Record Pile: Scott Walker

Julian Cope described 1960s solo Scott Walker as psychedelic music for housewives, adding that they needed to have their minds blown much more than hippies did.

When Scott left the Walker Brothers he was at the height of his popularity in the UK and his first three (brilliant) solo albums went to No. 3, No. 1, and No. 3 in the charts, respectively. But there was already career trouble brewing as Scott 3 (which I’d rank as his all-time best) didn’t have the chart staying power of his first two.

I guess you could ask how many orchestral, exquisitely sung, eccentrically written un-ez listening songs brimming over with dashed dreams, societal unease, surreal malaise, and existential angst borrowed from European art movies people really wanted in their lives.

Walker actually got a mainstream variety TV series on the BBC and his soundtrack LP to it also went into the Top 10. The venal idiots over at the Beeb once took pride in erasing pretty much every TV show they made that wasn’t sold overseas (as Dr. Who was) so this well regarded series disappeared from view the moment after each episode was aired.

Here is a tune from Walker’s TV series LP that ranks with the work of the great American singers of standards (Nancy Wilson does a fantastic run through of this tune as well):

Walker is a very good MOR singer but his Broadway, Tin Pan Alley and film theme covers are generally not of equal lasting value as his original compositions. I’d highly recommend physical copies of Scott 1 – 4 and the really underrated ‘Til The Band Comes In. The last two albums in that series left no record company itching to let him record his own work and the fight seems to have left him for a big part of the 1970s.

Then, when Walker came back to creative music in the late 1970s, inspired by the art rock movement, he took the template from Bowie’s Berlin albums and the emerging synth-pop sounds, and stripped the pop and jittery new wave fun out of them in ways that appealed to even less people than before. But, artists were listening and the very people who influenced Scott Walker were in turn once again influenced by his new material.

These synth Scott records, The Walker Brothers in Hell magnum opus Nite Flights and Climate of Hunter, unlike his initial solo records, didn’t even get released in the States. This makes sense since even his solo records that were hits in the UK made the Velvet Underground’s American sales figures look robust in comparison. That said, I heard both acts repeatedly mentioned as influences by artists I liked throughout the early 1980s but I couldn’t find any records by either of them at the time.

No wonder Scott Walker slipped away again.

Returning for good in the 1990s, Scott Walker threw off any pretense of pop and now created music that was basically avant-garde Classical in nature and even more deeply unnerving then his synth albums. Judging by the fact that I was literally the only person at the SF movie theater to see the fine feature length documentary on him I am guessing that even cult stardom eluded him in the States.

In the previous Record Pile on The Walker Brothers, I mentioned how much Scott not only influenced David Bowie and Bryan Ferry, in sound and artistic aspiration, but also the British Post-Punk/Neo-Psych scene of the late 1970s and early ’80s. Here is an early Scott solo cut that really illustrates that influence well — even in the bass guitar being so out front. As part of the Scott Walker backlash in the UK, this song was repeatedly, inaccurately, described in the press as being pro Stalinist when its obviously a negative comment on the Soviets rolling into Czechoslovakia.

Funny how music works. This song didn’t sound like 1969 in 1969 and then was considered old fashioned in the early 1970s; then was considered cutting edge at the end of the decade.

Today, Scott Walker sounds very 2022.

Record Pile: The Walker Brothers

When every post Beatles 1960s British band was making a bee-line for the States, The Walker Brothers went against the tide and became the rare American band to become huge in the U.K. They had two early Top 20 singles in the Stats but enjoyed ten in the U.K., with two going all the way to #1.

They started off with pre Beatles American pop in the Phil Spector mode but lead singer Scott Walker could also handle standards and started to go in an artier direction that he would pursue in his solo career. I don’t have any of their official albums on vinyl, including any of their reunion records culminating in 1979’s brilliant Nite Flights (Bowie/Eno submerged in Euro art cinema despair). But, I do have five fine comps, highlighted by The Fabulous Walker Brothers.

Here is a nice halfway point from The Walker Brothers to solo Scott with “After The Lights Go Out” which sure sounds like a major influence on The Teardrop Explodes and Julian Cope to me. Cope would introduced Scott Walker to the post-punk generation with a retrospective comp that he put out in the early 1980s when his music had gone out of print and was considered a relic of the 1960s.

While David Bowie and Bryan Ferry have never been shy about the influence Scott Walker had on them (and that influence was flipped on his post 1979 work), I think its pretty easy to hear what initial post-punk figures as Julian Cope and Ian McCulloch took from Scott, even from his tenure with The Walker Brothers.

The other thing about The Walker Brothers period is that it is where solo Scott Walker really started in earnest, with a number of his finest self-penned songs. Scott Walker moved around a lot growing up so he knew first hand the difference between living in a gray NYC high rise versus an expansive, Los Angeles suburban home. Then, when the tall, sun-tanned So Cal. Walker Brothers moved to London and he once again found himself in monochromatic urban life, this time in a pre-EU market London that was still rebuilding, and feeling deprivations from the war.

It is insane how many of Scott Walker songs, from covers to originals, have to do with living in a cramped spaces.

Here is Scott covering one of Randy Newman’s best tunes:

Here is Scott going solo on a Walker Brothers EP where they all took turns. My all-time favorite from the group:

I will do a Scott Walker solo LP Record Pile next.

Paul Desmond, Desmond Blue

It is springtime in San Francisco, with blue skies and sunshine followed by flashes of surprise rain followed by a heatwave that turns into artic winds whipping out of nowhere.

With just a little bit of light in the sky, I reach for Desmond Blue, an orchestral jazz set featuring the bittersweet, lyrical saxophone of Paul Desmond. Its a timeless release but it reminds me that the early 1960s were still part of the 1950s.