Excerpts From

The Impossible Dream:
The story of Scott Walker and The Walker Brothers

by Anthony Reynolds

Dennis Weinreich: “I remember Scott arriving at the studio in his orange Volkswagen Beetle,” he says. “He had a white pork-pie hat on. Real low over his eyes, all the time. He never took it off. Constantly playing with it. So he talked to me about making records and stuff and he said to me, ‘We need to work out how to record the vocal. Because the thing that pisses me off is that, when I’m ready to sing, I’m ready to sing right now. And I need to be able to perform once and that’s it’. So, I got this idea of [Scott’s voice] sitting very, very compressed on top of the record without a huge amount of dynamic. I felt, from listening to him talk, that he had a natural dynamic, that it wasn’t based on level. It was based on this intensity he had in his voice.”

Scott and Weinreich hit it off immediately. “I told Scott that once we had found a vocal sound, we’d keep it for the album and when we’re ready to go! And then I’d modify it for the song. I said, ‘But when you’re ready to go, I’ll be ready to go’.” 

Big Jim Sullivan and Alan Parker were also involved. Sullivan was glad to get the call and noted that the Walkers set-up was much more bohemian than it had been when he’d first encountered them back in 1965…

“I just got the sense that they were going to do whatever it was they wanted to do,” he says. “It was much more experimental than it had been back at Philips.”

Weinreich remembers everyone being open to new approaches and technology. “Big Jim had a Roland guitar synth, one of the first,” he grins. “It was kind of a weird thing, it looked like a Les Paul, kinda, and I remember it being delivered, taken out of the box. I’d never seen such a thing! Nobody really knew how to use it but we had a lot of fun messing around with it.”

Big Jim Sullivan: “I remember I plugged the guitar into the amp and it was set up in such a way that it started feeding back and the lead was crackling. I went to fix it and they said, ‘No! Leave it like that, it sounds great’. I didn’t go mad with effects, as I can recall, maybe some phasing. When I played on ’em, there was not much else going on. No strings, not much at all. So, I just tried to use my imagination. There was only a guide vocal, bass, drums, and perhaps keyboards here and there … And I don’t think the drums and bass were the finished article either.

“It was a bit different to working with ’em in the 60s. They were a bit looser now. Some of the things they’d ask me to do, you know, ‘Improvise! Go crazy! Make something up …’.”

Dennis Weinreich: “Scott came up with basslines, musically he came up with everything.

The blending of his and John’s voices was magnificent. You know, when you double-track somebody, you record a voice and then you say, ‘Ok, we’ll put the other voice over now’ and it’s always loose and you have to say things like, ‘Don’t say any S’s, only say the S’s on the first track’, because otherwise you just get a big ‘schh’, you know, it’s all funny-sounding, the overlap and all. But you never had to say that with John. If he was putting a harmony to Scott or the other way round, you never had to do that. They had something really quite special in that they knew how each other sang.”

As the recording progressed it became obvious that not only did Scott know what he was doing but that he had chosen the right personnel to help him realise that vision. “The guitar solo on ‘The Electrician’ is just scrumptious,” says Weinreich. “Big Jim [Sullivan] had ‘been there, done that’, but he still performed with energy and passion. Everybody did. Most of the time with session players, you’d struggle to extract a performance out of it. They could play it but could they perform it? The band who played on Nite Flights had passion.”