Interview

NME - 17 March 1984
by Richard Cook

SCOTT WALKER The original godlike genius

Richard Cook goes Walker Bout with a fallen '60s pop angel who launched a solo career that was to inspire the music of Marc Almond and Julian Cope. Now, with the release of his first LP in four years 'Climate Of Hunter', Scott Walker himself is about to enter the '80s..

“I LIKE to watch people throw darts.”

But where have you been all this time?
“In a trance. I’ve been here drinking!”

Scott Walker sits at a table in a hotel bar and sips gingerly at a very modest scotch and soda. He thinks back to the period between 1978- when we last heard from him and now.

“Well, time flies when you’re not working. I haven’t been doing anything that anyone else wouldn’t be doing. Movies, reading, music, everything…some travelling, but nothing exotic like I used to.”

Amused, a little nonplussed at the attention. He’s turned 40 but looks ten years younger: the same sweep of gold hair secrets no greyness and only a pair of steel frames alters his unchanged teen idol features. Scott Engel Walker can’t really understand what the fuss is all about.

It’s about an American singer who won a brief, explosive acclaim as the lead voice of a group of sentimental crooners nearly 20 years ago; who went on to track out the decade with four astonishing, unsurpassed solo records that match a consummate musical and songwriting mind with a voice of vast strength and power to affect the emotions; and who got lost in a wilderness of neglect, wasted opportunity and-it seemed-final withdrawal.

When The Walker Brothers lazily reformed in the late ‘70s, Scott Engel gave one further indication that his powers were undiminished: four songs on the ‘Nite Flights’ LP that demonstrated a chilling grasp of a modern dynamic, graphically intense slabs of darkness and tumult. Then he was gone again.

Now, at last, he surfaces once more.

First there was a single, “Track Three’, and now an LP called ‘Climate Of Hunter’ falls into a pop world that has nurtured his name through its maverick tributes: Julian Cope’s ‘Fire Escape In The Sky’ compilation, Marc Almond’s loving touch-up of ‘Big Louise’, secondary echoes of his sumptuous melancholy drifting through most of the romantic pop of recent times.

Seven or eight years ago I paid 90 pence for a second-hand copy of his 1967 solo debut ‘Scott’. Walker’s grip on a lover’s passion as translated with his tempestuous charge through Jacques Brel’s ‘Mathilde’ and ‘My Death’ and his own ‘Such A Small Love’ and ‘Always Coming Back To You’—left me numb. I scoured the city until I had everything else he’d ever breathed on. Since then this voice and music have been a constant resource: they inspire fanticism.

None of those records have been in catalogue for years, and if Cope’s choice made a fine collection it’s only a shadow of the achievement that Walker pulled off. He fashioned an impression of a young man’s journey out of the awkwardness of adolescence into the loneliness of maturity through music that incredibly fitted the severest of pain and disrepair inside a skin of rare grandeur. If Scott agonised and flaired, he kept his head, If he was indulgent and occasionally mawkish, his experiments with form- the huge music of the great ballad singers brought to bear on ‘pop’ concerns remain unique, unanswered. This was a most splendid isolation.

As the few who stood by him always insisted, there is no music like this. Its mystery makes idiots call it pretentious; its delivery doomed it to esoterica, an arcane quirk in the annals of lost pop singers. To me it doesn’t have to compete: it’s work that stands as alone as the private and abrasive figure that Engel seemed to portray. It has mirrored and cast light on a young person’s experience with the world s more than any other vocal music I know,

I was afraid to to meet its maker, even though I’ve waited a long time for this interview. But he dispels anxiety. His soft Californian accent is untouched by his many years living quietly in London. Slowly we picked up the pieces of a carcer that looked in ruins: mere MOR fluff for Philips and CBS followed ‘Scott 4’ in 1969, until the Walkers reformed in 1977.

“It started off as a situation that that we tought might be amusing,” he recalls. “But everybody just got sick of each other again. When we’re not working together it’s fine. I keep in touch with the guys every week. Then when GTO fell apart Virgin approached me and I signed with them.”

But still nothing happened..

“I was trying to get some studio work on the quiet but, uh… I didn’t know who to go to. Then I found this management through Al Clark. I was pretty broke. They said, well, why don’t you finish your contract? I had a bad history-I’d lost three flats just as I was gaining any kind of impetus-but they said, at least start talking to Virgin again. I didn’t know if that was the problem-they didn’t realise I had to have money to complete it. “Then last year I got a fairly hefty publisher’s cheque and I had these bits and pieces and I thought, I had to finish it. I couldn’t seem to get anywhere in my life until I’d done this—completely leave or murder myself or anything.”

The story is eked out slowly in a lot of broken sentences. Scott hasn’t been interviewed in a long time.

“So… I rented a cottage in the country. I looked in the paper and saw this workman’s cottage near Turnbridge Wells, so I rented it for two months, on my own. I put all of ‘Climate Of Hunter’ together down there. I told Virgin I’d have it ready in two months — I had to run a bluff on myself. I knew I had it.” He clenches his fist. “And I made it.” Wasn’t there a list of songs from the lean times, waiting to be made?

“No, no, I never write without a definite. project. I get very disheartened if nothing’s going to happen. And I’m not one of those people who sings at home, so I had to work on that too.

It sounds like Gissing: the artist in a garret, forcing the inspiration.

“I’ve been doing that anyway! It seemed like everything was crumbling around me each time I tried to get started. But I knew I had to find it this time even if I never made another record. C’mon you old bastard, keep moving!

“A meeting was arranged for me with Eno who wanted to do a record, a coupla years ago, an LP of some kind. But I thought rather than destroying his career too I had to do one on my own (laughs). It’s like everybody was working in the dark on it, until the late stages.”

Was he rusty, making a record again? “That’s what I was worried about. I asked Virgin to send me some producers’ tapes because I thought I’d be behind with all the studio technology, and you have to make that stuff work for you. That’s how I got Pete Walsh. I thought his stuff sounded more total. I work very much on no crowds a one-to-one with everything in the studio.

And the voice?

“That was the great thing. This is the best age to sing at until you reach 50, when it starts to go down. Right now you’re at your peak. I was very worried about it but once I started it was easier than I’ve ever found before. And I can’t tell you why. The physical act of singing is very hard, but I was doing something that was complete to myself again.”

THAT VOICE is peerless, something more than the Scott we remember-darker, even more finely controlled. Whatever was expected of ‘Climate Of Hunter’, the results are different.

It maintains his position outside, for there is practically no precedent for this new music, Perhaps the urgent propulsion of the ‘Nite Flights’ songs recurs again in “Track Three’, or whatever. But rock is atomised and reshaped in this record: the songs swirl out of widescreen orchestrations or paradoxically sparse tre rhythms and take substance through a jangle of harsh, freezing images. They take in vistas and delineate detail like a slow-motion blink.

“As the heat in your hands/Carve the muscle away/And he grins from a break in the backflash”. When Walker’s voice looms out of the dense thundercloud of sound at that moment on ‘Rawhide’ all the indecisions and false starts of his battered career are obliterated in an instant: Walker has come back stronger than ever before. These songs-lyricised in the most abstruse poetry, put to music that turns rock upside down-have him at the height of his powers.

It stems from a tiny group of players, including older associates Mo Foster and Peter Van Hooke-and, of all people, the improvising saxophone genius Even Parker.

“I love his playing. I knew he’d be perfect for it, but Evan was very worried. I said, what I want you to do, you can do better than anyone else. And then he got into it. He’s a marvellous guy. Getting him out of the house is a problem.” Um. It sounds like…

“Yeah, we related perfectly,” Scott smiles.

Four songs are named simply for their position on the record ‘Track Three’ and so on. Does he follow Anthony Braxton’s dislike of titles, things which introduce emotional or sentimental connotations which might be misleading?

“That’s very well explained, but he’s an instrumentalist. For me it was just that the lyric was complete and adding something later on was totally unnecessary. I didn’t know if it had been done before.”

ALTHOUGH HE is reticent about it, Walker’s reappearance was first signalled in the attention that suddenly came his way in 1981. What was his reaction to the refreshed cult status triggered by Cope’s ‘Godlike Genius’?

“Well, I wasn’t aware of it until then. And I didn’t know what to think. You know, when it’s just one guy doing it…I can’t think about that too much. Yeah, I guess I was embarrassed by it, since I didn’t know anyone who’s connected with it. I wasn’t bombarded with it.” Didn’t he see it as an opportunity to (ahem) come back?

“No, because I wasn’t ready,” he responds immediately. “Unless I’m ready to go at any time for anything it would take a bear to drag me out. Even this isn’t a ‘comeback’. It’s just a record I had to get done.’

What of Marc Almond’s interpretations of neglected Engel songs like Big Louise’ and The Plague’?

“I haven’t heard them,” he admits. “People say I must. I don’t know what they’d be like.”

He laughs in some amazement when I tell him that Almond began his Christmas shows with ‘The Plague’.

“I don’t listen to the old songs. I don’t have the records. People don’t believe that, but I say you can come and listen to my apartment, like Gene Hackman. I think a lot of it was absolutely awful. That’s not false modesty, it’s absolutely true. Some of it was very good. But the time I wasted after those first records was shameful.

“It’s the old story of the guy who made it seeing flaws. I was sent Cope’s compilation and I put it on and listened to this young guy singing… thought, hey that’s not bad. But one play was enough. What’s the greatest difference in making records now, instead of then? “You don’t have to do it live. We did, everything live-everyone was in the studio at once and I’d be running back and forth as co-producer. Now you can take your time. But the prime way of making records hasn’t changed, you just have to modify things. I wanted a hi-fi sound. Like Rudy Van Gelder (Blue Note’s master producer)-a sound where everything is as pure as possible. The voice was recorded. absolutely purely, just a couple of places where it was compressed for the lyric. “Artificial techniques can be good. You can make great pop records that way, like with Michael Jackson. The output of the record industry today has created more diverse situations. When I started… well, now is a perfect time to make records. The ‘70s were a real dry gulch but now everyone can make the record they want. If they want to make it.”

The best time? I thought this was a time when there was no dissonance, all smoothness, a bland obedience to some idea of ‘modern pop’?’

“But then that’s the kind of record they’re going to make anyway,” demurs Walker. “If there’s pressure on them then I know what that’s like ‘cause I had pressure on me too in the ‘70s. They’ve gotta get that pressure off and this is the time to do it.

“You’ve not had people like Costello or Almond making records before-that’s what makes this time different. There certainly weren’t in the ‘70s, even the ‘60s. There were good records and maybe there were moments like The Sex Pistols. But now, if they can pull it off, they can do it. Before there was an inability to pull it off. That was my problem. Elvis Costello doesn’t seem to have it.”

How far can you go in giving a song weight?

“It’s all down to taste, isn’t it? You can hit a sequence of things in a song that will somehow match up and work. That’s part of the magic. But it’s a hard question.”

In Walker’s songs the sequences sound inconceivable at first: but hear ‘Dealer’, and see how a cinematic jumble of images eventually focuses. A phial of metaphysic! “The idea is to make it resonate. If you de can find a polemic in there, good for you (chuckles). But it’s to get this resonating factor going. I don’t cut up, I’m not that kind of writer. I can just tell you that, uh, it’s not easy. I have to work at it and, please, someone else work at it when they’re listening.”.

Tough work. Reference points to other music are hidden or overturned. The great spread of sound suggests a bathos that the melodic strength of the songs never admits.

“The idea is that if you’re a strong enough singer-and I know that that’s not stylish today, but that’s why I worked so hard on the lyrics and getting it right, getting the melodies to match-then I know that if I’m there I can sing the songs no matter what. And we found that the songs virtually mixed themselves.” Is this work designed entirely for a studio context?

“I wouldn’t know how to do it outside.

Performing is one of those things I don’t like to do, like flying. Nowadays it seems you can put anybody on a stage and make them sound great. I’d do it if anything happened with my record. But I think they’ve got a long wait. It’s just not worth it as something to do-if it’s not happening in the studio then it’s not happening. I’m not advocating just making studio records because surely I can go out and sing tomorrow-but everything has to be right.”

Does the finest music develop from a great literacy in the form?

“I think you should know as much as you can but it doesn’t necessarily help to make anything better than something else. The problem I have is this basis as a pop musician which is something you can never drop. You can use other disciplines, if you know how, but it’s all according to the thing you do originally-everything will work around that. I could have done this whole album with just a bass tracked a few times, varispeeding it, and used some percussion.”

Why not do that?

“Well,” he smiles, “I thought if this was the first record I’d done in a long while I thought it’d better be something I could live with a little longer.”

YOU MAY detect some reserve here. Walker politely turns away from discussing the flesh of his work. When asked about his old fixation with Brel he dismisses its relevance. He respectfully concurs that his own songs might have a similar role for others. But he won’t talk about them.

“I’m a little loath to discuss material. It’s so damn hard, you know, and it brings it all back to me and I feel unlucky when I have to discuss it. What was on my mind was getting it to flow together. I was trying to remember how I’d done this before and how I was going to compound it all. You really have to do it on your own.”

The scrutiny is still the price of a pop star. He might even have a hit again. Is he prepared to embrace all aspects of a pop culture once more?

“I did a video the other day so I’ve embraced that much. Very Tarkovskian. I think if I did another record I’d have to do the video myself. It’s another apparatus that’s grown out of this business and I have to have control of it if I’m to have it all right.

“It’s easier to be selective. I’m not doing a lot of interviews, as you know. That’s another thing that’s easier about today- you have a choice. Generally speaking people who buy this record won’t be interested in who you’re shacked up with or whatever… well, they may be. I don’t know. But I’m not doing too much, Richard. I want to see what’s going on.”

Does he ever wish he’d started like Townshend or Davies, a beat group leader instead of a crooner?

“Well, it would’ve been easier. Yeah. Credibility all down the line, on a lot of levels. Now I think I’m better off.” Though it doesn’t sound as if you made as much money as them.

“No. The money escaped me. It’s not bothered me a whole lot, just sometimes. I deserved it, anyway. The CBS thing went wrong and I kept on going with it when I should’ve just walked out.”

He looks back again, unprompted, at a career that might have been a mere cabaret turn.

“People wanted to sign you as a singer. The slothfulness and… you see, I can’t tell you what a fight it was to make those first records. Even though they were charting. It was like those people at Philips were just waiting to say, no more of this shit! I went to CBS and the bad fate started - they said first I could do my own songs, but they changed their minds and it was tawdry and I gave up there… I thought I’d get some kicks with the guys at GTO, sure, why not? And then the kicks didn’t work out..

“So I went to Virgin and got a hassle because I didn’t bring an album in in two months! That slowed me up. I just had to pull myself together.”

What kind of recognition does he want now?

“It’s a cliché, but in the end you have to work for yourself. It’s come to me like that. It’s everything I’ve been telling you.

This is the only way I can do it now, the only way I can make records. What kind of recognition I’ll get, I have no idea.

“I’m just gonna check this out. I have a totally different record I want to do now because I discovered all the new things I can use in the studio now. But I have to wait. This is a waiting game.”

Is there a particularly valuable thing his work can do for other people?

“Not more than a good record by anyone else can. Sometimes you think, maybe nobody’s seen it this way before, and then… Maybe a good Lionel Richie or Michael Jackson record is as important. If they work-a record by John Coltrane or Michael Jackson can become the same thing. The finality of everything, if it’s resonating in the same way, it’s the same thing.

“But I want it to be placed in the right setting,” he adds, his voice as languidly rich as his singing. “The best analogue is film: Syberberg works to evoke a seriousness, only realeasing a film to certain cinemas and so on. As far as joy goes, though, there’s no reason why you can’t go see Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and let it put you on the deck.”

I know what he means. I like movies that make me laugh, but I return mostly to a deeper seam, a Godard or a Bergman. I like ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’, say, but it’s ‘Scott 4 ‘- and now ‘Climate Of Hunter’ - which renews one.

NINETY MINUTES with Scott Walker allowed no penetration of the certain mystery that succours his work, and it’s something I’m glad of. This deeply private man might not be a Godlike genius, but he is as equidistant from being a pop artisan grafting for hits. It might always deny him the status he once had; it might sustain a unique insight. Either way, he embodies a particular aloneness.

“There’s a lot of things I’d like to do still.”

Scott listens for a moment to the chatter of drinkers and darts players.

“Or I could be good at just doing nothing.”