Introducing The Walker Brothers

The Walker Brothers
Released: December, 1965. Label: Smash

Introducing the Walker Brothers is the Walker Brothers’ debut album in the US and Canada. Four tracks featured on their UK debut album, Take It Easy With The Walker Brothers, do not feature: Lonely Winds, Girl I Lost in the Rain, First Love Never Dies and Tell the Truth are removed, and replaced with the band’s first three singles, Love Her, My Ship Is Coming In and Pretty Girls Everywhere, plus Doin’ the Jerk, Pretty Girls Everywhere’s B-side, Scott Walker first solo composition to be released.

It features their UK hit cover version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s Make It Easy On Yourself, alongside interpretations of Bob Dylan’s Love Minus Zero, Marvin Gaye, Ivy Hunter and William Stevenson’s Dancing In The Street, and an early Randy Newman composition, I Don’t Want To Hear It Any More. The album’s liner notes describe The Walker Brothers as the “Golden Boys” of the record business in the UK, and how their “three-week promotional tour of the British Isles for the Southern California trio became a full year’s stay”.

Short biographies are also provided of the three band members. Scott Walker “loves art…digs the vocalizing of Jack Jones and Sandie Shaw and Francoise Hardy…Gerald Wilson and Count Basie head his favourite bands…[is an] avid fan of the Beatles…[loves] composers like Strauss, Gershwin, Liszt”.

Two singles were released from the album in the US. Make It Easy On Yourself reached no 16 in the charts. My Ship Is Coming In reached no 63. Introducing The Walker Brothers did not chart in the US.

Track listing

  1. My Ship Is Coming In
    (Joey Brooks) 3:15

  2. Doin' the Jerk
    (Scott Engel) 2:25

  3. Love Her
    (Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil) 3:23

  4. Dancing in the Street
    (Marvin Gaye, Ivy Hunter, William "Mickey" Stevenson) 3:50

  5. I Don't Want to Hear It Any More
    (Randy Newman) 3:48

  6. Love Minus Zero
    (Bob Dylan) 3:05

  7. Make It Easy on Yourself
    (Burt Bacharach, Hal David) 3:14

  8. Land of a 1,000 Dances
    (Chris Kenner) 2:35

  9. There Goes My Baby
    (Lover Patterson, Benjamin Nelson) 3:08

  10. Pretty Girls Everywhere
    (Eugene Church, Thomas Williams) 2:30

  11. Here Comes the Night
    (Mort Shuman, Doc Pomus) 2:27

  12. You're All Around Me
    (Scott Engel, Lesley Duncan) 2:39

Credits

Music Director - Ivor Raymonde, Reg Guest

Producer - John Franz, Nick Venet

Arranger And Conductor - Jack Nitzsche

Drums, Vocals - Gary Walker

Guitar, Vocals - John Walker

Vocals, Guitar, Keyboards - Scott Walker

Accompaniment - The Quotations

Photography - Terence Donovan

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Portrait
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Take It Easy with the Walker Brothers