Who's Simon Defending Now?: Scott Walker

Why Scott Walker isn’t more famous is a mystery I’ll never quite understand. Despite being tremendously influential and a true musical pioneer, I struggle to find people I know who’ve even heard of him. While admittedly not music geared towards pop charts success, his music has proven over the decades to be immensely important and deserves the attention given to other pioneering groups like the Velvet Underground or Leonard Cohen. All this is why Noel Scott Engel, better known to the world as Scott Walker, is the subject of this month’s Who’s Simon Defending Now.

To properly tell the tale of Scott Walker, it must be divided into two parts. The evolution his music has seen between the 1960s and the present is absolutely mind-boggling. However, when he first started his musical career, no one (probably literally no one) could have predicted where his music would eventually lead him. Scott first rose to prominence with the Walker Brothers. Three Americans, they weren’t brothers and none of them were named Walker (very much like the Ramones!). However, their dramatic pop ballads became very successful, especially in Britain, persuading all three Walker Brothers to move there for good. They hit the top of the UK charts with songs like “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” before the usual mess of creative differences started creating riffs between the three of them.

Scott used this opportunity to release four incredible records of bizarre, classical, orchestrated pop ballads. Taking cues from the Belgian singer Jacques Brel, Scott found himself writing intense, dramatic songs, such as “Montague Terrace (In Blue)”, while also turning out some impassioned covers of Brel and other classic songwriters (see “Mathilde”). For 1967, the same year the Beatles and Rolling Stones got really, really high and got lost with backward tape loops, this type of backward-looking music sounded simply alien. The records did sell (Scott was a pop star, after all) but as the music got darker, his fanbase dispersed and Scott began to sink into reclusiveness. By 1969’s Scott 4, all his songs were original and he was singing about Ingmar Bergman films. No one bought the record.

Since no one was doing particularly well on their own, the Walker Brothers chose this time to reunite. The resulting music (both on the Walker Brothers’ and Scott’s solo albums, recorded and released parallel to the Walker Brothers) was generally uninspired, bland and all-around boring. It looked like Scott Walker’s career was spiraling into obscurity. Just another balladeer past his prime. Thankfully, it’s here that the second half of Scott Walker’s career began.

1978’s Nite Flights isn’t a particularly good record overall. Disjointed and horrifically uneven, it was the result of the three Walker Brothers essentially compiling their various current solo projects onto one LP. Two-thirds of the music is absolute trash. However, the third that Scott Walker wrote is nothing short of transcendent. His four songs fully embrace the new, experimental electronic sounds being pioneered by artists like David Bowie and Brian Eno. The masterpiece is “The Electrician”, an eerie slab of noise shoved in the middle of an unsuspecting pop album. Still one of the most unnerving songs I’ve ever heard, “The Electrician” is truly in a class of its own. It would also serve as the blueprint for the revitalization (at least in artistic, if not commercial terms) of Scott Walker’s career.

Scott essentially vanished off the face of the earth following Nite Flights. Taking “reclusive” to a whole new level, he settled into a loose rhythm of releasing a single album every ten years. 1984 saw Climate Of Hunter, his first album fully dedicated to his new, intensely claustrophobic music. However, the record was somewhat marred by an overly detailed 80s production job and it wasn’t until 1995’s Tilt that the metamorphosis of Scott Walker was complete. The opening track, “Farmer In The City”, says it all: deeply experimental forays into the darkest corners of music, with Scott’s semi-operatic voice resonating through the murk. Tilt is one of those rare albums that simply sounds like nothing else, defying all genre tags thrown at it. Scott was essentially silent again until 2006, releasing The Drift, which proved to be even more experimental and forward-thinking, if not absolutely, uncontrollably insane. Shattered guitars, animal noises, the sounds of meat being punched…The Drift redefines music as you know it (there are very few albums that actually deserve such a ridiculous, hyperbolic statement, but I swear this is one of them). Simply listening to “Jesse” shows you what a mean. It’s a Lynchian nightmare about Elvis’s stillborn twin brother, ending with Scott’s otherworldly cry echoing in silence: “Alive…I’m the only one left alive…”

The influence of Scott Walker is felt all throughout music, including virtually all of post-70s English rock. David Bowie and Marc Almond (of Soft Cell fame) were both fascinated with his music, going on to become new disciples in the school of Jacques Brel-flavored drama. A primordial Radiohead would often rehearse a song they called “their Scott Walker song.” You know it by a different name: “Creep”. Even newcomers, like the Last Shadow Puppets, show a remarkable affinity and loyalty to Scott’s music. Pulp even lured him out of the dark to produce their stellar 2001 album We Love Life. He’s achieved an almost god-like status in the UK…

…which is why it’s unforgivable that Americans haven’t even heard his name. Sure, he’s an ex-pat from Ohio, who abandoned this country for another one that understood him better. Sure, he records some of the most off-the-wall music you’ve ever heard. Sure, you can’t understand his style of hand-to-forehead melodrama. But I bet at least 50% of the music you listen to has been influenced to some degree by Scott Walker. Know who he is. Listen to his music. You certainly don’t have to like it (people might even worry about you if you do), but it's undeniably important. Scott Walker can be ignored no longer.

To conclude, here’s one last video. This is the most recent live clip of him I can find…and it’s from 1995. He’s performing Tilt’s astonishing closing track, “Rosary”. Enjoy.