Simon Raymonde on Scott Walker, from his memoir, In One Ear
In One Ear, Cocteau Twins, Ivor Raymonde and Me by Simon Raymonde
Reproduced by kind permission of Simon Raymonde and publishers Nine Eight Books
First published in the UK in 2024 by Nine Eight Books
BBC PROMS SCOTT WALKER – July 2017
Even writing that down makes the hair on my arms stand up,
I’ll go back to the beginning briefly. To remind you, in the mid ’60s, Ivor did the orchestral arrangements on the Walker Brothers hits ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ and ‘Make It Easy On Yourself’ as well as several others. My intense love affair with Scott Walker remains unsullied to this day. The significance of Dad’s work with Scott and Dusty Springfield cannot be underestimated. It must have been an incredible period for him to be arranging orchestras for two of the most significant voices of the time.
However, when Scott Walker comes to your house and you are barely five years old, it means nothing.
If I have one regret, over fifty years later, it’s that I didn’t call out to him as I looked out of my upstairs bedroom window to where he sat in the garden, angelic in his white shirt billowing in the light spring wind. ‘Hey, Scott, I might only be five but know this, we are going to be on the same record label, not once but TWICE! How do you like THEM bananas?!’
The strangest parts of that apparent fantasy are not that Scott was at our house or that he was wearing a white shirt, as both of those are true, but that my own band Cocteau Twins signed to Fontana (Scott’s label) after years on 4AD, and that Scott then signed to 4AD years after being on Fontana. Indeed, no fantasy at all.
Thanks to Julian Cope’s Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker CD release in 1981, many more of my contemporaries became aware of him. Culled predominantly from the four albums Scott 1, 2, 3 and 4, the twelve songs Julian picked were perfect as an introduction to the introspective Walker.
My love was rekindled all over again.
Once I had relaxed a little into what I was trying to do with Bella Union, I looked into licensing all four Scott Walker albums for a boxset release and with my friend Kieron Tyler who helped me with the Ivor Raymonde releases, we put in a request to Universal. I spoke with Charles, Scott’s manager, and he said Scott loved the idea too. Amazing. I liked Charles a lot. We had been in touch previously around the release of 30 Century Man, the excellent Scott documentary that my beautiful friend Stephen Kijak made.
A few months rolled by and then we heard that Universal had decided to do their own boxset. I was gutted. I think Charles was disappointed too and worried that Universal might botch the boxset but he needn’t have been. They actually did a really beautiful job.
An excellent Dutch writer called Dick Hovenga, who had been in touch with me several times over the years, had begun a new blog ‘Written in Music’. He was a huge supporter of Bella Union and we always tried to meet up whenever he came to London. We shared a lot of the same music tastes and also a lot of the same frustrations from working in the industry. One of our joint passions turned out to be Scott Walker, and we often spoke about trying to arrange an orchestral tour of his songs with some of Bella Union’s finest singers, like John Grant and Father John Misty. Now, speaking about it and actually doing it are totally different things. Whenever I would speak to agents it would usually get knocked back due to scheduling clashes or some such stuff. Dick was friends with Jules Buckley, an accomplished arranger/ conductor/orchestrator who had co-founded his own sinfonietta the Heritage Orchestra. He had mentioned to him our fanciful idea of this ‘Songs of Scott Walker’ tour.
On 4 January 2017, while on a call to the BBC Proms people about another project they were working on together, Jules mentioned our concept and had very positive feedback. I called Scott’s manager and by the end of the day, Scott had given his blessing. Within a few days, Dick and I were brought on as creative directors for the BBC Proms 2017 – ‘The Songs of Scott Walker’. It seemed unreal that our preposterous idea had come together so beautifully and organically.
The next six months flew past. The cast list of singers was the first thing we needed to secure.
Scott himself had requested Jarvis Cocker be one of the singers, and that felt entirely appropriate given their existing friendship. Fellow Sheffield legend Richard Hawley was also favoured. John Grant was always going to be my number-one choice and not just because he was on Bella Union, but because of his voice, presence and his ability to convey the deepest emotions. The choice of the fourth singer was not so easy, but I insisted it had to be a woman. Four middle-aged blokes just seemed unbalanced and disparaging. It was all liable to be rather . . . grey.
The BBC offered up some suggestions – Jehnny Beth and Siouxsie were two that I remember, both incredible artists – but I was adamant that the fourth singer needed to be a wonderful singer with range and not just a charismatic individual. To that end, I suggested Susanne Sundfør and the initial reaction, which I of course expected, was ‘Who?!’
Privately I had sounded out Susanne. She was already a massive fan of Scott’s and having seen her live, I knew with all my heart that she was the right person and persuaded them to at least listen to her music; ironically her debut LP for Bella Union was due out the following week. Any accusations of nepotism please send to youdontknowme@sofuckyou.com.
That night I wrote to Scott and his manager with a link to Susanne’s new LP with a note outlining exactly why I wanted her to be the final singer. By morning, Scott had come back to say he had listened to her album, loved it, totally agreed that her voice would be perfect and approved her inclusion. Knowing this, the BBC felt comfortable with the decision and our cast list was complete.
The next task was to pick the songs that would both best serve the Prom and the voices. For an artist with a career spanning five decades, there were always going to be dissenters, people who wanted a broader choice from both his early and later work. That was to be expected, but we all agreed with Scott that a show focusing on Scott 1–4 and ’Til the Band Comes In would work best with the Heritage Orchestra. Jules, Dick and I exchanged some ideas and spoke to the artists. After some to and fro, we settled on the following tracks and running order.
Jarvis Cocker
‘Boy Child’
‘Plastic Palace People’
Susanne Sundfør
‘On Your Own Again’ ‘Angels of Ashes’
John Grant
‘Rosemary’
‘The World’s Strongest Man’
Richard Hawley
‘It’s Raining Today’ ‘Two Ragged Soldiers’
Jarvis Cocker
‘The War is Over’
John Grant
‘Copenhagen’
Susanne Sundfør
‘The Amorous Humphrey Plugg’
Richard Hawley
‘Montague Terrace’
Jarvis Cocker
‘Little Things (That Keep Us Together)’
John Grant
‘The Seventh Seal’
Susanne Sundfør
‘Hero of the War’
Richard Hawley
‘The Old Man’s Back Again’
Everyone
‘Get Behind Me’
In conversations with Scott, one thing he kept emphasising to me was that the new arrangements had to have ‘power’. He had seen the Bowie prom the year before and felt it lacked horribly in that department. Jules noted this and made the brilliant move of inviting the London Contemporary Voices to add some depth and volume if needed.
The original arrangements on Scott 1–4 were done by a combination of Peter Knight, Reg Guest and Wally Stott (who later in 1972 transitioned to Angela Morley), while production duties were handled by one of my dad’s great mates, Johnny Franz.
Now the task for Jules Buckley in 2017 to meticulously recreate arrangements from exactly fifty years earlier was a mammoth one. None of those original orchestral arrangements exist, and nor have any of these songs ever been performed live in this way before, even at the time. The only performance was on the day of the original recording sessions.
I’m no expert, but nor am I a total dummy, and even I, after thirty-five years of doing this music lark for a living, found it hard to imagine how one could dissect these songs in such granular detail and know with any certainty what instrument is playing what. Remember, there are no studio tapes in existence, where Jules could, say, pop into a studio in 2017 and have a listen to the orchestra parts in isolation. I’ll be honest, I kept my fears to myself. But I did wonder how it could be done. But he clearly did it, and my admiration for this craft, his craft and that of my dad, and the likes of the formidable Fiona Brice, Andrew Skeet, Hannah Peel, David Arnold and all the other brightest arrangers in the world, could not be greater.
We only had a couple of days’ rehearsal with the orchestra and singers before the event, so it was all done fairly by the seat of our collective pants.
While rehearsals were going on, I called Charles to see how many tickets he would need and to enquire whether maybe Scott would likely make an appearance. He asked for some tickets for himself and for Scott and his family ‘just in case he decides to come. He may but he may not.’
On the day of the prom itself, I was a fidgety nervous wreck, in a constant blur of caffeine and dog walking. Never once sitting still, all I could think of was that it was going to go spectacularly wrong. Whilst going out live on the BBC.
Abbey and I got the train up to London and headed to the Royal Albert Hall early. We went for a little dinner first, but I didn’t eat a thing. My stomach couldn’t take it.
We went to our seats, stupidly early. I was looking around for Charles and any clues that Scott might be in the house when I espied Stuart Maconie in the BBC box. He beckoned for me to join him, and I popped in to have a chat with him live on air. He was excited about the event and as the room was now almost full, I began to calm down a bit.
I have to be honest, at the time the concert was happening, I have no idea what I thought of it. I could tell how nervous all the singers were, as these were very big Walker shoes to try and fill, but all my usual high-functioning critical faculties had completely deserted me. I make my living by having an opinion about the music I hear and deciding very instinctively, very swiftly whether I like it or not, and if it is connecting with me. For the first twenty minutes or so I had no idea if this was good, bad or indifferent. My thoughts were scrambled. I just kept thinking of my dad, of how proud he would be that I’d pulled this off, (not just me of course but you know what I mean). I thought back to Scott Walker coming to the house when I was a boy and then to Scott now and if he was here and if he was hating or enjoying it. Did he watch two songs and then slip out the back in disgust, or was he like me shedding a tear at the enormity of it all? Was it powerful enough for him? I was a ball of confusion.
By the time John Grant, and then Susanne, came on, my heart rate began to settle to its usual pace, between eighty and ninety – funnily enough around the same beats per minute as most Cocteau Twins songs – the numbness in my legs began to disappear and I felt more confident that it was going well. Really well.
The realisation of what was happening was starting to dawn on me. That for the first time anywhere, those arrangements of the finest orchestrators of their era were being heard live just as they were written, just as they were intended with a worldwide audience in one of the UK’s elite concert halls. It wasn’t Scott singing but it was the next best thing, with four artists who all loved the material and were doing everything they could to make their interpretations honourable and authentic to the writers and authors.
The reaction from the audience inside the Albert Hall was stunning.
Abbey and I stayed in our seats and watched as people gathered their coats and began shuffling towards the exits. As the room began to empty out, we walked down towards the left of the stage to go back to see everyone.
It was already busy backstage. There were a lot of people in this unique production all with friends and family coming back to say hello.
We walked into John Grant’s dressing room first. And the first face I see is Scott Walker’s. He came up to me before I had a chance to say anything and gave me a massive hug. ‘How was it?’ I said quietly as he held me. ‘Everyone did an amazing job. Thank you so much! We all loved it. Beverly, Lee, this is Simon.’
I was introduced to his partner Beverly and his daughter Lee. ‘Was it powerful enough?’ I checked.
‘It was. It really was. Better than I could have hoped for.’ Scott Walker loved his own Prom.
So now I can retire and go to my grave happy. Satisfied that one of the most important musical figures in my entire life loved a show I played a small part in organising, an event I was sure he probably wouldn’t even attend, a concert of songs I believed he no longer had feelings for.
In case you’re wondering, I never spoke to Scott Walker about my own version of ‘It’s Raining Today’ when we saw each other at the BBC Proms event. Nor did I find the right moment to bring up my dad doing the Walker Brothers arrangements for ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ and ‘Make it Easy on Yourself’. I am not sure why. Charles and I discussed it many times on the phone, so it doesn’t really make sense. I’ve thought about it a lot, but I just think when in the moment of speaking with him and hugging him, that was plenty enough for me. But truly, what did that all matter now? I didn’t want to spoil this precious moment with him.
After half an hour backstage, we let everyone in the cast and crew know that we had arranged a free bar around the corner from the Albert Hall and we’d love to see them all there. I told Scott and Beverly about it, not imagining for a second that this shy man that we had all been led to believe was some sort of Howard Hughes recluse would actually come and hang out with everyone.
But they did. And they stayed till 1 a.m., chatting and laughing with everyone and having a thoroughly fabulous time. I had to do a double take a couple of times, sitting in the corner with my glass of water, looking over to a room filled with maybe forty people, one of which was Scott flippin’ Walker.
His death twenty months later deeply shocked us all. Cancer when it hits can sear through the body like a laser. Ivor went the same way, fast. Here one minute seemingly in good cheer, and then gone.
I was honoured to be invited with just a few close friends and colleagues to attend his funeral in a secret wooded location. It was a beautifully sombre and elegantly curated Walkerian event. Moving and profound, thought-provoking and unique. Like everything he put his earthly hand to. Gone but never forgotten.
And I should have known better than to assume that would be my last entry on Scott Walker.
On Valentine’s Day 2023, I was sitting in the bath when the phone rang. It was arranger Jules Buckley. He explained he had the Barbican on hold in May for an event with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and thought maybe we should do something together again with the songs of Scott Walker. I remained sitting in that cold bathwater like a defrosting turkey for the next two hours, and by the time I finally exited the tub, this bird was ready for basting. I only had two conversations. One with Jules and one with Josh aka Father John Misty.
In just three short months, Jules would create eight brand new arrangements for Josh. They had together come up with a brilliant setlist, not just from Scott 1–4 as we had done previously, but with Scott compositions from each of the next three decades, from 1970 to 1995. ‘Thanks for Chicago Mr James’ from the 1970 album ’Til the Band Comes In, ‘The Electrician’ from Nite Flights in 1978, ‘Sleepwalkers Woman’ from Climate of Hunter in 1984 and ‘Farmer in the City’ from the 1995 album Tilt released on 4AD.
The evening of the concert came along so quickly, Abbey and I arriving early to soak up the atmosphere. I didn’t have the nerves like before, perhaps having had Scott’s personal blessing from the Albert Hall Prom that we were doing things the right way had helped, and I was able to enjoy every second just as a diehard fan would. I knew within the first few seconds that we had made the right choice asking Josh. An artist with great presence who would not resort to pale impersonation and would rather inhabit the songs in his own way, his own inimitable style. The new orchestral arrangements blew me away.
There was a beautiful symmetry with the original BBC Prom night, meeting up with Josh in the pub across the road from the Barbican after the show, just like we had with Scott six years prior.