Scott Walker is, depending on how you want to look at it, modern music’s
greatest underachiever or its greatest overachiever. Underachiever because,
given the young Walker’s rich baritone voice and cool good looks, the man
who sang The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore was clearly destined to be his
generation’s Sinatra — the one singer who could link the style of the old
crooners with the sound of the new pop generation. He was obviously going to
be the biggest star in the world. And he very much isn’t.
Overachiever because a man whose musical career began in what was essentially
a boyband has grown to become the critically acclaimed musician’s critically
acclaimed musician. The people who the rest of us think are on the cutting
edge can only peer into the distant horizon to watch Walker’s receding
boot-heels as he takes music further and further into unexplored territories.
Many of music’s brightest and cleverest can be found praising Walker’s work
in Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, a new documentary on the singer, which
opens in cinemas this month. David Bowie, Jarvis Cocker, Brian Eno, Damon
Albarn and various members of Radiohead are interviewed. Their comments
aren’t always insightful — “What do I know about Scott Walker?” asks Bowie.
“What does anybody know about Scott Walker?” — but they are intriguing.
Walker’s music has clearly captivated them, even if they struggle to explain
why.
The fact is that Walker’s reputation rests not just on his music but on his
determination over the past two decades to keep making it, pure and
unadulterated by commercial considerations, musical fashions and market
forces. In a music world where even the most credible artists make
compromises, Walker’s refusal to deviate from his artistic vision is the
object of admiration and no little envy. Many people talk the talk, but
Walker walks the walk.
It wasn’t always that way. Walker burst onto the scene as part of what we
would now term a manufactured pop band. None of the Walker Brothers was
called Walker (Scott’s real name is Engel), and they weren’t brothers. The
three young Americans took Britain by storm with hits including Make It Easy
on Yourself and The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore. They weren’t as big back
home, but that didn’t bother the Anglophile Scott, who was as fascinated by
European art-house films as by Duane Eddy and Link Wray.
Just like the Beatles, they were besieged by screaming teenage girls.
Walker’s reaction to that was the first indication that he wasn’t your
run-of-the-mill pop star. In 30 Century Man, Walker tells of one night when,
after a gig, a girl took him back to her flat and he had a life-changing
experience. She played him an album by Jacques Brel. Walker fell in love
with the work of the Belgian songwriter and determined to introduce his dark
cabaret songs to an English-speaking audience. Rarely has the phrase
“musical differences” been more appropriate than in the case of the Walker
Brothers’ split. Walker released four numbered solo albums heavy with Brel
compositions and his own songs. Initially, they sold well, partly because of
Walker’s earlier hits and partly because of his continuing profile. But the
disparity between what Walker was trying to achieve and what a mainstream
audience wanted from him — evident when he sang Brel’s grim My Death on the
prime-time BBC light-entertainment vehicle The Billy Cotton Band Show —
finally proved too much. Scott 4 failed to sell, and Walker was forced to
face commercial reality.
He made a series of albums on which he caved in to record-company pressure to
provide more accessible material, and as a result sank into a period of
self-disgust and heavy drinking — at least, we assume that is what happened,
as he also became increasingly reclusive — before reemerging with a series
of widely spaced but extraordinarily powerful albums (Climate of Hunter in
1984, Tilt in 1995, The Drift in 2006) that have established his current
reputation as a pioneering and uncompromising artist.
Walker’s habit of disappearing — professionally and personally — for whole
decades at a time means that the idea of making a documentary about him
seems courageous, if not foolish. But Stephen Kijak, director of 30 Century
Man, says he is obsessed by Walker: “I’ve been a big fan since I first heard
his work on a compilation in 1990. The songwriting, the voice — I was
hooked. Anyway, easy isn’t interesting. Making a documentary like this is
like wild-life photography — the sitting, the waiting.”
Given Walker’s reclusive reputation, you would expect his management to have
rejected Kijak’s initial approach. It didn’t. It just didn’t get back to him
at all. “Six months later, I tried again,” Kijak recalls, “and they were
surprisingly open to the idea.” So surprisingly open that it took only four
years for Kijak to start filming. To be fair, there may not have been much
to film before that, as Walker was on one of his long hiatuses. “I was
becoming very frustrated,” Kijak says. “His management kept saying, ‘We’ll
let you know when there’s something visual going on’, and I was thinking,
‘Hey, I’m the director.’ But then they told me to come to the studio, and
there was a man punching a side of pork, and I thought, okay, they were
right.”
That man was Walker’s favoured percussionist, Alasdair Malloy, trying to
recreate a sound that Walker wanted on Clara, a track on The Drift that is
about Mussolini and his mistress. Walker eschews the comparatively easy
world of synths and samplers in favour of creating his own extraordinary
sounds. In 30 Century Man, we also see technicians building a large wooden
box in the studio so that Malloy can hit it with a breeze block.
The image of Walker as an exclusively serious, reclusive artist takes a bit
of a battering in the film, which shows a man quite capable of having a
laugh in the studio and fully aware of the world beyond his artistic vision;
but then, I’d already seen Walker humanised when I interviewed him earlier
in his manager’s house in west London. Walker stumbled into the room, his
progress hampered by his manager’s terrier, Dougal, which was wrapped round
his right leg. Dougal’s intentions towards Walker were roughly similar to
those of his female fans back in the Walker Brothers days — and I don’t mean
that he wanted to play some Jacques Brel songs. After that, an unduly
reverent approach was impossible.
“Everybody who works with me has a sense of humour,” Walker says. “They have
to — otherwise we’d all go crazy. I place a lot of demands on them as
musicians; it’s difficult work, so I can’t have them all brooding about the
place the rest of the time.” He talks of “removing the emotion” from his
work. “So much emotion in music is just bullshit. When I sing, I’m trying to
be someone singing without any particular emotion or personality. It’s
supposed to be neutral.”
This is perhaps the key to Walker’s work now. For the last three albums, his
music has borne little relationship to rock or pop, or indeed to any other
genre. He’s been out on his own for a while; but The Drift — great slabs of
intense noise followed by equally powerful silences, vocals intoned almost
tunelessly — takes us even further from any known, comforting reference
points. And perhaps it’s this striving for a lack of emotion that so
completely separates Walker’s music from everybody else’s.
Walker can’t throw any further light on it. He doesn’t know where his music
comes from. He just knows that it takes a long time coming. His first long
silence he explains by saying that he was “haunted by my bad faith”, the
period when he caved in to commercial pressures, and a jokey mention of
“imbibing a lot”. After that, the long gaps between albums are explained
partly by the difficulty in getting record companies to finance such
radio-unfriendly music, and partly by Walker’s writing methods. He says
months can pass between the writing of one line of a lyric and the next. “I
sit and I wait,” he says with a shrug. “It takes a lot of silence before the
right line will come.” When he has tried to work faster, the results haven’t
been as good. “I have to wait until something comes that I don’t expect,
something that surprises me but that I know is right,” he says. “Or maybe
I’m just really slow.” It’s clearly hard work; but, as Kijak mentioned, easy
isn’t interesting.
30 Century Man opens on April 27 at Curzon Soho; Odeon Panton Street;
Watershed, Bristol; Showroom, Sheffield
I have been a Scott Walker fan since the beginning when he was with the Walker Bros. Have all his records and still play them. I also have all the solo ones, and Tilt and Drift.
These last two albums took a lot of getting used to. I still havent got properly into Tilt, but I have got into Drift and the more I play it the more I like it. I think Scott is a genius and hope he continues to give us albums, even if they are like the Drift. I think he looks well for his age and hope he will be around for years to come. He is a true icon in my eyes. He cant do no wrong for me.
Marian King, Leyland, Preston, England.
I have been a Scott Walker fan since the sixties when he was with the Walker Bros. I have all his albums including his solo ones and of course Tilt and Drift. Much prefer the older stuff . Took me quite a while to get into Tilt which even now I struggle with. Drift after playing a few times I have got into and like. I hope he continues to do some more albums. In my eyes he cant do any wrong. He is a true icon and I think he looks well for his age and hope he has many years to come. I know many artists look up to him for inspiration. I cant wait to see this 30th Century film and hope it comes to a cinema near to me.
Marian King, Leyland, Preston, England.