The Audience Is Waiting. On the late music of Scott Walker.

In December 2012 Scott Walker released Bish Bosch, the last record in a trilogy with which he has established a very personal style so far unmatched by any other musician. In 2013, after listening to each record in succession over a period of several months, I wrote the following text for an essay contest, albeit with a different (and, admittedly, really crappy) introduction. The text was prompted by the music, obviously, but also by the many reviews and reactions I had read then, none of which ever matching my experience of listening to the music. I must confess having come very late to the music of Scott Walker, maybe 4 or 5 years ago only, and via his later output, being totally ignorant of his 1960s music.  The text was also written from the point of view of an art writer, a bit as if it was a piece of visual art. It was also intended for a general audience, initially, so I tried as much as possible to write it  in non-artspeak. I had shelved it after a few unsuccessful attempts to pitch it to music magazine,  and thought about maybe posting it later this year when his collaboration with Sunn 0))), Soused, was going to be released on Sept. 22nd, but as today marks FBC! 7th anniversary and that I'm in no real mood to write anything else, here it is for your enjoyment. Or not.

“The audience is waiting
 Its audience is waiting 
Its audience is waiting 
Its audience is waiting”
Scott Walker, “Hand Me Ups”, The Drift, 2006

The Audience Is Waiting. On the late music of Scott Walker.

Looking up  at what established critics have written about Scott Walker's recent output, and being confronted with qualifiers such as “terrifying, harrowing, austere, arcane, inaccessible, difficult, taxing, demanding, dense, austere, impenetrable, dark”, one cannot help but feeling doomed to fail at describing the experience of listening to it. But as the artist himself has said in the 2006 documentary 30th Century Man “I fail lots of times, but at least I’m trying.”
Let’s try.


The Artist, The Audience.
Scott Walker, born Noel Scott Engel in 1943, is nearly as old as rock music and pop music, if you will, having gotten his start as a teenage singer in the 1950s, in the wake of the commotion caused by Elvis Presley’s success. In the United Kingdom, he is mostly known or remembered as the lead singer of 1960s band The Walker Brothers and as an immense Pop star back then, who went solo in 1967 and released in quick succession four albums of delicate and timeless Pop music, backed-up by soaring orchestras that enhanced his famous baritone voice. He’s also credited as introducing Belgian singer Jacques Brel to an English- speaking audience by being the first one to cover his songs, later sung by the likes of David Bowie and Marc Almond.
The story goes that Scott Walker lost himself in the 1970s by recording mediocre albums of middle-of-the-road standards, before resurfacing as an avant-garde musician in 1995 with his record Tilt, following in the footsteps of earlier attempts, his 1984 solo record Climate of Hunter and the four songs he composed for the Walker Brother’s final album Nite Flights, after they had briefly reformed for a failed come-back. This story is of course incomplete, and as such has only served to grow a myth, about a reclusive and mad genius who releases a new masterpiece once every decade, using strange sound-making techniques and devices in the studio.
The reality is probably more complex, his glacial rate of delivery having to do with record companies’ corporate issues and with their need for commercial pragmatism, in addition to Walker’s own self-avowed slow rate of production.
The result of this complicated tale we’ve been fed however is that there seems to exist a split within his audience, between the part that grew up accustomed to his magnificent but still largely conventional music, and a newer one more interested in his recent adventurous output. That some people might enjoy both is rarely acknowledged, not least by the artist himself who’s convinced his old 1960s fans cannot abide his newer music. A quick look at comments on video sharing websites or social networks appears to confirm this: “rubbish”, “garbage”, “crap”, “trash”, or the ultimate crime, “pretentious” have been used to describe his recent songs, while some people, seemingly unaware Walker likely doesn’t read their comments, use the same pages to plead or demand he “goes back to his old style, to accommodate his fans”.

Walker’s most recent album, Bish Bosch, was released at the end of 2012, several years after The Drift (2006), completing the trilogy started with Tilt (1995). With this latest record, we are now afforded the possibility to comprehend better what he has been doing for the last two decades or so, to situate it within a larger context. As if to further complicate matters, the Scott Walker actuality has been quite busy recently when a box set of his first five solo records Scott Walker The Collection (Scott, Scott 2, Scott 3, Scott 4 and ‘Til The Band Comes In) was commercialized earlier this year, accentuating the divide between fans of his older music and lovers of his newer output. Though in truth the latter set tends to also enjoy early Scott Walker music, so the musical divide might simply be a generation gap rather than a real, sharp aesthetic division.
The box set also helped to finally attempt a comprehensive examination of the artist’s work, allowing to detect in early songs the roots of his current musicianship, as evidenced in a recent article by John Doran on the specialized music website The Quietus. Viewed retrospectively, old songs such as Plastic Palace People (1968) with its fragmented lyrics and breaks of rhythm within the same tune help understand the evolution that lead to Walker’s current work. Other songs like The Old Man’s Back Again (Dedicated To The Neo-Stalinist Regime) or Hero Of The War, both on Scott 4, are just the seeds which Bolivia 95 and Patriot (A Single) on Tilt will grow from several decades later, their lyrics as political and poetical at the end of the 1960s than they will be at the turn of this century.
Outside of the United Kingdom, Walker’s reputation and fame are rather murky. Except maybe in Japan, he’s virtually unknown as a former pop star, which helps with a better reception of the Tilt, The Drift and Bish Bosch trilogy. For one thing it is the esteem in which these records are held critically that has paved the way for people to rediscover his early work, as in the United States.

What It’s All About Is Not “About”.
When confronted to the Scott Walker of the 21st century, it helps to think about other mediums outside of music, such as literature or visual arts. Most music critics tend to compare Walker to T.S Eliot, Samuel Beckett or James Joyce, understandably enough as his lyrics draw from language tropes most famously pioneered by these modernists, however these comparisons are unhelpful in the sense that they are used by the reviewers to try and explain away what this music “is about”.
That this music is wholly unexplainable and not necessarily “about” something might be a more interesting avenue to explore. That this music is unexplainable and not necessarily “about” something may be what makes it unbearable to anyone attached to simple answers and used to a completely passive reception. That this music is unexplainable and not necessarily “about” something is also why it is so new and fascinating.

If we lose the impulse to try to explain it away we can look at other elementary questions, like the ones an art historian starts with when confronted with an unknown artwork outside of an immediately recognizable context. What does the work do? What does it want? Where does it exist?

Impulsively some quick answers come forth: what the work does is to simply exist, as such it is new, it creates its own style, and as every single artwork that operates as “new”, it doesn’t come from nothing, even when it does seem to appear out of thin air. So let’s look at it, now that we have a body of works within which we can draw comparisons.
In the visual arts field, most enduring artworks are effectively not “about” something, because in the space where they exist they are multi-layered, dealing with complex influences, functioning in a fuzzy cultural and social context, answering to historical and mundane demands alike, interfering or dialoguing with vernacular and elitist tropes. They appear: irritating, dense, scandalous, annoying, puzzling, funny, bleak, scary, strange, encountering resistance and praise, sometimes failing their creators’ original intent but succeeding in changing the then-current rules of the game, or more prosaically the artistic conventions of the context within which they function.
As such, they often meet the incomprehension and the mockery of a general audience, the same general audience whose offspring will flock museums, concert halls and literary commemorations later on: witness the annual Bloomsday celebrating James Joyce in modern- day Dublin, the success of the many Picasso or Warhol retrospectives, and the reverence accorded to modern recreations of Stravinsky and Nijinsky’s Rite Of Spring. Yet all these works have caused a scandal and met a large resistance when they first appeared.
The late Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley was reviled as a jokester in the 1990s, yet his recent retrospective (December 2012-April 2013) held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam attracted nearly half a million people. Marcel Duchamp, the seminal 20th century artist whose readymades influenced everything from Pop Art to 1980s Appropriation Art, used to say that the audience accepts unconventional artworks only after a certain delay. It proved certainly true for many influential movements and artists from the end of the 19th century to the Postwar ones, so revered nowadays that it is sometimes difficult to understand the outcry that greeted them when they first appeared. As they’ve been slowly assimilated and even co- opted, at least superficially, by latter-day graphic designers and interior decorators, as attested by the way the radicalism of Minimalism has been absorbed by contemporary corporate office design, the uproar they met when they were first offered on view seems incomprehensible.

Out Of Thin Air
Listening to Scott Walker in the 21st century can sometimes prove a challenge to an audience unaware or unaccustomed to a wide array of musical genres that exist outside of mainstream Pop music, yet there is an ever-growing circle of listeners who latch on his songs without hesitation. For this audience, there is a musical context, which without being directly traceable as an obvious influence on Walker makes it familiar to ease into his music. This context is often ignored or goes unmentioned in reviews of his work, sadly, as they tend to focus on the apparent dichotomy between his 1960s pop music and his recent dissonant one. Dissonance in itself is important if you recall it is a leading principle of modern and contemporary classical music, along with atonality. Modern and contemporary music is roughly contemporary to Modernist art and literature: most milestones like Schoenberg’s “Scandal Concert”, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Kandinsky’s invention of abstract painting, or Duchamp’s readymades were all made or released around 1911-1913.

Abstraction, cerebral art and atonality have been with us for a good century and for the culture at large we’re only getting accustomed to it now. Outside of high culture, in the musical world most of us inhabit, the one that encompasses popular and vernacular music released commercially, we’ve been used to underground, alternative and independent music for many decades as well, music that strives to be experimental, unconventional and innovative.
Some of it was ignored at the time of its making but grew extremely influential, with bands like The Velvet Underground; other acts whose perception of eccentricity has more to do with image like Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart, their music not really sounding unconventional or difficult anymore today, still managed to attract a sizable public.
A bit more foreign to a mainstream audience, some niche genres such as industrial music have existed since at least the mid-1970s, with pioneer band Throbbing Gristle in the UK (1975) or German band Einstürzende Neubauten (1980), later bigger acts such as Nine Inch Nails, acknowledged as an influence by Walker, brought the genre to a larger international audience in the mid-1990s. Outside of industrial music, Walker is known for being a lover of classical music, as well as of modern and contemporary classical music. Composers Turnage, Kurtag, Berio, Ligeti or Lachenmann are often mentioned in interviews or were played at the Meltdown Festival he programmed at the Southbank Center in 2000. He has also often talked about his love of progressive jazz back in the 1960s, and as for current mainstream rock bands, he’s a Radiohead fan. An audience that is accustomed to these types of unconventional music might be naturally drawn to what Walker does nowadays.

The Audience Is Reading
Listening carefully to the Tilt/The Drift/Bish Bosch trilogy in successive order, we can recognize an evolution, with Tilt introducing the brand new style created by Walker, and in retrospect probably the easiest of the three to get into, The Drift being a consolidation and refinement of the same style, while Bish Bosch clearly opens up new possibilities and directions in his development, hinting at a more baroque and diverse future output while signaling a sort of irregular closure of the cycle. Like most groundbreaking works in all mediums, these records are by no means perfect. They offer however a certain methodical construction that even an untrained ear can recognize, when listening attentively. Interviews with the artist can also be illuminating in getting a deeper understanding about his creative process.
In all his interviews Scott Walker explains that he starts all his songs by writing the lyrics, later on molding the sounds and the music to match them. Read separately from the music, the lyrics are poetical with an often lush imagery yet they can appear nonsensical because of the complex puns, metaphors and figurative expressions assembled together in a non-linear way. Nevertheless there is a narrative continuity to them, as well as common themes: violence, decay, anatomy, eroticism, fauna, astronomy, wars, dictators, and childhood. There are even some love songs. Some of his songs are clearly explicit in denouncing the horrors of war but associated with a poetic language that brings them beyond a simplistic political message. Walker has also been insistent that there was humor throughout all his records, though it is the most apparent in Bish Bosch you can catch glimpses of it on his other albums. Walker himself rarely offers explanations about his lyrics save for some well-known

examples, so we get to know that Jesse (on The Drift) is a song responding to 9/11 – here paraphrasing Walker in the interview he gave in the documentary 30th Century Man – a song visually composed by juxtaposing the images of the vertical twin towers, reflecting “American hubris” but having “no spiritual reflective qualities” in contrast with the horizontal vision of the American prairie where Elvis Presley, in a nightmare, speaks to his stillborn twin brother Jesse Garon whom he cannot see and who is therefore deprived of “a reflective quality” himself.
Pretty much all of Walker’s song lyrics share this jumping from one idea to another via associative pairing or aural puns, which at first listen give a very fragmentary idea of what is going on. It’s only when listening to the music several times over that the structure of the songs become apparent.
Because he uses many words coming from foreign languages, they sometimes come out as nonsensical, though they make sense once you understand the underlying themes. For example a song about the Balkan wars would refer to Bosnian place names, or on the contrary the place name translated in English would open another entire new avenues by using free words associations. Sometimes the listener understands them instinctively, sometimes not at all; depending on their level of obscurity Walker occasionally offers footnotes and references on the album sleeves or the lyrics booklet. These can be helpful sometimes, but in truth they don’t always feel necessary.

The Audience Is Listening.
Now as for the music, it also follows an inner logic that makes lots of sense once Walker unveils the main rule that underlines his creative process: as the lyrics are what come first to him, the music has to match them, sometimes quite literally. In an interview recently published in the magazine The Believer, he explains how the drums in the song See You Don’t Bump His Head on Bish Bosch are there to match the image of the swan in the lyrics, where the bird seems to be gliding majestically over the water while below the surface it is frantically paddling, to keep on moving.
Once that principle of sounds corresponding to the lyrics or trying to give the best possible approximation of them is understood, then the infamous percussive meat-punching for the song Clara on The Drift becomes evident as a signifier for the mob defiling the corpse of Mussolini’s mistress after she’s been executed along the Italian dictator. Aside from the Foley effects used on his records, the songs themselves tend to be built to include many moments of silence, “silence” being defined by Walker as the origin for the lyrics and as an essential part of the music itself.
All the music is constructed according to an internal structure that isn’t made to be obvious to a listener, so the traditional verse-chorus-bridge we’ve been used to with Pop music and rock’n’roll is noticeably absent, though there are repetitions of musical patterns and lyrics in most songs.
When we switch on the radio, go shopping, hear movie soundtracks, go to restaurants and bars, most of the current commercial music that we’re passively subjected to is constructed around drum loops or build with the idea that the beat is the essential component holding the song together as an entity.
Walker’s music is totally opposite: there are breaks and changes within the beat, and sometimes there isn’t any beat at all for very long moments. These shifts in patterns are startling to an audience that isn’t used to them, though they are relatively common in

contemporary classical music. The other changes that tend to shock and surprise the listener are the shifts in registers when Walker sings, which are likely the source of the dismay or even the disgust expressed by some of his [now former] audience, the one that screams “bollocks” in capital letters in YouTube comments under videos from The Drift or Bish Bosch. Journalists invariably mention Walker’s current singing style as “strangled”, “as if his testicles were being squeezed” which immediately signal that they haven’t really listened to the records in their entirety, because you can’t really hear that in songs such as Cossacks even though it is the opening tune on The Drift, or that they somewhat missed the recent video clip for Epizootics! from Bish Bosch, a song where you can clearly hear his baritone though not throughout.
In all the records in the Tilt/The Drift/Bish Bosch trilogy, Walker doesn’t restrict himself to one singing style but rather sings in at least three different registers, his regular baritone as well as some lower and higher range, sometimes shifting from one to the other within the same song. The singer’s magnificent baritone has been lauded everywhere as one of the greatest male voice of the 20th century, consequently the high register he sometime uses in his songs seems to be the one that rankles both his old fans and his current detractors, who regret that he has “abandoned his own voice”. He hasn’t actually done that but rather has added two different registers to his usual one and has been prominently using the tenor-like over the others, something he explains in interviews once again by the need to voice his lyrics according to their internal structure, but also in terms of pitch in relation to the way the rest of the music is laid out.
When listening carefully to Walker’s current singing style and his shifts between registers within the same song, the most strikingly strange thing isn’t his use of the high register, but first and foremost his diction. It is so impeccable it does indeed sound peculiar, the same way opera singers can sometime sound incomprehensible when they sing in English as every single word is so impeccably pronounced.
Walker articulates his singing so clearly and precisely that every single letter and sounds comes out crystal clear: no final “s” is ever forgotten, every single “th” so exact you can almost picture his tongue being placed between his teeth. His phrasing and articulation are so perfect as to manage to convey humor even with onomatopoeia, which he uses sometimes in appropriated lyrics, bringing echoes of Baroque singing with, say, a marked elongation of consonants or an over-artificial way of repeating “la la la la”. But this use of ultra-precise phrasing and diction isn’t new at all, as it can be heard as early as in the Walker Brothers day, in their cover of Land Of Thousand Dances for example.
In his recent music, it is just used as yet another tool to emphasize the prominence of the lyrics, as an additional instrument at the service of the music in its totality rather than a personal mean of self-expression. If you start hearing it as such then it becomes clear that the voice and the singing are the binding element of the music. It’s not the beat that holds a Scott Walker song together, since it is not continuous indeed nor the melody since it also shifts all the time; but the precise articulation of the lyrics by the voice, a voice that Walker wants to see purged of its ego or personality so as to express a universal experience of “another kind of self”. One can only hazard guesses at what this another kind of self is, a sort of collective persona that could sum up the absurdity of human existence with all its travails but also all its redemptive experiences (love, beauty, empathy, humor…). In this context, the famous Scott Walker’s baritone ceases to be the trademark of a former Pop star but just another means at the musician’s disposal in the vast array of instruments needed to complete the music. Therefore it can be modified, adulterated or bypassed in favor of another register more apt to convey a particular piece of lyrics, without any concern about whether the voice sounds “natural” or not.

Its volume also reinforces the artificiality of the voice and the diction: Walker can shift from a whisper to a shout to spoken words to a snippet of melody within the same minute. By doing so he has pretty much invented his own style of singing, a style that is so new very few musicians have been able to cover his recent material successfully, a style that can appear unnatural because we’re not yet used to it.

The Voices And Their Audience
For someone coming new to his later work without any knowledge of his 1960s career, the debate doesn’t really exists, but for clarity’s sake the question of natural versus unnatural range and register deserves a quick detour.
Now that we’re living in the 21st century and have been used to so many singers in both pop and classical music singing outside of any “natural” or “conventional” range, from falsetto (Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury, Russell Mael) to counter-tenor (Alfred Deller, Klaus Nomi) you wonder why Walker’s use of a different one from his natural baritone in the music he’s been making for almost twenty years now is so disturbing. Especially at a time when nobody seems to think twice about how artificial and bizarre Autotune sounds when added to the voice of Miley Cyrus or Lady Gaga yet their records and songs sell by the millions. Outside of pop music, Schoenberg has come up with Sprechstimme as early as 1912, and once again we can quote opera or baroque singing as rather unnatural for untrained singers. More recently we’ve been used to the recitative spoken lyrics expressed in hip-hop music, a genre that pretty much radically did away with a lot of the melody and put the beat at the forefront of the music.
Take seemingly niche musical genres such as Death Metal and Black Metal, where singers routinely seem to be vomiting rocks when uttering fairly disturbing lyrics about mayhem and murder, on top of complex distorted musical structures. All the same these types of singing styles are no more conventional than Walker’s yet don’t encounter the same type of indignant resistance. In most cases they’ve been already digested, sometimes via assimilation by more mainstream acts, sometimes because of the powerful effect of dilution and dissemination operated by movie soundtracks. We have yet to see how David Bowie’s homage to Walker’s current singing style in his latest record could help spread it, but just the fact it has been recognized as such in the mainstream media signals a flicker of recognition.

The Audience Is Waiting.
So, what is so new with Walker’s music that makes it difficult to immediately assimilate? Is that the voice, then, considering the various singing styles enumerated above? The only real difference is that with Walker, the breaks in the beat patterns added to the use of different registers within the same song create surprising variations. Where Walker creates his own style is for one thing the musical domain where he operates, because he is neither a contemporary classical musician nor an alternative artist, as he uses instruments and orchestrations that belong to both genres, bridging them in something that doesn’t exist elsewhere yet. Contemporary classical music sometimes make uses of electric instruments associated with rock and roll, while some rock musicians have occasionally used the power of multiple instruments inspired by classical orchestras to create new works, like Glenn Branca’s guitar pieces. What these lack usually is a singer. There are unconventional singers in contemporary classical music, there are rock acts that play with large orchestras, but rarely do these mix together to create a brand new genre.

A striking thing comes up repeatedly when musicians who either worked with Walker or enjoy his music comment on how what he does doesn’t belong to anything known musically: it is not classical, it is not avant-garde, it is not Pop or rock music, it isn’t harmony, it isn’t discord, but something that exists at the frontier between all of these. It escapes any known definition as of now, and because it occupies such an uncertain space it produced discomfort in the listener. That uncertain, undefined space is a space that moves away from known musical conventions.
It is not only the voice that is unconventionally used in Walker’s music, but the whole structure of the music that constantly shifts unto itself, a process that Walker explains as a way to avoid complacency in the listener. In very simple terms, the titles of the last three records are fairly revelatory about what the music somehow does: it tilts, it drifts away from accepted musical tropes, to somewhat unsatisfactorily wrap up with Bish Bosch: the job is done, sort of, with an atrociously bad pun that also shifts from “bish bash bosh” to “a kind of universal female artist”, according to interviews given by Walker. One doesn’t have to swallow this explanation whole, but listening to the last album you can sense another departure, another shift for Walker. This record is irregularly shaped, like a baroque pearl, it sounds more dynamic, more diverse than the two previous ones, more humorous as well, a bit as if Walker was announcing he was done exploring the sound he had created and was now ready to experiment with new avenues with the next record. It’s also less tight and compact than Tilt and The Drift, and if it contains great up-tempo songs (See You Don’t Bump His Head, Epizootics!) it doesn’t present such magnificent and beautiful highlights like Farmer In The City or Rosary (on Tilt) or Jesse and A Lover Loves (on The Drift).
There’s a certain abandonment of pure obvious beauty, though there are some beautiful moments on Bish Bosch (Dimple comes to mind) for something more playful and exploratory. And yet Bish Bosch is still far ahead of most commercial music that has come up since then and been hailed as new or innovative: David Bowie’s The Next Day still adheres to conventional song structure even when he tries to imitate Walker on Heat, while The Knife’s attempts at Shaking The Habitual sound mostly contrived and laborious, as for Kanye West’s Yeezus, the bloated egomania at work can’t mask the poverty of the lyrics while the music itself is rather bland and unimaginative.
To the simple question asked earlier, “What does the work want?” the simple answer is that Scott Walker’s music demands undivided attention from the listener. This is not wallpaper music that can be used as a backdrop for parties or domestic chores, but something else, something closer to contemporary visual arts. It shares with artists like Mike Kelley the same interest for irritating, grotesque or annoying motifs that are unforgettable and force the audience to pay attention, to look, to listen, to try and think. Like most complex artworks it asks questions and points to avenues of explorations, rather than provide the audience with easy answers, with comfort, with delusions. Because its forms are so new it is easy to mock, ridicule, vilify or crudely parody, like most groundbreaking works of art have been. Because the work is so new despite its nearly two decades of existence, it has only found a limited

public... so far. Because it is so innovative yet existing in a context where all sorts of unconventional genres of music are readily available on the Internet, it is in fact on its way to finding an ever expanding audience, as evidenced in the many personal blog posts written about it.

Meanwhile, the audience is waiting. It is waiting for the time when it will meet the trajectory of Scott Walker’s music and finally surrender to it. It is still blind to the realization that the unthinkable has already happened: the very first music that speaks of the 21st century is here.

Scott Walker Trilogy: Tilt, The Drift And Bish Bosch

It's been a pretty busy few months for Scott Walker aficionados since his latest album Bish Bosch was released last December,  and with a new boxset of his five first solo albums being reissued at the beginning of this month.
A lot has been written and published about Walker's very long musical career and the so-called enigma of his "reclusive" personality, his audience seemingly divided sharply between two camps*, with the one preferring his old stuff (usually described as aging boomer women in the musical press) and the other really more into his newer output (described as middle-aged hipster dudes in the same press. Clichés never die). This division is a bit pointless, and if you come to his music brand new I'd say you should, like me, start backwards, especially if you come from the art world. Then you shouldn't be surprised by anything.

To give a  quick recap, Walker was born Noel Scott Engel in 1943 in Hamilton, Ohio, had an itinerant childhood in the United States, started performing as a child singer on Broadway then on the Eddie Fischer show on TV, before joining in his early twenties a club band in Hollywood named the Walker Brothers, none of them being siblings nor named Walker.
He was their bass player, and the band later achieved brief but immense fame in the UK in the mid-1960s when it morphed into a majestic boys band performing (mostly) covers of foolproof standards arranged with soaring orchestrations. They had great looks, Engel was (and still is) blessed with one of the most beautiful male voice of the last half-century or so, and so he became the reluctant lead vocal of the band. And the target of thousands of screaming and stalking pubescent girls, an experience that has apparently traumatized him for life. He's said to be a painfully shy man and extremely private person so finding himself the target of such violent scrutiny can only have been frightening, as he was often unable to leave his home lest he be molested by dozens of young women trying to tear off bits of his clothing and of his body as souvenir.

The band broke up like all bands do (the Rolling Stones and U2 don't count, OK?),  Scott Walker released in a very quick amount of time 4 magnificent solo albums of mostly self-penned music (with Jacques Brel covers that made the Belgian singer known to the Anglo-Saxon world), the last one sinking without a trace in 1969, condemning him to an ignominious career in the 1970s as a cheesy singer interpreting crappy innocuous  ballads and country music.
The legend goes that he drank himself to oblivion, until a Walker Brothers short reunion at the end of the 1970s before breaking up definitively again, but not until after they had made a great experimental record called Nite Flights in 1978. It influenced  David Bowie and Brian Eno, and is in passing screaming for a re-issue on vinyl.
Scott Walker then had to wait until 1984 to be able to record an entirely self-penned solo record again, Climate of Hunter, and then wait another decade to come up with his "latter" work with Tilt. Then in 2006 came The Drift, and last year Bish Bosch. 
These albums have come to constitute a trilogy, often deemed "difficult" or "inaccessible" by music critics. Yours truly begs to differ, because I listen to them all the time, if not every day (as a matter of fact, almost everyday, save when I have a migraine). Not only that but sometimes I listen to the three of them in a row, which is an incredible experience I can only recommend you try (you just need 4 solid hours of free time ahead).
Also, I digress, but I would really like if music critics wouldn't utter definitive pronouncements on new records such as "listeners won't give it more than a couple of listens", which I've read about Bish Bosch when it came out, at a time when I'd had maybe a dozen listens of the record already. Music critics, you can't presume everybody will have the same experience and reaction to music as yourselves.

A lot of the Walker mystique has to do with the long time that comes between his solo records, and the fact that as he seems to be living a totally normal, regular life. Like he goes to the supermarket, rides his bike, etc. The length of time between albums has a lot to do with record labels and music industry shenanigans more than anything else, as is often the case with older musicians who make or strive to make non-conventional music (John Cale, my other favorite musician, has had to wait a long time between leaving EMI and finding a home at Domino/Double Six, for example). The regular life means Walker doesn't show his face at industry parties and celebrity hangouts. Also, he's seventy now and maybe he'd rather be at home or spending time with his loved ones than, I don't know, go to a sponsored party for some stupid cell phone? You've been to one stupid party, you've been to all of them.


If you want to know more about Walker, there are at least half a dozen books and bios published about him. I've read about 3 or 4 and I can confidently tell you that you'd better read his Wikipedia bio and then hunt from various interviews on the internet (several audio and video interviews are available on YouTube, and you can find some good ones on the websites of The Quietus, The Guardian, etc.), you will learn as much and you won't have to spend the money that would be better used buying his own records. It's more interesting to listen to his music anyway than trying to figure out what this elderly dude eats for breakfast, who he's dating, and how he makes a living (seriously the number of interviews I've seen when he's asked how he makes money, geez, how rude).
In addition there was a rather good documentary complete with interviews with Walker himself that came out in 2006, Scott Walker 30th Century Man. It's available on DVD, there are excerpts on YouTube (the whole thing seems to be available on there as well but "not available in your country blah-blah-blah), and I think it's a better introduction to Walker than most of the books and bios. It's great because you see Walker working in the studio in it, something that always fills me with childish wonder when I see it because music making is very abstract to me, so seeing it being made is always a treat.

Now, about the music. As I said earlier, there are apparently 2 bitterly divided camps about his music. That was rather new to me when I started to get into Walker's music, rather late compared to everybody, as usual.  You see, I discovered it with his "later" output post car-accident, one evening  in 2009, when I clicked on one of those YouTube related links after listening to I can't remember what (Throbbing Gristle maybe?)
The song was "Jesse", from  The Drift and HOLY MOTHER OF BELPHEGOR HOW COME SOMEONE CAN MAKE SUCH INCREDIBLE MUSIC!
I had absolutely no idea that the song was about 9/11 and about Elvis Presley's dead twin brother.  Not that it  mattered to me at the time.
All I knew was that it was heartbreakingly beautiful, and that whoever was singing like this made me cry. I had to listen to it over and over again, until I moved onto a few other songs by Walker.

By that stage all I knew about him is that he was a name that had been repeated many times in French mag Les Inrockuptibles when it was still a respectable publication, at the very beginning of the 1990s. At the time I was too broke to buy music anymore, and Walker's records weren't available anywhere that I knew of. I was also under the misguided impression he was some old, washed out Nashville country singer, which, in my twenties, sounded like anathema.
His subject matter at the time was a lot about the miseries and sordidness of ordinary life, but also about political subjects, and also sex of course in all its crude and unsavory facets as well as its unmitigated pleasures.
 I'm just mentioning this because some of his recent lyrics can also be raunchy, he deals with the political as well, etc. and so I don't see a real discontinuity with what he sang about in the 1960s. The language has evolved, it's more poetic and also I think more sophisticated, but in some songs it still follows a narrative of sorts, especially on Bish Bosch, with SDSS1416 + 13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter), the coolest song title ever.

I'm generally not super curious about musicians beyond reading the Wikipedia entry about them if there's one, which I'm sure I did at the time,  and then I quickly forgot the basics. At that time I was also very broke again (see, car accident) and not yet in a possession of a turntable, so I had to wait until 2 years ago to be able to lay my hands on beautiful vinyl records and finally find The Drift (at Wombleton Records in Los Angeles, thanks so much Ian for fetching it out of the back when I asked about it, may you be blessed forever). 

As you can see I am really very, very late to the Walker party. Which is great in a way because I didn't have to wait that long until Bish Bosch came out this year. I didn't really get into his 1960s solo record until last year, when I bought some reissues, so the division between new/old Scott Walker isn't particularly interesting nor even relevant to me. 
In hindsight when I listen to the old stuff I can see the germs of the "new" music already in songs like Plastic Palace People, with its broken tempo** and its lyrics that verge a bit into abstraction. A lot of"early" Walker songs have this tendency to abstract lyrics ("Can't you see the towers of mine they could shine like a dime" on The World's Strongest Man - I always think about something vaguely obscene like, er, ahem... when I hear that, but then I'm French),  so for me his recent songs are a continuation of that. 

The music has evolved of course, but it's still the same musical vocabulary: lots of strings, lots of bells (I love love love how he uses them) and interesting percussions, in conjunction with the regular instruments you find in rock and pop music. It's used differently of course, but once again the seeds sowed in the 1960s just grew into something exotic and unfamiliar, but recognizable and very exciting.

I'm saying all of this because if, like me, you discovered Walker recently and find your way backwards in his discography,  then you don't see what all the fuss about the "old" and "new" Scott Walker is all about.  It's the same guy, the same concerns, the same idiom, but that has evolved to become unconventional and as such groundbreaking. It resembles nothing you've ever heard before, and nowadays it's very rare to listen to music that is so new. Coming from someone who's seventy and could be happily retired.  

Now I understand that it can be very surprising if your idea of music is to put on the radio to listen to Rhianna or Beyoncé while you do the dishes, or switch on your Ibiza Dancemasters 12  mp3 compilation on when you have friends coming over. Or if you've been listening exclusively to hipster new folk music or generic indie rock for the last 10 years. 

But if you've been curious about classical and experimental classical music, as well as industrial music and pioneers of rock and roll experimentation for a long time, then Walker is for you. 
Say, you like Einstürzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle, Varese, Stravinsky, Feldman, Shostakovich, Ligeti,  the Velvet Underground, and maybe Death Metal, then you should be at home with Walker's music. 
There's a long history of eccentric figures in rock'n'roll including, say, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa (I loathe both of them but it's another story) on the one hand and maybe, say, Nick Drake and Tim Buckley on the other, and Walker bridges both types - without having anything to do with them musically, it's just to give you an idea of the type of persona that could be attracted to his music. 

So it's not as if there wasn't anything to give listeners any context to place Walker in terms of the last 50 years of popular music or so.

I think what throws off most people when they listen to the "new"*** Scott  Walker is his style of singing. At first listen it may seem unnatural. I say "may", because if you've ever heard baroque singing or even opera singing, these are totally unnatural styles that people are nevertheless not questioning at all when they listen to it. 
They don't correspond to popular, mainstream ideas of music, but they are accepted all the same. And as far as popular music goes, does Freddy Mercury's style sound natural to you? All those guys singing into falsetto voices, do they seem natural? Does Klaus Nomi sounds natural? Robert Plant? Russell Mael?
On the other end of the spectrum, how about Death Metal and Black Metal? It always sounds like singers are vomiting stones if you ask me, it doesn't prevent them from having a vast and faithful following. 
So there are many popular singers who don't sing in a natural voice, and it's also true about most contemporary R'n'B  which, being the most prevalent commercial genre these days, tells you all you need to know about about judging Walker's style on its artificiality or not. 

Walker seemed to have abandoned or rather modified his trademark barytone as far back as Nite Flights in 1978, with songs like The Electrician where he experiments with various tones (scales?  once again I lack musical descriptive vocabulary) and more characteristically with the Nite Flights song itself. Climate of Hunter pursues in this vein, until we arrive to Tilt which is really when that new singing manner makes its mark. 
The album starts with what is for me one of the most beautiful song ever written, Farmer In The City, in homage to Pasolini.
 It's a song that comes this close to verging on kitsch with its strings arrangement,  but the voice is what keeps it all together. I've listened to it over and over and even though I know if so well, my heart breaks each time Walker sings "... and I used to be a citizen".
Some other songs deal with politics and wars (Patriot-A Single and Bolivia 95 most particularly) where Walker makes his feelings known about his native country's involvement in the many bloodbaths and support of dictatorships in the 20th century), and the albums ends with Rosary, a rather bleak and spare song about... love? 

Tilt does exactly just that, it throws us off balance and obligates us to pay attention to the music because of the shift in focal point, and by focal point what I mean is that there isn't just one but many.
 And this is reflected in the structure of the songs, in the sense that they all do have a structure but it isn't a conventional one as you would expect in pop or rock music. There are breaks and pattern changes and silences and variations in tones and even in volume within the same song.
 Everything shifts in a Scott Walker song, but does so while miraculously keeping its  internal balance, more often than not through the sheer power of the voice and its unconventional singing style. 
There are moments when you would expect him to whisper lyrics and he shouts them, and some others where you'd think some power singing would do but you just get the tiniest flutter of words.  
In passing, I've read people speculating that Walker sings this way because "he must have lost his voice", to which I want to say: listen to it. People who lose their voice don't have that incredible power. Man, is he loud and powerful when he wants to.

The Drift continues in that vein, with Walker pursuing his shift away from conventional songwriting, as indicated with the album title, but with added touches of dark humor here and there. The opening song, Cossacks Are , appropriates media reviews or reports of "backhanded compliments", but whether you know it or not won't prevent you from finding it funny (I hope). 
The imagery is a mix of beautiful images and savagery "Cossacks are charging ... in a field of white roses" and absurd details "it's a nice suit... it's a swanky suit" as well as a sentence culled verbatim from George W. Bush talking about Chirac "I'm looking for a good cowboy". What makes the song is Walker's delivery, a mixture of deadpan humor and absurd tragedy.

As with Tilt, some songs are heartbreaking, such as Hands Me Up and the aforementioned Jesse. Hands Me Up mixes two topics, the cult of celebrities that came up with reality TV and a sordid tale of a father murdering his children out of jealousy.
 You can sense a lot of anxiety in the lines "The audience is waiting" (repeated 4 times) and "I tried"(twice). And then you have "the pee-pee soaked trousers": it's ridiculous -  followed immediately by "the torn muddied dress": it's a cliché. But sung together in Walker's voice, these are heartbreaking. The mundane little tragedies of childhood brought together to evoke death. 

The one song people always think about when The Drift is mentioned is Clara, about Mussolini's mistress who chose to go to her death with him even though she could have easily escaped. People remember the "meat punching" used to aurally evoke the abuse her dead body had to endure when it was exposed to the crowds at the end of WWII, an image Walker had seen on a newsreel at the cinema when he was a child and that had haunted him ever since. But it is a very long song, with a guest female singer in the middle, and some spoken words by Walker in the middle and at the end, about "birds" and the bird that flew inside someone's room and was released outside by the narrator, so unlike Clara the bird escaped  imprisonment and a certain death.

There's  also lots of humor in Walker's other songs, sometimes present only with the onomatopeia used as chorus or bridges like the "wahoo wahoo wahoo" in Rosary on Tilt, or the "Psssst Psssst" in A Lover Loves which concludes The Drift  (and ends up with "let's go!" which never fails to crack me up, no matter how many times I've heard it). 
Sometimes these are really irritating, but annoying in a way that makes you think the song would lose all its internal balance without it, and also makes you think about all the conventional "lalala lalala" or "fafafafa", etc. in countless mindless love songs everywhere. Change the sound of the onomatopeia and you see the song in a whole new light. 

With Bish Bosch we're now used to Walker's style, but this one is another beast altogether. If you compare it to Tilt and The Drift, this album is far less monolithic and much more diverse in terms of sonic textures, and the humor is this time fairly obvious. Many people commented on the "fart noises" on Corps de Blah (many UK journalists were shocked, and this coming from a country that invented the whoopee cushion) which also sounds like balloons being deflated. Or burst even.
 I like this image much more because it can be used metaphorically: the seriousness of people commenting on Walker's "somber outlook" seeing their stereotypical opinions burst with a needle and reduced to torn rubber pieces (also because the image is close to the "plucking feathers from a swan's song", the line that opens the record on "See You Don't Bump His Head"). 

 Zercon, the longest song on the record, tells the story of a deformed dwarf court jester at Attila's palace and his transformation into a stylites hermit and later on an exploding/imploding dwarf star. Being a jester he throws lots of jokes, and the one people always quote is "if shit were music, you'd be a brass band" (they fail to mention the melancholic "la la la la" right after "music" which I think adds a lot more meaning to the song). 

As always a lot of the humor comes simply with the delivery, especially if the words used are clichés: on Epizootics, a song that starts like "A Hawaiian nightmare" but morphs into an inventive use of 1930s and 1940s hipster slang (most of it  real and not invented by Walker, such as "Gabriel's gravy", but  now totally obscure especially if you're a secondary language speaker).
At the very end of the song, the last words go something like: "Sweeeeeet Lei-LAAAA-ni HEA-venly FLO-wers" to somehow make fun of all the Hawaiian imagery. 

Walker loves blending the grotesque, the ridiculous and the absurd with violence and tragedy, such as in The Day The Conducator Died, recalling the end of the Romanian dictator Ceaucescu and his wife but blending the story with "a personality questionnaire" as many dictators and world leaders suffer from personality cult, the ambiguity being compounded with the "O very much, O not so much" at the end of each question. 
The song and the record end with Walker playing a bit from Jingle Bells on precisely that (bells that jingle, thank you for the tautology, it cracks me up all the time), and it manages to be totally heartbreaking once again, while being also so ridiculous it's funny. 
The song is subtitled "A Christmas Song" because Ceaucescu and his wife were shot by a firing squad on Christmas Day. During interviews Walker was joking that "of course, it is the perfect Christmas single".

Sometimes you can't make sense of a whole song, but then I'm not sure it really matters because this can be said of a lot of other songs by other musicians (randomly, This Corrosion by Sisters of Mercy: does it make any sense to you? But it's a great song nonetheless). 
Walker uses a lot of foreign words, sometimes pronouncing them incorrectly ("cogliones", in Zercon, is a case in point), sometimes without you having any idea what they mean, like the Danish words on  Dimple, but it doesn't matter because just the way he repeats them as backing vocals is simply too beautiful. 
Sometimes the imagery is just powerful enough you don't see why there should be any meaning anyway, like the way he repeats "roomful of mice" on Pilgrim.

Bish Bosch is a whole lot different from Tilt and The Drift because, if the former heralds the shift from musical conventions and the later its floating even further away from them, Bish Bosch announces that the job is done and it's time to move on to something different. In a way it is a lighter album than the other two ones, while also being more baroque in its irregular shape. You hear more variety in the melodies and instrumentation than on The Drift, for example.
While listening to the three albums consecutively and separately, I've been trying to figure out if one of them was the best of the three, but I can't manage to come to this conclusion. 
Bish Bosch is more dynamic rhythmically so you have more variety and therefore less occasions to be emotional than on The Drift or Tilt (and that's why I say it's promising a new direction) but it's also a very tight album conceptually and musically, the way both Tilt and The Drift are. 
The only song I find a bit out of place on the trilogy is Tilt itself (on Tilt, obviously) because I think it sounds more like something that would have been more at home on Climate of Hunter.


All three records survive numerous and repeated listens without the listener (OK, make that me) ever getting bored or satiated. There's always a sonic surprise coming up whenever you put them on the turntable, always a piece of lyrics you grasp anew, and then these moments you come to expect with a childish impatience if they make you laugh, or that never fail to move you even if you heard them many, many times. 

There has been a lot made of Walker's expressivity and emotion or on the contrary lack thereof in his singing, depending on who you ask, but as far as I know, when people comment on the way he's stripping his voice of emotion, I think they miss a very salient point. 
What Walker has been stripping his voice of is his ego, and by ego what I mean is that overconfident sexual swagger many male singers are imbuing their vocals with.
 He's not demanding  people to want to fuck him (God knows the poor man has had to suffer enough from the hypersexualized attention of hordes of fans in his youth). He's not stripping his voice of emotion, he's stripping it off of manufactured, clichéd, fake feelings.
 There a millions of insincere love songs on the planet, so he's not adding yet another one to pretend to comfort lost souls and laugh all the way to Las Vegas.

What he's been doing instead is humbly asking that we listen to the words, to the stories... to the stories coming down from our common savage history, made to marry new and groundbreaking music that makes him the very first, and to my knowledge the only one musician of the 21st century, the one that transport us to another place.

Everybody else is just pretending.

I pilfered this picture from a Google image search a while ago and I have no idea where it's coming from. At a guess I think it's "Iain and Jane" who did the Bish Bosch trailer?

* You can observe this division if you check the two main Scott Walker fan pages on Facebook, one of them manned by real fans and the other by whoever represents his back catalog, I think Universal. Many people who are on that one don't seem to have any clue that Walker is still alive and making groundbreaking music.
 In passing, I'm always surprised when people check fan pages on Facebook and seem to believe or assume that whoever musician/writer/artist/filmmaker etc. is behind it and write comments assuming the person will read them and answer. It happens but it's rare...
** As I've mentioned elsewhere on the blog, I love music but I know jackshit about it, so if I use the wrong descriptive words it's all due to my lack of musical training and abilities. Sorry about that.
*** I keep on putting "new" and "later"  in quotation marks because he's been doing it for almost 20 years now, it's not so recent anymore.