and it's an incredibly difficult thing to control. One trick would be to record them in isolation and then put them together digitally, but of course that was never, ever something that I would even suggest, because I knew that what was wanted was the pattern and the consistency between them.

MW: That's very similar to some of the issues we ran into with Huey [Hugh Burns]on the guitar with certain distortion that relied on pushing an effect right to the edge of crackling or going into self-oscillation, just on that dangerous edge.

That tuned gong issue would have excited Scott immensely. He loved the feeling of sound being like a high wire tightrope: If you go just a millimetre too far, it's ruined.

AM: And of course, for me, playing like that, it was never a question of thinking, well, I don't need to worry about all this because I can let everything ring and I can let everything bounce together. I was still having to find a way of playing that allowed my sensibilities to come through as well.

So I'd be managing as best I could all of this resonance and all of these things happening. And there were many other situations with Scott where, as you rightly say,I was being pushed either to the edge of what the instrument could do, or indeed the edge of what I could do.

It was never a question of thinking, well, it doesn't matter, it's a crazy effect or it's a pointless event. It was never that. It was always a question of giving him what he clearly wanted and envisioned in a way that I felt I was still taking care of every little aspect of what I was doing. And I'm sure that every one of the musicians, whoever worked for Scott, when they realised that was the world they were in, embraced it. You had to really, didn't you?

MW: You're absolutely right. And that's why he loved working with you, because he knew that there were built-in limits, parameters of taste and ability and technique and experience that you would bring to any of the requests he had, and yet with a total desire to give him what he wanted. And that's a magic combination.

AM: I would be lying if I said that there weren't occasions when it was frustrating. I’d think, ah, I've got close to what Scott wants, but I have just not got there. Because of just trying to understand and trying to loosen myself up in some ways from all of that. But, you know, maybe after a break or whatever, come in with a fresh approach and something will be there.

MW: I'm remembering a conversation now, I think we would have been in Metropolis with a big, deep orchestral bass drum, and you were telling Scott that it really was counterproductive to hit it as hard as he was asking. He kept saying, “Is that the hardest you can hit it?” and you explained that the instrument would resonate more and actually sound louder if you didn't thwack it as hard as you could.

AM: That's it. 

MW: But I was worried at that point because it didn't look like you were committing as intensely as Scott wanted. It’s almost like he wanted the visual to match the sound that came out.

AM: Yes, I know. I mean, those were funny moments. In that case, that was something where I felt, you know, with my orchestral playing I'm massively experienced at knowing how to project a bass drum sound in a big concert hall in such a manner that it's got all of the weight and all the intensity and fits into the orchestral context. So I knew that no amount of stripping off my shirt and going down to a loincloth was going to produce a better sound!

MW: Well, Alasdair, it's been such a treat catching up and hearing your recollections. Was there anything in conclusion that you wanted to add?

AM: I think one of the things about me in general, Mark, is that as a musician, I've always revelled in doing lots of different things, all at the very highest level and I'm immensely proud of my association with Scott and of all the things we did together. It catches me out sometimes, because somebody will have suddenly come up to me in a completely unexpected context to say, “I've just discovered that you worked with Scott Walker.” And I can see in the way they're addressing me that this is, quite rightly, a thing of marvel for them, a thing of astonishment, that they would have realised that this was a very extraordinary world to be part of and to be like you, a handpicked key member of that world. It gives people a completely different perspective on what they might have thought they understood about me as a musician. And so I will be forever grateful for the opportunity.

I did develop a lot as a musician through working closely with Scott, realising that you can't just rely on the technology to save you, and you don't just go in and play and then, yeah, they can sort it out in the mix. What’s the point?And, you know, I've always had a very strong focus when I'm working. But I think my work with Scott took that to different heights. Somebody described me recently as forensic. And I thought, well, that comes from Scott. That’s how he was. And I'm hugely grateful to him for having let that rub off on me because it puts me in an astonishing position as a musician.