Signing Scott Walker, by 4AD managing director Chris Sharp

Chris Sharp interviewed by Stephen Kijak, October 22, 2024

Chris Sharp was Managing Director of the legendary indie record label 4AD from 2000–2008 and is now Contemporary Music Programmer at the Barbican. 4AD had cemented its identity in the ’80s with its combination of eclectic and eccentric sounds married to designer Vaughan Oliver’s singular artwork: sonic and visual dreamscapes, sounds from well left of centre. Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil, Throwing Muses, Pixies and Lush were followed in the ’90s and ’00s by The Breeders, Red House Painters, TV On The Radio, St. Vincent and Bon Iver. The list goes on and on.

Nearly ten years after Tilt, released on Fontana in 1995, Scott Walker was ready to record again and needed a home for his new album…

Stephen Kijak: How did Scott initially come into your orbit? How did you come to sign him to 4AD? 

Chris Sharp: It was rumour, it was the grapevine. Scott had let it be known to his managers that he had this body of work that would become “The Drift” and that he was ready to start doing it. So, there was a sort of grapevine thing going on. An email or a phone call or something reached me at a certain point saying, Scott Walker is ready to make a record and he doesn't have a record company. And I just thought, fucking hell, Scott Walker!  So, I got hold of Charles’ email address and I sent him a message saying, I've heard that Scott's interested in making a recording. I'd love to talk to you about it. That was it. I mean, it was amazingly quick.

The context, at least for me, when “Tilt” came out in 1995, I was doing PR for Rough Trade Records and I was hanging out with a lot of the writers for NME and the Melody Maker and all the rest of it. And this is actually a true story, which I'd forgotten about until very recently, I ended up one evening in a flat somewhere around Blackstock Road, Finsbury Park, North London and there were various other music writers and PR’s at the flat. And although I don't think the gathering had been formed in order to listen to “Tilt”, promo copies of “Tilt” had just been circulated at that time, and so we all listened to it. We were all sitting around listening to “Tilt.” There was probably eight or 10 people there and I could hear the reverence and fascination in everyone, all of whom were in their mid-twenties, listening to that record and thinking, God, this guy's extraordinary!  Why is he making this music? What does it mean? And so, I'd seen how that record was received by, I guess, the critical class and how fascinating everybody thought it was. So, whilst probably the company perspective on it was that it was kind of a folly, I knew that it actually got people really intrigued and interested. And it certainly cemented Scott's reputation as the ultimate kind of mystery, the ultimate auteur.

SK: Did you have his Sixties records in your collection?  You were aware of him prior to “Tilt?”

CS: Oh, hell yeah. Absolutely. I had that compilation called, “This is Scott Walker” (Philips, 1972). They did them for a number of artists. It's like a Sixties vinyl compilation that gathered together some of the songs from his solo records. I picked that up in Manchester when I was at school, maybe prompted by my interest in Jacques Brel. And I still have that old vinyl! And then I gradually picked up the four solo records because I was a bit of a Francophile, I did French at school and I was interested in comparing the Brel versions with Scott’s versions (Scott covered 9 of Jacques Brel’s songs across his first three solo albums, released between 1967-1969) and being really interested in how they'd been transformed. And then I discovered, obviously songs like “Montague Terrace” and those extraordinary arrangements, and then the kind of snobby, collectory kind of music hipster thing was kind of like, oh, well, if you like “Scott 1”, “Scott 4” is the one you really need to have!  - it’s that weird inverse relationship that the critical establishment has with the record buying public. So, I remember listening to “Scott 4” a lot, I guess in my early twenties.

SK: What made 4AD such a good home for Scott? Did it take any convincing or was it an instant fit?

CS: It didn't take any time at all. I just thought, why wouldn't we want to make a record with Scott Walker? I mean, the guy's a genius. It was just about the deal. What's the deal? How much do you need? They'd made a budget for the record they wanted to make, which I recall being somewhere in the vicinity of 70 grand or something like that, this is 20 years ago, but that's my memory. And my memory is also that Scott did not take an advance. It was just like, we need the budget to make the record.

So obviously I was very used to making deals and working out how many records you'd need to sell to make that seem like a reasonable amount of money to spend making it.  Of course, we didn't make any money, but it wasn't about making money.  In the milieu of the artists that we were working with at the time, and I'm thinking about bands like TV On The Radio and Blonde Redhead and Beirut, and slightly later Bon Iver, a lot of these artists worshipped Scott. So, when we were talking to other artists and saying, you're going to be on the same record label as Scott Walker, you could just see everybody was going, no fucking way!

So, it didn't feel like it was an awkward fit creatively at all. Although of course, I had some comical conversations with various of our business partners when I was trying to present “The Drift” to our German distributors, for example, who were absolutely nonplussed at being played “Clara” in some kind of presentation room in Hamburg, which I did!

SK: Did you have any idea about the creative journey you were about to go on?

CS: Well, I was under no illusions. I did not think he was going to make a pop record. I absolutely didn't think that.

We just want him to make the record he wants to make. And that's what I say to everyone I’ve ever worked with my whole career - I don't work with artists to tell them what to do. I work with artists to enable then to do what they want to do.

And so, I wasn't being any different towards Scott. His modus operandi, as you know, was designed to keep you at a distance. Some artists would get you into the studio and say, what do you think? Obviously I wasn't expecting any of that.

Scott said it to me later, he said, Hey, I'm very happy that you liked “Titl!”. He was just so surprised that anybody actually liked it, it was as simple as that. And I think he was taken aback by the fact that we'd engaged with his creative practice and wanted him to do more of it.

SK: Did you ever get to sit down with him and talk to him about how he worked, asked what he needed from you as the record label? Do you recall any kind of conversations that went into any kind of depth about his process?

CS: No. No. But we had, during the making of the record, two points of contact really.  There was the session where we recorded all the string orchestra parts, the Mark Warman orchestrations, which was a very expensive day. So very graciously, Scott invited me and Ed (Horrox, head of 4AD A&R) to go and spend that day at Air Studios to listen to that happen. And that was the first time we had any insight into what the record might be like.

And I don’t know if you remember this, but all his vocal parts were recorded right at the end. So, everything else was tracked, and then he'd go in and do the vocal, but he had these guide melodies that were picked out on this kind of harpsichord sounding synthesizer. So you'd hear all these weird staccato melody lines that were supposed to be roughly the vocal melody lines. And we were in there all day. I mean, it was a proper day that started at 10 in the morning and finished at 10 in the evening or something. And so, we listened to some of those pieces many, many times and so over the course of the day, this kind of weird clinky, clunky harpsichord sound was burrowing its way into your brain with all these, frankly, nightmarish - Scott would describe them as nightmarish - kind of textures, sonic textures.

SK: I recall he described one of the sections as “the screaming strings that go down” – they’re quite shocking.

CS: I remember him talking to me on another occasion about nightmares and how he really suffered from nightmares. And I remember saying to him, most people who have a lot of nightmares would not want to recreate their nightmares as part of their creative practice! And he just nodded - he was a man of few words.

But I remember a couple of things about that day, firstly, that he was absolutely in control. He was in control of the time. He knew exactly when to move on and when to go for another take. He was super respectful of all the players and just the utter opposite of the kind of mad-cap, reclusive eccentric that he was portrayed as. He was coolly professional, kind of funny, cracking the odd joke. And there's a phrase that he uttered during that day which I use all the time now, which is that at the end of one of the string takes, he just said, Yep, we'll have that over the talk-back to the studio. We'll have that!  I use that all the time now, whenever I like something and I always hear a little echo of Scott in the back of my brain go, We'll have that! And it was just very classic him, just very casual. And then at the end of the day, I remember just wandering up and saying, thanks for letting me hang out and he just said, Hey, man, it's your show!

SK: I love that.

CS: By which of course he meant you’re paying for it! So, there was that. And then one of the most extraordinary days of my career - I was at home on a Sunday, phone rings, Charles is on the other end: Chris, Scott's finished the record. He wondered if you'd like to come and listen to it tomorrow at Metropolis in Chiswick.  So, the next day we hightailed it down to Chiswick. You shot some footage of the recordings in there, the meat bashing and all of that stuff, right?

SK: We did indeed!

CS: So, we sat in the control room with (producer) Pete Walsh obviously, and Scott, me and Ed and Charles and Cathy, and then literally they just played us the record, remorselessly, track by track, on really fucking loud studio monitors! And the record starts reasonably approachably and then gradually, as it goes on, it becomes really strange and you're assimilating all of this for the first time.

And then occasionally he had some things that he was prepared to say about the record, the insights that he was prepared to give about the subject matter. He spoke very clearly (about the track “Jesse”) about the Twin Towers and about Elvis and how it was about Elvis and his twin brother and the death of the Twin Towers and how that was linked together, and how those baritone guitar chords were actually just a super slowed down version of “Jailhouse Rock.”  And he had this spiel worked out, I'm going to give you a real creative insight into this song, which I still carry with me. But some songs, the really inscrutable ones, “Jolson and Jones” and others, he just didn't say anything about. And I remember the bit where, it’s “The Escape”, isn't it, where there's the WHAT'S UP DOC?, the kind of Daffy Duck thing –

SK: The demented Daffy Duck!

CS: Demented, big, and I literally thought I was losing it, because it was quite a stressful experience. This is the bit where the artist plays their records for the label. As a professional, you're thinking, what are the marketing people going to think? What are the press people going to think? What are the international licensees going to think? But at the same time, trying to respond on an emotional and creative level and really get into what it is that the artist is trying to achieve and what they want to say.

It was very hard to think of things to say, not least because I'd been absolutely fucking smacked around the head by this towering, monumental, grotesque, extraordinary emotional thing. I mean, it is a piece of work that's profound, it's difficult, but it's also emotionally really turbulent.

So, I was grappling with my own emotional responses to this music, trying to formulate intellectual and quasi-social responses to hearing it with the genius who made it standing there with his baseball cap on and his packet of oat cakes!  It was just a very strange day. And then at the end of it, Charles had a bottle of champagne he pulled out and said, I think this calls for a toast, don't you? Yeah, I could do with a drink! ((laughs)  It is obviously a treasured memory, an extraordinary experience. But intense.

SK: How has the Scott Walker experience aged in your memory? What do you carry with you the most from those years? I always think of him as some sort of sage, a teacher – has he left a lasting impact on your life?

CS: This is a mildly roundabout way of answering the question, but somebody I went to school with, whose name amusing is Johnny Greenwood, although he's not the guitar player in Radiohead, ended up being quite a senior editor at the BBC television news. And the day that news of Scott’s death was made public, the first thing I knew about it was a text from Johnny saying, Chris, Scott Walker's dead. Will you come and talk about him on the telly?

I felt that it was quite a responsibility in a way - I went on maybe three different news broadcasts - I can't remember now - so I was hanging around Broadcasting House most of that morning, talking to different people. And obviously I felt very keenly the responsibility of being summoned to summarize Scott to the world. And because it all happened very quickly, I didn't really have a chance to think about it very much. But I guess there were two things that I really wanted to say about him. And the first was that, and I mentioned this earlier, he had this reputation as this extraordinarily kind of elusive or difficult or, frankly, mad kind of artist. And I wanted to say that my experience was of a man who was self-deprecating, highly intelligent, just a consummate professional who'd grown up in a very different era where you were expected to show up, do the work, do it to your best ability, and get out and make a record in two days or four days or six days or whatever they had for those early Walker Brothers records,  and he still behaved like that. He still behaved like a man who was professional, polite, not starry at all, the ultimate anti-star in lots of ways.

So, I wanted to make that point. And then the other point I wanted to make is that at the same time as that, he was the most utterly uncompromising artist that I've ever known. And I'm sure there are other uncompromising artists out there, but they're not necessarily good, and Scott is an utterly uncompromising artist who was also unquestionably a genius. And whilst his work is not always easy to assimilate, I think people will be exploring it, trying to understand it, and will be astounded by it forever. He had this very, very clear, creative vision of what he wanted to do. He was not sidetracked by any of the setbacks, by the reception to any of the work or any of that kind of stuff. He was this absolutely pure, in that sense, totally pure artist, in that he had this absolute need to make this work. And then having made it, he just moved on.  

So, there were these two things about him; one is that he was, as a man, just very nice and very sorted and very grounded. But as an artist, he was utterly unbending. He knew what he wanted to make, and he found a way to make it. And that's a very interesting combination of assets.

And I guess another thing, people thought he'd gone mad in the seventies, I guess, when he was disappearing and turning up on TV shows and making terrible country records. But actually, in the end, his response to celebrity was the only sane response to celebrity that there can be, which is that having become a celebrity he decided that he didn't want to be one. He had no interest in being famous. He was only interested in making the work. And there's not many artists who you can truly say that about. And that makes him so authentic and so inspiring for anybody who wants to be creative.

So yeah, I'd say those things about him, I guess. And when you meet those people, those very, very singular and extraordinary people, what can you say?  In a banal way, yes, they are a source of inspiration, but also, it enables you to judge everyone else by that standard. And so, when you meet people who are bullshitters and charlatans, you kind of think, well, you’ve just failed the Scott Walker test!