Interview

The Wire, May 2006
by Rob Young

A voice - recognisably his voice, though at a considerably more relaxed pitch than usual - speaks from beneath the sunken brim of a navy blue baseball cap. “Of course,” the voice is saying, “I always surprise myself with the music, or the lyrics. You hear that from writers all the time, especially novelists. They’ll say, ‘God, I don’t know how this happened, how I did it.’ And I have that all the time. But you have to wait for that - that’s what takes the time. You gotta wait till the next piece fits. And it requires a lot of patience and frustration. If you rush it, it always sounds wrong. It never rings true.” The head lifts and yes, this lean, denim clad figure sitting on an armchair in his manager’s West London townhouse must be Scott Walker the mouth still glints with its impossible youth, the eyes, though guarded and darkened under the brim, are still glinting.

And so is the voice, that precious instrument newly removed from its velvet-lined case, where it is stored in the lengthy intervals between Walker’s record releases. It was last auditioned (briefly) on David Arnold’s Gitane-wreathed jazz song “Only Myself To Blame”, from the soundtrack to the James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough (1999), but the last ‘proper’ Walker release was Tilt (1995), whose shocks are still being absorbed after 11 years. Now that he’s embarked on The Drift, it’s clear Tilt’s unprecedented assault on the senses not to mention its challenge to the intellect - was no one-off. In fact, far from stepping back from Tilt’s precipice, The Drift has floated even further out, yanked the dynamic noose tighter. The Drift has intensified Tilt’s blocks of orchestral texture and noise, with massed string parts flapping through the tracks like a giant manta ray, or moaning like some giant theatrical wind machine; scabrous electric guitar counterpoints; spun radio dials; a newsreader; flickering electronic embers (including a sample from Mego group Fuckhead); an incredible array of percussion and sound effects such as fateful hammerings on a massive wooden crate, a rumbling that represents a gargantuan pea rolled under thimbles, and fleshy thuds thumped from a whole side of pork.

Now aged 63, he’s well aware of the common tendency to judge his recent work at best eccentric, at worst, insane. “To me, I hear it as just normal, you know,” he chuckles. “I guess I’ve been working that way for so long, it’s become a part of how I see or hear things. The problem with me is that I’m an either/or man. My imagination either gets very big, or it ends with a whimper, like all the end songs on all my records. Somewhere in between always sounds too normal to me.” But, adds the man whose fascination with English culture began while growing up in California, as a fan of Ealing comedy actors such as Terry-Thomas and Margaret Rutherford, “The album is quite funny, because if you don’t have that, the art is not balanced.

Drift: Passive travel with the current, abandonment to external influences. Walker handles his own production, aided by Peter Walsh, who has been at his right hand since 1984’s Climate Of Hunter. They are proud of their entirely analogue recording, which opens up a massive, broad sound stage upon which Commander Walker marshalls his forces. “I actually see the words as soldiers in the field - that’s my thing. So I can move them around, they have a certain space. After I’ve done that for a while, it starts to come to me, what each [lyric] needs. It’s a very abstract way to talk about it, but it’s how I see it.”

Scrawled from the poisoned inkwells that gave us TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, or Paul Celan’s lifelong wrestle with the ghosts of the Holocaust, Walker’s lyrics are guaranteed to perplex, confound and intrigue with each reading. It helps to view his songs as micro-dramas, with the narrative voice peopling several characters, wandering between tableaux, adopting multiple viewpoints and spanning geographies, ideologies and even archaeological time with deft, daring paces. His is The Waste Land spied through the lens of CNN or Al-Jazeera; the news is read by Samuel Beckett. Like Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, The Drift is a dust-hole of allusions, quotations from epic poetry and popular song, ironic asides, dialogues between past and present, East and West, civilisation and barbarity, disease and immunity, ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, Christianity and Islam, gnosis and kabbala - it even leaps between species. “Buzzers”, for example, opens on a fictionalised grisly, murderous incident in the recent Balkan wars, but flips into a spectral evocation of natural selection lengthening the face of the horse, allowing the animal to remain alert while grazing. “It’s essentially a plea for love, really,” Walker elaborates. “The horses’ faces lengthen, so it’s more about longing for the time a spiritual face can stay with us… So it isn’t about the lengthening in that sense, it’s about lengthening of time, that you can hold that. Most of my stuff is about frustration,” he explains, with a nervous clapping of the hands, “of being unable to hold on to a spiritual moment, always losing it. You just get glimpses of it, and so you have to separately give an idea of it, and that’s all you can do. And it’s the frustration of not understanding what it is. So that’s how it relates - they lengthen, why can’t I have this face lengthen for me?”

People will do it, but it’s easy (and lazy) to cherrypick passages as evidence of incomprehensibility (suck on these: “… scaling/comes scaling/comes red is/ patchy snows/the silver an/other night/gotta pull/muffle bye,” from “Psoriatic”; or “From the/voice/flooded/ semen/clotting/to/paste/Can’t/swallow it/then/bury it/And the/jigger/raps pits,” from “Cue”). These mini librettos need more than a single sitting to assimilate, as each one often fosters two or three distinct poetic images, superimposed or mirrored.

“That’s the idea of the album,” Walker explains, “that it starts with something we know - a political issue and then it drifts into another world, and into something else. All kinds of disparate elements then take place.

“All the time is taken writing the words, which will inform the rest of it. Nothing is extraneous, everything is considered - that’s why it takes so long. Because you have the lyric there and you think, Oh God, there it is, now what… What can I come up with [musically] to really bring it out? And that’s the time consuming stuff.

The Drift’s Vaughan Oliver-designed sleeve is almost black: in an advanced state of decomposition, or it’s tarred and scorched – torched, perhaps, as if to eradicate all traces of its passing. As on Tilt, he prints his lyrics in brilliant white shining out of black, like the illuminated wall-script at Belshazzar’s feast. Those ee cummings-like willow tears of text dripping or weeping down the page are all minutely plotted by Walker himself – it’s no design conceit; in fact on the afternoon I meet him, he’s tutting over various errors he has found in the latest draft of the layout.

These fragments he has shored against his ruins. Because Walker, who lives in Chiswick, West London, pops his head above the parapet so infrequently, the word ‘recluse’ is routinely rolled out. He clearly values his privacy – who wouldn’t, after nearly perishing in a car upturned by hysterical fans? - but in person he’s affable and gracious, his answers frequently accompanied by non-dysfunctional laughter. He’s encountered misunderstanding so many times in his five decade career, that he’s learnt to deal with 

In any case, low-key he may have been, but unemployed he wasn’t. Soundtracking Leos Carax’s Pola X lasted two years just before the end of the millennium, as Walker shuttled back and forth to Paris to attend the shooting. The film came out in 2000, the same year that, after much deliberation, he took up an invitation to curate London’s Meltdown Festival (“In the end it was fantastic, like having the best birthday you ever had”); he wrote two songs for German singer Ute Lemper, the very Drift-like “Scope J” and “Lullaby (by-by-by)”; and he was conscripted as producer to rescue Pulp’s valedictory album We Love Life in 2001. “They’re a band that has tons of character, but their production was very digital, very sterile. I thought, I’m going to give them a better sounding recording than they’ve ever had.” Walker has remained close friends with Jarvis Cocker ever since, even borrowing his baritone guitar for use on The Drift. Aside from work, there were “a couple of deaths in the family and stuff like that. And then the record company [Fontana] changed regimes about five times, some were favourable some weren’t, it was like, he loves me, he loves me not.”

Let the endgames begin…

A heap of matter driven together, as snow. Could it be that, every decade or so, Scott Walker’s inspirational demons come knocking at his head, a spooky jigger rapping on his door, out between midnight? Inspiration for The Drift appears to have begun with a BAM BAM BAM BAM: the fateful knocking of a “flugleman” that slams through “Cue”, which was the first piece of music that visited Walker a couple of years after Tilt. “That one was maybe the toughest song I ever wrote. It really is a song that is so odd,” he himself admits, “so strange in all the turns it takes, that I’m kind of loath to deconstruct that, because why did I bother to construct it in the first place? It’s hard enough…” The song is ripe with infection (“Deep as a virus”, “Herpes to clit”); nowhere on the planet is immune (“What do Seoul/Sudan have in common/Both start with an S”); infestation is ordained (“The birth of a vermin Holy Ghost”). “At the beginning it was rather a meditation on all these plagues that are coming that we have no answer for. We put it out of our minds. But they are coming, and they’re there. It started out that way, and it became something else, as with all my songs, it all comes back to the self in some way - not the ego self, but the other self.” The flugleman appears halfway through (a trumpet heralds his arrival), scything through “Dormant wards and nurseries… In the lung smeared slides and corridors”, and at his pass, the lamentations of the dying “the wah-wahs” - are beaten to death with a breeze block. Striving to achieve that sound the final nails in the casket - it was decided to build a ‘big box’ in the studio. “I know pretty much everything that can be used in percussion,” claims Walker, a veteran of countless full orchestra calls on his late 60s albums onwards, when he worked with producer John Franz and arrangers Wally Stott and Reg Guest. “And I couldn’t hear in my head anything that was gonna create that noise.” Pete Walsh’s brother in law, a carpenter, was given specifications to build the thing: “It’s a five by five foot box, and we put it on cinder blocks, and then [percussionist] Alasdair Malloy eventually began beating it with a big cinder block, so we got that real sound… that’s the sound, that’s what the sound would be. Because with all my things, they take on nightmare proportions, so everything’s out of proportion. It’s usually very big, so it’s like a dream, so this had to fall in line with that.”

The box came in handy on “Psoriatic”, which opens with the image of a “thimble-rigger” - the confidence trickster who “slyly rolls the pea” beneath one of three mixed-up thimbles - and the game is represented by a gigantic, ominous rumbling, as if the pea were thundering around in your head. “We drilled a hole in the top of the box,” continues Walker, “and we stuck a mic in the middle, and got these big dustbins and moved them around. And of course the pea became a giant bowling ball that was slowed down.”

The box has sadly been dismantled. “I suggested that my brother in law put it on eBay,” says Walsh, “but we couldn’t get it out through the door.”

The object aimed at: the meaning of words. (‘You get my drift?’…) These songs find Walker roaming labyrinths with nary a bran-trail laid down for the listener to follow. But, for The Wire, he provides several clues. His superimposed imagery is best illustrated on “Jesse”, titled after Jesse Garon Presley, the real-life twin brother of Elvis, who was stillborn. At the start of the song, the opening strums and drumbeats of “Jailhouse Rock” are deconstructed down to two slow burning guitar notes and Walker’s whispered “Pow, pow”. Pete Walsh remembers the mixing stage: “I said, ‘Let me pan those “pow, pow”s left and right.’ And he goes, ‘That’s brilliant, how did you think of that?’ And I go, ‘I dunno, it kind of sounds like they should be left and right.’ And we were mixing on these huge monitors, about 12 foot tall, and it was at that point that he told me what it was. And I went, you’re joking!” The whispered blows, prefaced by a throbbing streak of bass drone like a jet engine screaming across the sky, are intended to mimic the strikes on the Twin Towers. “I actually wrote this about a month after it happened,” says Walker, “and it came together pretty quickly, so obviously it had a pretty dramatic effect on me. The hubris of the Twin Towers - that’s just American muscle. Those skyscrapers - that’s just pumping yourself up. So I was looking for something that didn’t have any reflexive quality - in a sense it came down to Elvis’s dead twin brother - we’ve never seen him, something he imagines, but he can’t really have it. It’s once again a frustration. Then it moves into the other American image, the prairie, so you have a horizontal and then a vertical image going on as well. And finally it zeroes back in to the existential moment - the self- for the very end of it.

“As for what transpired after [11 September 2001], I mean, I just couldn’t believe what was going on. I never actually believed it, even the night before, when they said they were going to do Iraq. I thought, well, Saddam will stand down, and this is a big bluff - and then they did it, and everybody just watched.”

“Cossacks Are”, which launches the album in a flurry of drummed hoofbeats across the Steppes, samples quotes from newspaper cultural reviews, such as “‘A noble debut tackling vertiginous demands””. (Cheekily, and self-deprecatingly, he’s also included the lines “You could easily picture this in the current top ten””.)

“They’re cribbed from reviews - no, they’re not reviews of me! Most of them are backhanded compliments” - that point is reinforced by the use of backwards guitar and vocal reverse echo. “There’s also a quote from George Bush in the middle. I remember when Chirac was over in America recently, somebody asked in the press conference, ‘Are you going to take him out to your ranch, Mr President?’ And Bush said, ‘Well, I’m looking for a good cowboy,’ and I thought I’ll put that in, ‘cause that’s a real backhanded compliment. Chirac took it that way, too.”

“Clara (Benito’s Dream)” is a double portrait of Mussolini and Claretta Petacci, his lover at the time of his summary execution, who insisted on dying with him. Walker recalls seeing footage of their strung-up corpses (evoked by Malloy’s ‘meat punching’) on newsreel when he was a small boy. “I had nightmares about it for quite a while after. Part of the reason for completing “Clara” was because we have all this fascism in the air now, coming from all kinds of directions. I’m never a fan of out-and-out protest songs - someone preaching at me and strumming - so my idea is to sneak up on it. It’s a love story and it’s a very interesting relationship - she was besotted by him, and had posters of him in her room and was a real fan. But she didn’t need to die with him. In a way it’s funny, but it’s kind of moving. So I tried… [the song is] really his dream that he’s having about it all, and then it ends with me, or you, or anyone else talking at the end.”

“The Escape” is apparently set in Cartoonland - it opens with a bitter simulacrum of the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes slide guitar, mentions “foreshortened angels hunting me down”, and ends with someone (Walker himself?) hissing “What’s up, Doc?” in a demonic Donald Duck voice. But this Cartoonland is mapped onto the Holy Land, with its “Rabbi craters” and its kabbalistic terminology (“Serifot” and “kelippot” - look ‘em up). “It had to do with the secretive society business, and conspiracy theory, I think I was trying to match those two together,” is all he’ll say on the subject. It’s dedicated to “Mr K”, who, Walker reveals, is the composer György Kurtág - the song borrows one of his chord sequences. “But then I discovered he took it from Charles Ives’s Unanswered Question.”

“Hand Me Ups” enters the psyche of a conflicted television ‘personality’. “He takes it too far, he’s jealous of his children. And he wants to be the child himself, and a celebrity. I wrote it during the first Big Brother, one of those awful things. He’ll stop at nothing, including sacrificing his children on whatever altar, because they steal his youth and the focus of his attention, preventing him from living his dreams. That’s why you hear the children’s screams. And there’s some quotes in there from The Iliad. So… there we are.”

The track most likely to bring accusations of mislaid marbles is “Jolson And Jones”, with its apparently random refrain “I’LL PUNCH A DONKEY IN THE STREETS OF GALWAY!”, as well as the violent braying of that unfortunate ass. After some persuasion, Walker confides that the lines “The fair señorita don’t seem to care” and “In her voice there’s a flaw” are lifted from “Donkey Serenade”, a 1930s popular song by Allan Jones, later made famous by Perry Como. “Allan Jones was Jack Jones’s father. Did you ever see Night At The Opera, by the Marx Brothers? He’s the romantic tenor in there.” These sampled lines become conflated with Al Jolson’s “Sonny Boy”, who may not be a boy at all, and the tussle between these songs mimics an actual confrontation on the streets. But this song seems like the closest Walker will come to a hoedown. (Another vintage popular ditty, Bob Carleton’s “Ja-Da” (1918), is quoted in two other Drift songs; one of many tunes sent to raise the morale of front line troops in the trenches.)

The Drift rolls inexorably towards death, or assisted suicide. Walker, alone with guitar on “A Lover Loves”, charcoals the deathbed scene “Corneas misted, colour high”; the other side beckons “Psst psst” from the dark; a parade - a dodo, Bambi, the Kaiser, Beuys, Red Rosa (Luxemburg?), Tintin - dances before expiring eyes. “All my albums tend to end with whimpers - you were talking about Eliot earlier. Yeah, all the people named in there either don’t exist, or they’re dead, and if they are dead, they don’t exist any more, in reality.” The logic of bones is impeccable.

“When you go into a Scott record, you know that it’s not a short EasyJet hop to Paris, it’s a couple of times round the world.” Pete Walsh ought to know: he has co-produced the last three Walker albums, beginning with 1984’s Climate Of Hunter, recently remastered by Virgin. At the time Walsh was “24, and very much an 80s wonder kid” who had just produced the brittle New Gold Dream for Simple Minds. “The first time I worked with him, he put a picture of a load of scribbles drawn in pencil - on the console; I think it was a nightmare!” The soundworlds of Tilt and The Drift are the result of a dialogue between orchestral textures and the collective contribution of Walker’s core group: Brian Gascoigne (keyboards, who’s been with him since Climate), Hugh Burns (guitar), Alasdair Malloy (percussion), John Giblin (bass) and lan Thomas (drums), with occasional exotic instruments supplied by Andrew Cronshaw.

“They play it beautifully,” beams Walker, “and sometimes they’ll add something wonderful as well. They’re used to all the stuff that’s going on in there, they’re not surprised. We could run a herd of cattle through there and nobody would blink.”

“The starting point has been different on each one,” says Pete Walsh. “With Climate, the first time I actually heard anything was when I had five musicians sitting in front of me, and the arranger walked in with the music, and it was ‘1-2-3-4’ and off we go. The Drift differed quite a lot in its starting approach. A few years ago Scott bought a programmable keyboard, and he has beavered away for the last, I don’t know how many years, and he has got all these songs inside his synth. So the starting point for The Drift was, OK, press a button and then it all comes out. It was a lot more of a focused plan than he’s had before. Often Scott would have done the first half of the song, and then left the second half, and expect the guys to build on it. And then we just set about making it as dynamic and real as possible.”

“One of the prerequisites of working on one of my records,” says Walker, “is that everybody’s got to have a sense of humour. ‘Cause, you know, we would all die if we didn’t, in that situation. I’ve always said I don’t want a lot of guys in black, brooding around the studio noodling on things.”

“You don’t really want anybody showing off,” Walsh adds, “you don’t want to hear the person behind the instrument. The ego - you don’t want it to be characterised.”

The group sound is sharply set against the orchestral blocks of noise, which were captured on one fraught, time-tied day at Air Studios. “There isn’t one splice on the album,” reveals Walsh. “The whole thing is analogue, and it’s on tape, so it is done in one pass. They were changing parts on the day, actually rewriting the thing in the studio with 40 musicians sitting there waiting to play. Scott wouldn’t actually pen out the orchestral arrangements, but those clusters of notes are worked on and worked on and worked on. He gave [arrangers] Philip Sheppard and Mark Warman freedom of expression: ‘Here are the notes, but you can do a lot more. You tell them how to play it, let’s create something special.’ So the guys would go away, and get the arrangements down, and then come in and explain what they’d done.

“The string section was real fun to do,” he continues, “but when you’ve got that many musicians to pay at the end of it, and it’s well known that they will actually stop half way through a take if it goes past the clock, it’s really nail biting.” There are inevitably challenging aspects of working on Walker’s material, he admits. “Setting the tempos of the songs is a master task. You’re not hearing the vocal at the time while you’re recording, so you’ve got these long passages, and the tempos are shifting up and down within those passages.

“There is an aura around Scott, and a lot of people get frightened or embarrassed by that. But he is in fact an incredibly funny guy and has some very funny takes on life… he loves his Wimbledon, he does some running, and he’s always on his pushbike - when it’s not being stolen! There’s a little bit of tongue in cheek with the meat - we’ve asked Alasdair to do so many ridiculous things over the years…”

In his last Wire interview, in May 1995 (issue 135), Walker was called an ‘underachiever’, an insult which would never be applied to a novelist or film director, say Thomas Pynchon or Alejandro Jodorowsky. Since his retirement from public life in the mid-70s (“that hiatus I had, you know, where I became the great leper”), he has slowly gained the perspective, and the distance from his stardom, to contemplate how rock might be packed with a far richer amount of data than is expected of it. The career path has reversed: instead of the common fate of his generation of pop idols - initial flare followed by long, slow burn out - Walker’s early chapters with The Walker Brothers, the TV show, the sublime four solo albums, plus showband and Brel/Brechtian interludes - he had signed off these chapters before reaching 30. The seeds of where he’s at now can be heard in some of his early music. He’s made a signature of singing over luminous, shimmering string drones running continuously under the song: follow that particular line from “It’s Raining Today” on Scott 3, through “The Electrician” on Nite Flights, “Rawhide” on Climate Of Hunter, “Patriot” on Tilt, to “Jesse” on The Drift. And is it far fetched to imagine that his 21st century drift begins in pop’s biggest eclipse: the melancholic darkness that spreads when “the sun ain’t gonna shine any more”?

Pop music is never judged, these days, by the kind of standards he sets for himself, and his work is better compared with the kind of existential and experimental art, literature and film that beckoned him to live in Europe in the first place, 40 years ago (he’s only visited America a total of three months since the mid-60s, he tells me). Tarkovsky’s long takes echo the single-pass recording technique used on The Drift; the splintered narratives of Godard and Bergman, especially Persona, are analogous to the montage effects in Walker’s own lyrics. Béla Tarr’s The Werckmeister Harmonies, with its trudging tempo and its bizarrely incongruous giant whale deposited in the main street of a rural East European village, demands a similar degree of mental receptiveness as Walker’s latest records. (As a dedicated moviegoer, he’s familiar with the film). Significantly, he uses a visual tag when he says of his own progress, “We’re getting better and better at getting this picture together, the picture of what this is.”

He lets slip that he has “an excellent idea for an album that I could probably gig with, and I just have to find a way to do it with about five people”. But for now, the voice has been laid back in its case. How does he look after it, in the gaps between albums? “Well, I just don’t use it - I look after it great!” he giggles. “I only start singing maybe a couple of months before I start [a new record]. I’ll sing the blues or something. I’m not a trained singer, so I get it in shape by instinct. But singing is a great terror for me anyway, so it’s something that I’ve never wholly looked forward to. When I’m home, I’m just singing for myself, it’s OK, it’s relaxing sometimes. But if I’m actually going to do it, especially for things like this, it’s very worrying, it really gets on my nerves. But I have to capture that as well, because that’s part of what it is.

“It seems such an incredible thing when the singing comes out of your mouth, but if you’re doing paragraphs or sentences or whatever, you have to catch the phrasing right, it has to sound really right, and real. And I’m just afraid I’m never gonna get it. And in my mind I never do.

“I never listen to my records once I’ve made them,” he reminds me, before departing. “I spent years writing it, producing it, arranging it and singing on it… I never want to see it again, basically. I’ll let someone else live with it for ten years.” The stop button is pressed, and in an instant he’s on his feet, shaking my hand, and BAM - the room is deserted.