A Fascinating Character: cellist Frank Schaefer on working with Scott Walker’s music
Saturday 9th August 2025
Mark Warman So how is life treating you?
Frank Schaefer I've just come back from the gym - that was more in preparation for my tennis at four o'clock as opposed to this zoom call!
MW [laughs] In the intervening time I've been looking at some of the other interviews on the website. Some of the orchestral musicians who worked with Scott over the years have only slender fragments of memories, brief impressions of the man, because I guess in the sessions he was pretty much for you just a disembodied voice in the cans from time to time?
FS Well yes, and no.
“I mean, to me he was a fascinating character. Look – just being able to see him in the box, when we were at Angel doing our recordings, just seeing his presence in the box there, with that peak baseball cap, and his denims, and of course always those Converse sneakers! That was part of his [image], his working outfit, you know?”
Frank Schaefer
MW And that furrowed, intensely concentrating face, hovering over the mixing desk! In sessions when there were just the three of us, finding sounds and working on details, he'd always be making fine level adjustments on the console while the track was playing back. Of course, as the mix engineer, Pete really needed to be in control of which knobs were being turned, so he had to develop an ingenious way of tracking Scott's moves and immediately recreating them in the pro Tools session so that they were repeatable.
FS Was he also in charge of the desk in the live concerts then? In Rotterdam?
MW No. Pete was always on the desk. Scott of course was at the Drifting and Tilting concerts we did at the Barbican, supervising everything from the back of the hall. But he didn't come to Rotterdam. Fortunately, you were able to join Pete and me over there for a quite extraordinary three days of recreating with a live orchestra Scott’s monumental score at the international film festival’s screening of Childhood of a Leader.
FS I'm sure I wasn't on my own.
MW No - Tom [Pigott-Smith, Violin] came over as well. You both knew the score so well from playing on the original studio sessions. You understood the style of totally committed playing that Scott’s music demanded, so were the perfect choice to lead the young Dutch players from Codarts and inspire them to produce the level of passionate ferocity required!
FS Well, it was pretty much full in your face, wasn't it? Most of the playing was full-on.
MW Scott also had this antipathy most of the time for playing with any vibrato. A lot of the time he wanted a very plain but intense sound with no vib, which we had to insist on from the players. I remember often having takes rejected in Angel because a little bit of sensitivity had crept in.
FS Too much vibrato.
MW And of course the moment you remove vibrato, intonation becomes tricky.
FS So are you specifically wanting to concentrate on that movie, or his whole tone that we worked on?
MW I'd love to explore what it felt like from your side of the music stand to be there in the room leading a large cello section thanks to Scott's insistence on using big string forces for his work. He had no desire to thicken out the sound with samples, like most would do. The sound he heard in his head was certainly not the buzzing of electronics, but the intensity of playing from the real musicians that he adored working with. It's funny - I suspect that he probably knew the players in the room during those orchestral sessions better than they ever got to know him.
FS Well, he wasn't standoffish, but he wasn't approachable. I mean, he never put himself in a position to be approached. His whole kind of function was in the control room or at the back of the theatre at the sound desk.
MW But he genuinely looked forward to seeing you at the front of the cellos and Paul leading the violins.
FS To be honest, I didn't know anything about Scott Walker before we worked with him on Drifting and Tilting. It was quite a surprise when we went in for that first rehearsal! I didn't know what to expect, nothing at all. Scott Walker? I didn't even know the Walker Brothers’ music that he did, but he was famous. They were world famous, this “Walker Brothers”. I thought their tunes would have been more mainstream but in fact they required a listening. They weren't like pop tunes, were they?
MW They very much drew on that wall of sound that people like Phil Spector was creating over in the States. They were epic productions.
FS Right. So, basically what I'm trying to say is when I came in, I knew he had a famous name but I didn't know anything about his background or the Walker Brothers group that he was in. I assumed they were kind of a Motown kind of band or something like that! [laughs]
MW So you strutted in wearing your funkiest shoes?
FS Yeah, something like that! And I walk in, and I'm going “What the f**k is this?”. Justin Pearson [the cellist], when he was touring with Michael Nyman, used to describe his music - and I would say this about Scott Walker – he was asked in a radio interview “How would you describe Michael Nyman's music?” and he said “Well, somewhere between the sound of music and acid rock!”.
MW [laughs]
FS You could almost apply that to Scott Walker. I mean, less of the sound of music but more of the kind of “out of your head” thing. I mean it was fascinating. When I’m working on music (especially when it's new) I try to tease out what it is that we're doing and where the composer’s coming from, you know?
MW Yes.
FS And it was fascinating, working on his music. I don't know whether he did the arrangements or if you were a big part of it, but even the voicings were extraordinary. I don't know how you would describe them! And then, to be told - because we're deep down in the Barbican’s orchestra pit - that what's going on up on stage, well they're beating a pig's carcass up there!! You know, I WANT TO SEE THIS!
MW I once stumbled upon a few grainy YouTube clips of just a couple of the sequences.
FS I was expecting that there might have been a video of it.
MW Sadly it wasn't professionally filmed and turned into something that could be celebrated. In many ways that was the frustrating thing about Scott’s extremely private nature. It wasn't put on to be a deliberate enigma, he just disliked publicity, gave extremely rare interviews, just wasn't interested in the celebrity of being a world-famous creator.
FS Well, he didn't write the kind of music to be a world-famous creator! I mean he did, but… given the background where he came from, it's extraordinary that he found a niche - well I mean it was definitely a niche - with the kind of music that he was doing. It's not everyone who can understand that music.
MW What's interesting about the artists who admire and honour him for the musical legacy he's left: they all feel that they've learned so much from his musical bravery and “out there” soundscapes. Okay, he blazed some trails that they have no intention of following religiously, but they're glad somebody did it in order to experience ideas that maybe they themselves would have no use for exploring quite as far as he did. During my 15 years with Scott, he definitely helped me listen to music, to texture, to dissonance in a completely new way.
FS Yeah, I think I would second that. Yeah, absolutely.