Mojo, May 1995
by Jim Irwin

Scott Walker: “That Francis Bacon, In-The-Face Whoops Factor…”

TWENTY-TWO YEAR OLD Noel Scott Engel was on the run from Uncle Sam. He was fleeing from a country that would never connect with his mordant soul. He was not the hail-fellow jock type that sunny California seemed to require. He was stirred by Albert Camus and Ingmar Bergman and his head was full of European romance. He felt alien in his homeland at the best of times, but now it was at war in Vietnam and pretty soon Uncle Sam would be drafting his meek, existentialist ass. He was afraid. And, as his plane touched down in England one freezing February morning in 1965, he couldn’t know that he was running from one unasked-for terror into another. He was about to become very, very famous.

HE IS POP’S OWN Salinger. A strikingly handsome and talented young man who could have taken everything the ‘60s had to offer, but who jilted fame. Nowadays he’s only famous for being absent. Salman Rushdie is seen out and about more often. Howard Hughes cuts more albums. People speak of him in quizzical, often concerned tones. He is revered and adored for his integrity, his sensual, serious singing voice and his artful and fascinating body of work.

He is Scott Walker. This is the first British interview he has consented to in 11 years and it’s a terrific temptation to turn up in a comedy wig, pump his hand violently – electric shock buzzer concealed in one’s palm – and bellow “’Scuse the warts, Sunshine! Mind if I fart!?”

After days spent filling my head with his legend – tales of an enigmatic recluse, an eccentric, a painfully shy man who shuns sunlight –it’s hard not to succumb to nervous laughter. And, because the interview has been rescheduled several times, I’ve started to wonder if it’s actually going to happen. In the ‘60s, Scott Walker developed a reputation for turning up hours late for interviews or gigs, if at all. In the ‘70s he was interviewed on only a dozen occasions. He hasn’t stepped onto a stage since a toe-curling Birmingham cabaret date by the revived Walker Brothers in 1978.

He signed to Virgin in 1979, but it was five years before he delivered Climate Of Hunter, his first and only album for the label, warmly received by critics but doomed to sell poorly. Since then he has seldom been glimpsed, his last appearance being a tiny cameo in a TV ad for Britvic fruit juice. It was assumed that Scott had retired from music forever, especially when word spread that he’d enrolled at a South London art college.

But in June 1993 a single, ‘Man From Reno’, appears on the Fontana label in France. Scott had turned up unexpectedly at the London office of Fontana head Dave Bates, and expressed his desire to record again. Bates, who had sanctioned the release of several successful Scott and Walker Brother reissues in the ‘80s, is more than happy to welcome him back to Phonogram. The contract stipulates that Scott has total freedom and Bates will not hear anything until the album is finished.

With new music on the way, Virgin Books commission a biography from fans Mike Watkinson and Pete Anderson. Scott Walker: A Deep Shade Of Blue appears early in 1994.

Still no album. Seasoned Walker-watchers anticipate a wait even lengthier than that preceding Climate Of Hunter. But suddenly, Scott Walker’s new album is ready. Entitled Tilt, it is to be previewed before a small, invited audience at the Royal College Of Art on Thursday March 16. The playback goes ahead. Scott Walker does not attend.

A FEW DAYS LATER, I’m shown into a vast sitting room in his manager’s four-storey house in Holland Park. White wooden shutters cover most of the main window and keep out the bright late-afternoon sunshine.

Someone enters.

“Hello.”

The soft voice belongs to a tall, trim man in blue jeans and baseball boots. He’s wearing a roomy blue-green bomber jacket over a navy blue shirt. Graduated pilot shades cover his eyes. His hair is light brown – not that much thinner than it once was – and worn short.

Scott Walker. He does not look 52.

His handshake is firm, his manner poised. He tells me he’s just been having his picture taken and he hates that. Interviews, we’ve heard, are where Scott Walker suffers for his art.

And art it is. Tilt is a wilfully abstract record. Bewildered faces at the playback tell the tale. At first it sounds like there are no songs at all. Your next reaction is that it’s mad but adventurous, a record to be greatly admired, if not enjoyed. Scott’s voice is surprising too, it has moved up the scale, away from his sonorous baritone into a crestfallen tenor.

Further plays at home and access to the strange lyrics quickly undermined those first impressions. Tilt is a cantata, vocally operatic and sonically dramatic. A wild rattling wall of high snare drums dominate one track, ‘The Cockfighter’. On another, ‘Manhattan’, a great obelisk of church organ bursts through the arrangement. Throughout another piece, ‘Bouncer See Bouncer…’, there’s the chatter of locusts. Those expecting stately balladry will be disillusioned; those anticipating a quantum leap from Nite Flights and Climate Of Hunter will be thrilled. Anyone who hears Tilt will be fascinated that someone has made such a record.

It seems like a very painterly recording. Almost a visual piece of music.

“I wonder if the two can be married,” Scott says, settling in a huge rococo armchair. “I know that people are saying that the divisions are being blurred today. My records have always been visual, though, tied up with cinema or something. Maybe it was going through my mind in that way I certainly thought about it more, having worked in conceptual art.”

The return to art was for three years of a four-year course at Byam Shaw, a private college in South London.

“I just wanted to groove up on drawing and painting and to be around people who were involved in that.”

He insists that he didn’t have a solid reason to record again, but just thought, Hell why not? There was no material ready when he signed to Fontana so he spent two years pondering what sort of record to make. He is not, he claims, the kind of person who has to write. “I feel the need to, but I restrain myself. Because I know better, basically.”

ALL THE WALKER BROTHERS had to do to become famous in Britain was show up. Imagine a trio of tall, rail-thin, pretty American boys with identical Brian Jones hairstyles and a lush, swoony, Spectorish new single in their luggage. It would go over big even today; in 1965 it was dynamite.

Gary Leeds, the newest Walker Brother, understood that. He’d already toured Britain, drumming for PJ Proby, a wayward young American unknown at home who’d caused a sensation in the UK. It was Gary who told guitarist and lead singer John Maus (pronounced Moss) and bass player/backing vocalist Scott Engel, that the UK was easy prey and urged that they go there immediately.

By this time, The Walker Brothers were attracting a crowd to Gazzari’s, a club on Sunset Strip. They’d been signed to Mercury by famed A&R man Nik Venet (who’d also discovered The Beach Boys), cut two singles (‘Pretty Girls Everywhere’ and ‘Love Her’), shot an appearance in a particularly cheesy beach movie (Beach Ball), and landed a residency on Jack Good’s Shindig TV show. Scott, although fascinated by Europe, took some persuading by Gary’s idea. John was concerned that the proposed trip would harm their local success. But the hot breath of the draft board and a $10,000 loan from Gary’s dad clinched it. The Walker Brothers left America on February 17, 1965. Only John would ever live there again.

A couple of weeks later, The Walker Brothers swanned into the offices of the Melody Maker wearing “king-size Beatle haircuts and dark glasses”, buttonholed staff-writer Chris Welch and used Gary’s PJ Proby connection to get his attention. Welch, impressed by the bright, articulate and attractive ‘brothers’, wrote a small story about their visit for the issue of March 13. (The article also noted that they’d just appeared on Ready Steady Go!) Presumably someone had alerted Philips, the British arm of Mercury, that the boys were in town and ready to promote their singles But after a couple of months of intensive schmoozing, The Walker Brothers were nothing but cold, fed up with British food and desperately homesick. Then Gary located hot management team Maurice King and Barry Clayman and pestered them until they signed the band. By September, The Walker Brothers’ third single was at Number 1.

SCOTT WALKER, pop singer, was born by accident during the session at RCA Studios, L.A., when Jack Nitzsche cut ‘Love Her’. Nik Venet had hired Nitzsche to turn the former Everly Brothers B-side –written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill – into the Walkers’ second A-side. Nitzsche, famous for his arrangements on Phil Spector’s hits, conceived a cavernous, Righteous Brothers feel. Unfortunately, John’s gritty voice didn’t suit it. So Nitzsche turned to bassist Scott, who had spent the day backcombing and dressing everyone’s hair. Scott didn’t think of himself as a lead singer any more. He’d hardly sung since cutting some flop singles for the tiny RKO and Ember labels, but, with some coaxing, thought he could conjure the liquid baritone Nitzsche had in mind. Studio jitters were exacerbated by a surprise visit from The Rolling Stones during the recording. Venet was thrilled with the results and kept telling Nitzsche it was his greatest ever arrangement. From that moment, The Walker Brothers’ sound was immutable.

The Walker Brothers achieved an irresistible blend of melancholy and optimism. They made the statement “My ship is coming in” seem ineffably sad and the assertion that “The sun ain’t gonna shine any more” supremely uplifting. Their records understood that emotions are illogical and treacherous. Their records still move people.

“It’s strange,” says Scott, removing his shades and revealing pale, calm eyes, “because everybody says – people who aren’t particularly into what I’m doing now –Why don’t you make another Walker Brothers record? I don’t think anyone’d be that interested, quite honestly.”

Scott’s euphoria at their success was short-lived. “It lasted through the first album and about halfway into the second one and that was it. Then the vampire teeth started appearing on everybody We were locked into this sound and couldn’t change. The formula was embedded in everybody’s minds. The protests I made fell on deaf ears. Everybody got greedy and kept it going like that and it wore us all down.”

The Walkers came unstuck when Scott attempted to marry his interest in brooding, European culture to their epic, orchestral pop; tried, in effect, to become Ingrnar Sinatra. “The public who liked our kind of records would not have gone that little bit further. We tested them, they wouldn’t.”

Remember, this was the mid ‘60s, that strange period when the Stones would turn up on The Billy Cotton Band Show, or something. Standards were different then. And pop music was a rapidly expanding universe. Scott insists, however, that he felt no temptation to move into the regions being explored by for example, Dylan and The Byrds.

“It was too folky for me,” he says emphatically, “and I don’t like folk music at all. I liked jazz in those days, I wasn’t interested in following Dylan.”

Neither did he see any mileage in joining the hippy movement.

“I think it was just so silly” he asserts, suddenly animated. “They really weren’t prepared to go far enough. I realise everyone was naive, including myself. It’s just that everything I was influenced by was being blown away by this inane attitude.

“It just drove me crazy I still see red if I hear Glastonbury mentioned,” he laughs. “I can’t help it! Hendrix was exciting. We toured with him and he was amazing, the Beethoven of his time. But I couldn’t see anyone else who was. It was all very cheesy and easy to manufacture. Which they did, group after group.

WHEN THEY SPLIT in 1967, the Walkers had two Number 1s, three Top 5 albums, and solo singles by John and Gary on their hitlist. Scott’s solo career was more spectacular still. By the summer of 1969 when the let’s-not-mess-about album entitled Scott Sings Songs From His TV Series scaled the Top 10, Scott’s fan club had 16,000 members; more than The Beatles’ fan club. His albums Scott 1, 2 & 3, had been best-sellers. Scott 2 had topped the charts. He’d also won several Best Male Singer polls, beating Elvis, Tom Jones and Paul McCartney

But the statistics don’t really tell the story The Walkers’ good looks and Scott’s sensitive nature naturally drew out the innate lusts and mothering instincts of thousands of screamage fans. Individually they sympathised. As a pack they were merciless. And took no notice when Scott complained about their intrusion or violent enthusiasm at gigs, or when he subsequently developed crippling stage fright and began missing shows. As a pack they saw no irony in rushing to find Scott when he bolted into a monastery for some peace for a week in February 1966. By the time he was discovered unconscious in a gas-filled flat in the summer of 1967 (an episode Scott claims barely to recall and so shan’t discuss today), it was clear that the pressures of fame on Scott Walker were serious, but letters to the music papers from fans had been saying that they were tired of him moaning about everything. Even so, he never reproached them.

“You can’t despise your audience,” he says, replacing his shades. “Well, you do, you despise everybody but it’s irrational because you made all those moves and decisions yourself You do go through a lot of self-loathing. It becomes very out of control in your head. There’s so much going on and so many ways that people see you, after a while you don’t know how to approach anything any more. It’s different for me now, I don’t think about that, but I see these young guys coming up with these kind of problems.

Pop wasn’t ready for Scott’s proto-Cobain personality. Or for such a stylistic loner, not quite MOR, not really avant-garde. So, when he began to record alone, spoke in inte-views of writing surrealistic songs that were “very Dylan Thomas, very Kafka”, refused to release singles and started singing stuff as darkly comic as Jacques Brel’s ‘Jackie’, consumer confusion was inevitable. On his TV show he crooned digestible standards. On his following, entirely self-composed album, Scott 4 – which he insisted issuing under the name Noel Scott Engel – he’d sing copiously of death and despair. The album opened with ‘The Seventh Seal’, inspired by Bergman’s film, included a song, ‘The Old Man’s Back Again’, dedicated to “the Neo-Stalinist Regime” and the sleeve carried a quote from Camus: “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” Engelbert Humperdinck it wasn’t.

It didn’t even graze the charts. Scott’s dismay at its failure provoked a turning point. His next record, Til The Band Comes In, featured one side of sharp songs co-written with his manager, one side of lacklustre covers.

On every subsequent album (two more for Philips, two for CBS, the first two GTO sets by the revived Walker Brothers) he did it their way. His heart wasn’t present. This is the work Scott refers to as “whoring”. Then, right out of left field, came the final Walker Brothers album, Nite Flights, made in 1978, marking the start of his current way of thinking, that his records should be full-on statements of intent or nothing. “It isn’t easy,” he says, ruefully, “people will always pay you to do something else, something other than what you want to do.”

TILT IS DEFIANTLY HIS. There isn’t the slightest whiff of A&R man about it. And it isn’t the kind of record you bung on while doing the housework.

“I wanted to make a nowhere record,” he says. “I’d like people to sit and listen to it, get into it through the words. I’m looking for that Francis Bacon, in-the-face, whoops factor in the sound. And I get it sometimes.”

It’s easy to misconstrue Tilt as mere self-indulgence or pretension. But isn’t self-indulgence the essence of art? “Well, it is today. Pretension is very ‘in’ as well. But that’s a very fine line, that one. If you don’t balance it with humour and so on, you’re in trouble, you just become some awful moaner.”

How would he react if people got the giggles while they listened to Tilt? “Oh that would be fine, because we did while we were working on it.”

How would he react to someone who said it was just showing-off and not purposeful? “I’d say they weren’t listening to it. If you wanted to show off you wouldn’t go the hard way around like that. It’s an acquired taste, you like what I do or you don’t…”

Tilt’s lyrics go way out into uncharted territory sometimes vividly engaging, sometimes apparently scornful of sense, images flashing by without any clear connection. Scott agrees this gives a kind of cinematic jump-cut effect, but sees it more as collage, open to many interpretations hut always controlled. Things do get very oblique, however. Take, for example: “Spared/I’ve been spared/all the powder/on a trumpet/of Gabriel.” Is he disguising things too far? Scott, do you know what you’re –

“Do I know what I’m talking about?” he interjects, laughing. “Oh yes. I’m not someone who puts in a line for the sake of it. I know exactly…I’ve honed and honed those babies down.”

So why make them so obscure?

“This isn’t anything new, I’ve always done this. It’s just a way to talk about the unsavable things of existence, the unnameable. You’re working around it, it’s a lot of edge work. You’re using language to discuss things that are beyond language.”

Walker once scrapped an album begun with Eno and Daniel Lanois. People who’ve heard the abandoned instrumental tracks say they’re beautiful and should be released, but Scott rebuts the suggestion that a good track is enough. “To me the lyric really matters. I work hard to get it pared down as much as possible because if you get the lyric right it can kick off anything, from the photos, to the concept of the design, anything you want.”

There are moments on Tilt when Scott’s singing leaves the mothership too. He says he never sings around the house for pleasure, so it must have felt strange after more than a decade, wondering what was going to come out.

“Singing’s hard for me. I’ve always found it difficult but it’s even harder now I don’t mean physically doing it, I mean in the sense of how it sounds, how to make it sound neutral. Everybody can overload it emotionally or underplay it deadpan, but to get it neutral is very hard, and that’s what I’m after. It’s an indecision, a grey area of vocal I want to produce.”

Tilt was recorded live and surprisingly quickly, Walker avoids the synthesizer where possible, preferring to use the imaginations of his musicians instead. While each player works from sheet music, Scott arranges on the hoof, coaxing unexpected sounds from the ensemble. Some of the textures the percussionists generate are particularly startling.

It’s a dark, intense sound, unfettered in comparison to his previous work, although there are echoes of the past. His trademark high, droning strings reappear – as used on ‘Such A Small Love’ and The Walker Brothers’ astonishing final single, ‘The Electrician’. The church organ has been a favourite component ever since a ‘60s B-side, ‘Archangel’. Here, at last, it’s been properly recorded and is like the Voice Of God. “That baby’s gonna blow you away!” Scott laughs.

As for subject matter, the death imagery seems less obtrusive on Tilt. It might seem that this is the work of man who, in his fifties, is losing his fear of the end. But Walker disagrees.

“I don’t think I’ve left that behind. I think I’m further into it. I felt it when I was younger in a very vertiginous kind of way, but this time it’s more reconciliation, a weightier thing. I realised all the phenomena of existence very young and it was a very hard thing for me. Now I’m living with it a little easier, more as an astonishment thing than a negative thing.”

FIFTY-TWO YEAR OLD Scott Walker lives alone IN London. He has very rarely returned to America in the last 30 years. His marriage to a Swedish woman is long over. Their daughter, Lee, is 22. Scott lives as best as he can on royalties and advances. He paints and draws. He likes to cycle. He doesn’t listen to music much, but has enjoyed recent albums by PJ Harvey, Portishead and, especially, Nine Inch Nails. He doesn’t possess any of his own recordings. He hasn’t read his biography He avoids contact with the media unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Once you’re a star who’s been tagged “an enigma” your mythology is sealed, whatever you choose to do. You don’t have to bounce down the King’s Road on your head whistling Dixie; simply pop up to your local on your bike and play a game of darts. Astonished rumour-mongers will do the rest.

When Scott Walker began to question what was expected of a young star in the ‘60s, people thought he was a bit touched. And nobody listened. Far be it from me to demystify Scott Walker for anyone, but it seems that real eccentricity lies in those who thrive in the boiling idiocy of the fame game. Scott strikes me as a very balanced person.

He twists in his seat. “I can always talk about art or recording in a balanced mode,” he says. “If I was talking about something else you might not think the same thing, but I think I’m all right. A lot of people think I’m mad. Even some of the people I work with. But I’m not worried about it. I think I’ve got it pretty well sussed.”

We are interrupted. Scott’s first interview in 11 years is over. Clearly relieved, he rises, smiles, shakes hands once more and briskly leaves the room.