A wintry afternoon and London’s roads are rammed with traffic. Mortifyingly, I am late to meet Scott Walker, the musical legend who rarely gives interviews, and ring, filled with apologies. No problem, assures his manager, Scott’s late too, he’s stuck on the bus. If rock’n’roll is the story of men who, in Bob Geldof’s description of Phil Lynott, “couldn’t imagine a life not in leather trousers, with a limousine taking him to work every day”, Walker is its antithesis. When we finally sit down, I could more easily picture the figure in front of me, snaggle-toothed and with a cap firmly pulled down over his eyes, as the protagonist of a Raymond Carver short story, about to grind his way through another day.
Not that he isn’t perfectly cheerful, in his own fashion, with occasional hints of mischief and lugubrious humour. Of Sundog – a selection of his lyrics over six decades – he reveals that one of the challenges in assembling it was having to go back: “It requires listening – and I didn’t want to do that. Cos, you know, I don’t listen to anything I’ve done once I’ve done it.”
Fortunately, the internet came to his rescue, in the shape of “all kinds of people who’ve printed your lyrics out”. This is the Walker fandom, who have followed him through his earliest incarnation as one of the three Walker Brothers (not brothers and none of them originally called Walker), through solo balladry, easy listening and interpretations of Jacques Brel, to the intense, complex albums of his later career.
But why do it at all? “My friend Jarvis Cocker approached me a few years ago and said, ‘Everyone’s doing it. You’ve got to do it. I’ve done it.’ And I said OK. But I’m a great prevaricator, so I went away and forgot about it.”
The result is thrillingly uncategorisable: densely allusive and imagistic, resistant to obvious interpretation and suggestive of a vast range of literary and musical interests. The novelist Eimear McBride provides an introduction, but sensibly avoids any attempt at definitive comprehension: “He will not protect or guide you,” she writes. “He takes no pains to reassure that if the correct procedures are followed, and the necessary obeisance made, one day all meanings will be revealed. Quite the opposite.”
TimelineScott Walker: his key albums
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From smooth 60s lounge music to ragged doom metal, Scott Walker made one of the most extraordinary journeys in pop
Debut LP. Three unrelated musicians – Scott Engel, John Maus and Gary Leeds – each adopted the surname Walker. The chart-topping, Burt Bacharach-penned Make It Easy on Yourself remains one of Scott Walker's signatures, and one of the greatest breakup songs ever.
After the Walker Brothers disbanded in 1968, Walker created a run of self-titled, numbered albums that took string-drenched easy listening into an increasingly strange, dark place, full of tragic storytelling. Scott 4 is the apotheosis, containing everything from ruminations on the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia to a rhapsodic, spectacularly beautiful retelling of Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal.
The Walker Brothers reformed in the 1970s, and their brilliant final album together, Nite Flights, again foreshadows Walker's later, weirder work. The four songs that Walker contributed range from the strutting glam of the title track and Shutout, to the glacial soundscape of The Electrician.
Walker's take on the slick soft rock of the 1980s – in his only album that decade – is predictably off-beam. Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler on guitar meets circular-breathing sax from Evan Parker; pristine production is made eerie by dissonant chords.
Just as other artists might start to reach for easy nostalgia or see their creativity wane, Walker strikes out into avant-garde territory for this disturbing, dramatic record. He lets his voice off the leash into ever greater vibrato and wailing freedom, on the way to accidentally creating a parallel vision for post-rock.
The experiments on Tilt become more mature a decade on, as the disquiet modulates into full-on agitation and terror. One song reflects on the death of Mussolini's mistress, another examines 9/11 through the prism of Elvis's dead twin brother. Wildly ambitious – and utterly magnificent.
A brilliant idea on paper – Walker collaborating with equally heavy, atmospheric doom metallers Sunn O))) – is brilliant in practice too: the band's titanic, glacial riffs prove the perfect bedrock for Walker's startled pronouncements. He said it was his best record yet.
Better, she advises, to abandon yourself to Walker’s ungovernable imagination: to 1995’s The Cockfighter, which “relocates” excerpts from the trials of Caroline of Brunswick and of Adolf Eichmann; to Jesse, from 2006, addressed to Elvis Presley’s stillborn twin brother; to the “Bubonic, blue-blankets / run ragged with church mice” from Herod 2014, made in collaboration with the experimental Seattle band Sunn O))).
Some have a broader narrative ambition, such as SDSS 1416+13B. The seemingly impenetrable title refers to a brown dwarf recently discovered by astronomers. The subtitle – Zercon, a Flagpole Sitter – conjures a Moorish jester at the court of Attila the Hun. The song flits between wisecracks (“If shit were music / you’d be a brass band”), grotesque imagery (“No more / dragging this wormy anus / round on shag piles from / Persia to Thrace”) and an almost Beckettian bleakness (“The dark day behind us / the dark day ahead”).
And that bleakness underlies even the warmest-sounding lyrics, including Sundog itself, a new piece that takes inspiration from the cold, phantom suns of the universe: “Sundog / couldn’t make / the heat. / Sucked the nipple-zit / on frack-frozen teat.” The lines, perhaps prophetically, were written at the time of Donald Trump’s election.
“The way I feel,” says Walker, “is the lyric will always guide you to what you need to do with the music. So if you get the lyric right, everything else will follow.” Even when he works with other musicians, as he has with Cocker, Ute Lemper and Bat for Lashes, he does “most of the heavy lifting” beforehand, then allows himself to be open. “They’ll hear something I don’t hear and I’ll go, ‘Fantastic, that’s perfect.’”
But to go back in time for a minute: these songs are a world away from his early work, in which his swelling baritone was heard on such No 1 hits as Make It Easy on Yourself and The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Anymore). They have little in common with the “cheesy stuff” he recorded to extricate himself from recording contracts in the late 1960s and early 70s. Can he see any progression, any link between the decades?
“People say there’s a certain sound in the early stuff that runs through everything. There probably is.” And with that, he fast-forwards. “But I can rate them, the albums, as I go along. Not the early ones, because I’ve no idea any more, but I can say the success rate of, say, Tilt, was about – from what I wanted to get – 65%. And then the next album was 75%, and on and on until I hit Soused, which was pretty perfect.”
The drive is always, in Ezra Pound’s words, to “make it new” – precisely what derailed his career with the Walker Brothers, for whom he sang, arranged and produced. “It kept repeating itself. Initially, it was fantastic, and I learned so much. I got to work with huge orchestras and good budgets. But after a while, the formula – they still wanted the same thing. I had to figure out how we were going to get a song that’s going to do the same thing. And it wore itself out.”
Walker is 74. He has lived in the UK since the 1960s, and credits it with giving him his musical life: “If I wasn’t here, I wouldn’t have been able to have my career. I might have been able to do it in Europe, say, in France, but I wouldn’t have been able to do it in the United States.”
He’s been talked of as a recluse, but that is a lazy label. He’s just not very interested in celebrity. He doesn’t have many friends, he says, but the ones he has are good. I mention that a pal of mine, a huge fan, used to live in the same west London neighbourhood and would often see him cycling about, doing ordinary chores. Oh yes, he says, his life is “very boringly normal, I go around on my bike, getting in lots of crashes and breaking things”. These “things” include his arm, his hip and his front teeth, now loose. “But I still get on the bike, like a maniac!”
Mainly, though, he works, his energy levels helped by the fact that he doesn’t perform live and, although he declines to say never again, has no plans to. He makes sure that he keeps abreast of new music. Currently, he thinks, much of the best work is being made by women, citing Björk, St Vincent and FKA twigs. For himself, he is entirely comfortable with his output being enjoyed by what we might call a niche audience.
“I have to believe in what I’m doing. That’s the main thing. I know they did a Prom this summer, where they did my more accessible music. I realise how many people really like that. And I don’t hate those four albums at all. But it’s just that I’m in a different area now, and I’m not going to draw those kind of crowds.” As long as someone is still listening, he says, he’s happy.
“I am writing for myself, but I’m writing for everyone else too.” He rejects snobbery, the idea that “you plebs can’t understand this, you should just go away. I feel I’m writing for everyone. Just they haven’t discovered it yet.” He laughs. But they will? “They will, yeah.” Another laugh. “I’ll be six feet under – but they will.”
- Sundog: Selected Lyrics by Scott Walker is out now from Faber & Faber, available in standard, limited and deluxe editions; scottwalkerbook.com.
