Interview

BBC 6 Music - Jarvis Cockers Sunday Service, 23rd July 2017
Excerpts of an interview with Jarvis Cocker

Jarvis Cocker: Before this interview started, we were talking about as I’ve been researching the songs, some of the lyrics online aren’t strictly correct.

Scott Walker: Exactly, because there’s all kinds of versions you can find. But I found a couple of mistakes because I mentioned in the song ‘Boy Child’, because I got a very good take of that, and that was done live, because the one word I left it there was the word ‘stays’, which should have been ‘strays’. Then there’s another song. I think it’s a song called ‘Duchess’ that I was scat singing a bit of that. So I would say ‘when you’re coming across’ the actual line was ‘as you come across’ and it didn’t happen often, but like I said, if I got a good take for the whole thing, I’d keep it.

JC: You mentioned, scat there, that’s something that, on ‘Scott 4’, there’s three songs that you end in a scat

SW: Scatting. Yeah.

JC: Which has always, intrigued me.

SW: Well, it’s just, there was kind of a space there to do it, you know, and I thought, we’ll fill it up. You know, with my jazz thing coming out.

JC: Is that you playing the bass? That’s got a very good bass line that. 

SW: No, no, I can’t remember who did it. No, I can’t remember. I’m sorry. 

JC: No, it’s okay. So that’s a great bass on that. 

SW: That would have been a very fine bass player anyway. 

JC: But we’ve got this, there’s a line in there, We’ve got: 

“the crowds just gathered, their faces turned away, and they queue all day like dragons of disgust.”

Which, that’s a favorite phrase of mine. ‘Dragons of disgust.’ I’d like to see what they look like. But this is from the internet now. So then the next line.

“All the women whispering, wondering just what these young hotheads want of us.”

And then here it says:

“And ‘entrez vie’ he cries.”

But I, as I hear it

SW: V, yeah Andrei V

JC: That’s what I think. Yeah, it sounds like a name. 

SW: Yeah it is, it’s Andrei Voznesensky. It’s meant to be Andrei Voznesensky. And so he was a Russian poet at that time.

JC: Right. 

SW: So yeah, that’s what that meant. Did you get that off the internet?

JC: Yeah.

SW: Okay. It’s a nice word, anyway, ‘entrez vie’.

JC: Maybe that’s what we’re doing at the moment.

SW: Maybe that’s what I should have sung, you know.

JC: So tell me a bit about Andrei V. I’ve not heard of him.

SW: Oh, no, this time…

“By the time the fourth album rolled around, I was interested in all things Russian. In fact, I went on my own to Russia.”

And there’s a fabulous story which I won’t go into now because it goes on for about an hour. Every time I tell it to the people, they go, oh my God, so I’ll just leave that hanging. But, oh yeah, so all things Russian. So I was reading like, so Solzhenitsyn had been published there. So I was reading a lot of that. I was reading, all the way up the Yevtushenko, listening to a lot of Russian music, Shostakovich, etc… you know, although it’s not reflected in the record. And, so that and a lot of Russian history and that’s just part of that song.

JC: You’ve intrigued me now with your Russian story.

SW: I’ll tell you some other time when we’re off air.

JC: It’s incriminating?

SW: Yeah

JC: The poem Foggy Street by Andrei Voznesensky. By now, you know, I’m no good at pronouncing things as read by the person who translated it from Russian into English, Richard Wilbur. That’s taken from an album, but we got from the BBC. Archives ‘Anti Worlds’, the poetry of Andrei Voznesensky, the Andrei V mentioned in the lyrics to ‘The Old Man’s Back Again’. And in fact, this collection of poems, Anti Worlds, also gets mentioned in the lyrics of that as well. But I also wanted to go in and talk to Scott about other influences on his work. ‘The Seventh Seal’ basically kind of tells the story of the Bergman film. Is Bergman like an important filmmaker for you?

SW: Yeah. Before I came here, I’d seen lots of Bergman films, and I ran across it accidentally. I used to go to a film theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. I can’t remember the name again, but they used to show, late night movies, you know, like stacks of them, you know? And you go and you sit there practically all night. And late night ‘The Virgin Spring’ came on, and so on, ‘The Virgin Spring’. And it was it was dubbed. And I’d never seen anything like it, you know. And I was about 16 or something like that. So from then on it kind of took off. I started going to the art houses and watching his films.

JC: And what was it that kind of grabbed you about that?

SW: Well, I like the, photography first of all, it’s fantastic. And he claims that he was copying Kurosawa, and you can see a lot of that there, you know? And, so I was fascinated by that. And, just the time that everyone was allowed to do things, you know, in European films, you know. But even in Hollywood, in those days, things were being cut pretty much in the atmosphere of the time. I like those.

JC: you’re listening to a Scott Walker special edition of the Sunday Service today. The next thing I talked to Scott about was the arranger of that track.

You talked about Wally Stott, one of the arrangers on your record. And being able to work with these people, I guess, who could tell you how to get sounds, I wonder how that process worked.

SW: Yes. Well, I was bringing all kinds of things in as examples for him. You know, I remember bringing in for ‘Boy Child’ the ‘gon gon gon gon gon gon’ thing at the beginning, that cimbalom thing that goes on. I’d had that all written out and I brought it in, and I know I’d been listening to Bartok and. But of course, Bartok took that from folk music, so he’d taken that from, you know, from another source. So that’s how that particular song had started.

JC: But would you sometimes go to them with an idea of, of a mood or something, and then they would tell you how you could achieve that with, with the instruments, you know, within the orchestra.

SW: Yeah, of course. Or they’d simply do it, you know, and I turn up and then I’d see how it was done. Like I said, there were countless examples of, I mean… actually… Wally and I just, we didn’t get on that well really, you know. I got on a lot better with Peter Knight and I think Wally considered me to be a bit of an upstart, you know, because I was always pushing. I was always… well… I was quite demanding and he was used to coming in and doing sort of, Harry Secombe records, You know. John would say ‘take this away’ and he’d go away, do the arranging and come in. He was not used to having people interfere with the with the process.

JC: I wonder whether in some ways that was nice for him, that you were actually taking an interest in it.

SW: Well, it was, but I think the conflict worked in our favor because, he… to my knowledge, he’d never done better arrangements than he did for me. You know, so I think the conflict kind of helped. There were a lot of difficult things going on in his life anyway. You know, he eventually would transition, and things like that were happening, so perhaps I wasn’t as understanding as I might have been. But anyway, we were getting results and he… it’s funny because when we did the first record with the Brel stuff, he was very prudish about the language. You know, he was very… ‘I really don’t know if I want my name on the record’ because it’s, you know, he’s saying this, you know, it was… he was very… So finally, he decided, ‘well, I will put have name on it.’ So we put the album out and the album went to number one, of course, the records we did together after that he was glad to have his name on.