In 2013, existential enigma Scott Walker returned with a staggering new album, Bish Bosch. A dense, at times almost impenetrable, hybrid of rock and classical composition with wildly divergent themes, it was an album that demanded - and rewarded - concentrated listening. Speaking to MOJO on the eve of the record's release, Walker looked back on the changing identities that defined the rock era’s most schizoid, fantastic journey. “There’s a personality connection running through all of this…” he told Ian Harrison...
There’s a special section for literature from Eastern Europe in Holland Park’s swish Daunt Books. Among the volumes on display are Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master And Margarita, Laura Silber and Allan Little’s forensic The Death Of Yugoslavia and Jaroslav Hašek’s absurdist masterwork The Good Soldier Švejk. Before an appointment this October afternoon, MOJO is browsing the assemblage of mystical realism, poetry, historical weight, culpability, horror and barbed comedy, and killing some time.
We gradually become aware of someone next to us examining the same shelves; a tall man in denims, with a green army forage cap pulled over his eyes. Possibly conscious that he’s been spotted, he drifts silently away and starts rustling in his shoulder bag. Can it be? It is. Scott Walker, looking for his sunglasses.
Seventeen years of semi-visibility and productivity haven’t eclipsed the enigma of this uniquely shadowed presence in music. Owner of one of the finest voices to ever sing of emotional hurt and the great unknowns, he found fleeting fame with hysteric pop heartthrobs The Walker Brothers in the mid-’60s, before seeing out the decade with four wildly esteemed, magnificent solo albums. His descent into obscurity in the 25 years that followed was so vertiginous as to become almost equally fascinating, while his return to recording in 1995 has posed as many questions as it’s answered. Consequently, it seems almost unthinkable that he should be seen by daylight; even when 2006’s bio-doc 30 Century Man saw big names like David Bowie, Radiohead and more paying tribute, none really managed to puncture the mystery.
In the bookshop, the seconds creep by. As the awkwardness of the predicament becomes unbearable, flight seems the only option. Disappearance. It’s a concept Walker is wholly familiar with.
Ten minutes later, we’re talking in his manager’s airy front room, the site of a previous meeting in February 2006 to discuss his then-new album, The Drift. Seventy in January, he’s little altered since that day, looking, at most, a trim 60. In conversation he remains a combination of intensity, polite obfuscation and charm; the bookshop encounter is alluded to with a short laugh. He also explains later that he broke his left front tooth on his bike while carrying it up some stairs recently, and has been avoiding the dentist “like crazy” ever since.
We’re here to enquire about Bish Bosch, his 14th solo LP, part-named for Medieval artist Hieronymus Bosch, who painted visions of heaven and hell using the visual language of nightmares. Bish Bosch is no less spectacular. A dramaturgical, audio-sculptural hybrid of rock and classical composition, it presents juddering, imagistic distortions of time, space and language, touching upon such disparate concepts as bodily functions and decay, comedian Jimmy ‘Schnozzle’ Durante and the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauçescu and his wife Elena on Christmas Day 1989. A less granite-hard and more antic experience than other of his late period works, these songs are intent, serious and precise, and demand concentrated reading. Ironically, making it was a relative breeze for a man who, since 1984, had only managed one new record every 11 years.
“This one’s been lightning speed for me,” begins Scott in tones hushed and still unmistakably American, 47 years after his arrival in Britain. “Just over a year it took me… I’ll start with a kind of anchor song, that will start the vibe going, then everything else starts to
unfold around it.”
The anchor was album centrepiece SDSS1416+13B. Begun in 2009, this 22-minutes of effortful intensity and cold suspension conflates Attila The Hun’s midget jester, a brown dwarf star in the constellation of Boötes, and a ’30s American craze for squatting atop poles.
“It was tough getting going on that,” he says. “The character, he’s a comedian in a sense, so the song begins with him being heckled by silence. What he’s trying to do is escape his situation, to achieve a kind of spiritual sovereignty – an altitude without calculation, something without a bottom or a top. In 2010, when I read an article about this brown dwarf star, I thought, That’s how it ends for this guy. He becomes this dwarf star. He’s trying to will his way into this space by ascending, but it only happens when you don’t will it. That happens when I start to write. If you start to push anything, it doesn’t work. It was perfect for me.”
This oblique aesthetic – be aware, the phrases “eunuch Ron”, “spam castanets” and “earth’s hoary fontanelle” appear in the lyrics – might make some listeners feel he’s gone too far off the deep end, but Scott is unconcerned with such things.
“Right now I have enough people who appreciate the work that I reach,” he says, smiling. “It’s not going to bother me if people call it mad… they can go listen to, I don’t know, Take That or something. People were saying this, remember, back when I started making my solo records.”
As to whether Bish Bosch could be seen as a continuation of his earlier albums, he’s in cautious agreement.
“I don’t want to labour it, but I definitely think there’s a personality connection running through all of this,” he says thoughtfully. “There’s a point where you break away in a big way, maybe sonically, but the core of what you are is drifting around in it somewhere, no matter how far you move on.”
Noel Scott Engel, born in Hamilton, Ohio on January 9, 1943, never wanted to be a singer. His father’s work in the oil industry saw him residing in Texas, Colorado and New York; as a child actor and singer, he made some recordings in his teens, one of which gloried in the title Misery. He and his mother moved to Los Angeles when he was 16. A progressive jazz fan and aspirant bassist into Stan Kenton and Bill Evans, he was, he says, the Continental suit-wearing natural enemy of the Californian surfer. Sombre currents moved in the young Engel’s mind. At 17, he saw The Virgin Spring, Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 tale of rape, murder and revenge in Medieval Sweden. It changed his life, he says. From then on, playing bass with The Surfaris, The Routers and others would fit around trips to Wiltshire Boulevard’s art house cinemas to gorge on Fellini and Bresson.
“I was a geek then, I guess,” he says. “Obsessed with things. We could get into jazz clubs in Los Angeles in the afternoons, we’d buy all the latest Miles Davis records as well as rock records. I was reading the Beats, Kerouac and all that stuff at the time, going to art school, working in the evenings as a jobbing muso.”
By late 1963, Scott and fellow former child thesp John Maus, who sang and played guitar, had started playing the clubs together. The jump to faux familydom was a short one, and as ’64 turned into ’65, the coiffured, smiling Walker Brothers – with John singing lead – were on TV dance shows Hollywood A Go-Go and Shindig!.
Fate would call decisively at the end of 1964, when ex-Standells drummer and wisecracking networker Gary Leeds started coming to Gazzarri’s, the La Cienega Boulevard nitespot where The Walker Brothers had a residency. Leeds explained that he’d just been to the UK with PJ Proby, and knew there were opportunities there for handsome Californian singer dudes with good teeth. An $8,000 donation from Leeds’ stepfather and, Scott admitted later, the attentions of the US draft board, sealed the deal.
They departed on February 17, 1965, having recorded a version of The Everly Brothers’ Love Her with Nick Venet and Jack Nitzsche for Mercury the day before. The song’s Spectoresque production, rocketing heartache, and Scott’s powerful lead baritone would become the group’s signature. After Leeds hustled their UK label Philips into getting behind them, and Love Her hit in June ’65, the group duly exploded.
September ’65 and February ’66 saw volcanic smashes Make It Easy On Yourself and The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore surge to Number 1 on Herculean strings, making The Walker Brothers one of the most rabidly adored groups in the country. Gary Leeds recalls Scott, who served as effective co-producer alongside the chain-smoking Johnny Franz, being presented with a Philips TV for his chart success.
“Those times never enter my mind, now,” says Scott tersely. “I was glad to have lived through that popular music experience, though, because so many people who write transgressively – which is more or less the side I’m on now – don’t always understand that other side, though I’m sure some of them secretly long to have had it… I remember Ready Steady Go!, the first time we went up there and the [fans] literally tore us apart, we raced back to the hotel in rags. Well, you brought it up, and now I remember it!”
He was always thinking outside of his role. A filmed interview of the period sees John and Gary talking about cash, while the sunglasses-wearing Scott, whose songwriting had began to seriously spark with such future-pointing, metaphysical vignettes as Orpheus and Archangel, declares, “I’m in it from a strictly creative point of view.”
“The first couple of albums with the Brothers, I loved it, and I loved making them,” he concedes now. But by the time of their third Top 10 LP Images, the alcohol-inflamed tensions and straitjacketing formats were becoming intolerable. By what would turn into their farewell tour – a heroically mismatched bill featuring The Walker Brothers, Cat Stevens, Engelbert Humperdinck and The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Engel and Maus were not talking. After a final date at the Tooting Granada on April 30, 1967, the group were no more. “It was a phenomenal thing that happened,” Scott reflects. “Once you’ve been there, it’s like any big experience, why have it again? Just do it when you’re young, have the money when you’re young. ’Cos you wouldn’t want to stay there.”
This fall, however, and the booze that went with it, now seems an integral stage in the development of his subsequent persona. Immersed in Camus, Kafka and Sartre since arriving in Britain, Scott the existentialist – “I wasn’t a hippy, not by a long shot,” he says today – had discovered the mordant chansons of Belgian songwriter Jacques Brel towards the end of The Walker Brothers. When Andrew Loog Oldham gave him Mort Shuman’s translations of these songs of death, drunkenness and anguish, the effect was seismic.
“Brel was a real key for me,” says Scott. “It opened all kinds of ways for me to write, so when the group finished I had some place to go to launch a solo career. It’s funny with him, though, because when I actually got to see footage and talk to people about him he had a kind of burlesque, music hall attitude, almost like Rolf Harris or something, whereas if you listen to his records it came across as something else. I took it that way, and I took it even further.”
Consequently, September ’67s Number 3 Scott and April ’68’s chart-topper Scott 2 were full of riveting incongruities, mixing Broadway tunes, Tim Buckley songs and seamy Brel compositions alongside his own increasingly luminescent solo works. Does he recall the writing process of early triumphs Montague Terrace or The Girls From The Streets now?
“I’d probably be sitting there with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s late at night, when logic flips away,” he reflects. “We were all very young then, highly romanticised, and we would just get it out that way… I had no discipline way back. It was probably a combination of melody and lyric going on, batting back and forth at the same time. I don’t remember toiling like I do now. But, you know, I haven’t heard those songs in years.”
A particular provocative intent was in evidence on his December ’67 solo hit Jackie. A galloping cover of Brel’s La Chanson De Jacky, it brought the bold lyric “authentic queers and phoney virgins” to Frankie Howerd’s TV variety show, but was otherwise banned by the BBC. Yet its follow-up four months later was a formidably MOR cover of Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent’s Joanna, a song that former Walkers bandmate Leeds confirms was a particular cause of tension for the singer. “Scott got really fed up with doing The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore, but the one he really hated singing was Joanna,” he says. “I’d be, Everybody really likes it! And he’d say, ‘I just don’t like singing it.’ I think it was because he was so gifted, and singing was so easy for him, almost like talking, y’know? And Scott wasn’t satisfied with just that, he wanted new lyrics, to test the voice, to push everything else into another art form. All Maurice [King, manager] wanted to do was make Scott another Andy Williams, or Sinatra.”
After March ’69’s baroque Scott 3 eschewed non-Brel covers, June’s easy listening …Sings Songs From His TV Series really confused matters by featuring showbiz tunes previously sung by Matt Monro and Jack Jones. A bid for freedom came that November, when Scott dispensed with his manager and reverted to the name Scott Engel for the wholly self-penned Scott 4. Adopting a more contemporary rock style for its second side, its most momentous track remains opener The Seventh Seal – a spaghetti western transmutation of Bergman’s 1957 film of a knight’s doomed chess match with Death.
Scott now admits that while his intention was always to entertain during the early solo period, 1969’s _Scott 4_was a conscious break. “Some popular entertainers can have a good shot at it, but you can’t please everybody,” he says, “so I gave it up. Scott 4 wasn’t an attempt to do a commercial record, so it didn’t exactly appeal to the Top 20. It wasn’t a shock [when it didn’t chart], because my previous record didn’t sell like my first two, because once again I was trying something a little different.”
The leap was too drastic for many. Compared to his previous three albums’ Top 3 placings, the non-charting Scott 4 was rapidly deleted. The following year’s ’Til The Band Comes In went similarly unnoticed. It contained an often sublime song-suite relating to tenants of an apartment building, but the appending of MOR covers including the pregnantly titled It’s Over and What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life boded ill. For the next seven years, he would sing only other people’s songs.
The album covers of ’Til The Band Comes In and 1973’s country flavoured Stretch both featured Scott smiling, but these were not terrific times. His feet shuffle as he’s forced to revisit this woeful period. “I was just doing records by rote, to get out of contracts,” he says wearily. “I was out of it a lot of the time, too. I’d always been a bit of a drinker, but I really escalated the stakes then…”
There was booze on show – this time a celebratory tin of Newcastle Brown Ale – on the sleeve of The Walker Brothers’ 1975 reunion album No Regrets. Having got back with the similarly loose-ended John and Gary, the LP’s title track would be Scott’s first hit in six years.
The real fireworks, however, would come in 1978. With their GTO label about to disintegrate, Scott’s songwriting returned with a vengeance. With Bowie’s “Heroes” as a reference point, and aware of the statue-kicking nature of punk, the four skeletal, opaque Engel originals on Nite Flights (working title, ‘Death Of Romance’) were stunning, and reached their most abstract, terror-struck intensity with the nerve-scraping strings and terminal harmonies of torturers’ fantasia The Electrician. The album sold around 3,000, and The Walker Brothers split for the final time.
“I always wondered what would have happened if we’d carried on,” John Maus, who died in 2011, told me in 2006. “We were in outer space there. The Electrician is kinda like death, y’know? But we had to go there… where do you push the music to? Scott has the tendency to frighten people away from him, but I admire his tenacity, and I’d like him to know that I’m in his corner.”
A last round of dates saw the group travelling by train to cabaret clubs in the English regions and avoiding the Nite Flights material. Their mid-1978 residency at Birmingham’s Night Out was wincingly anatomised in Anthony Reynolds’ 2009 Walkerbook The Impossible Dream. With John and Scott absent from the stage, Gary was reduced to telling the slow handclapping audience, “It’s great to be in Cleethorpes.” The scene would, ironically, have provided the ideal setting for the live premiere of The Electrician.
Aside from Julian Cope’s 1981 fan-comp Fire Escape In The Sky: The Godlike Genius Of Scott Walker, six years would pass before Scott was heard from again. Released by Virgin in March 1984, Climate Of Hunter was a trance-state half-hour of sonorous, lyrical ellipsis, frozen strings and fragmented rock. Like Nite Flights driven further into the other side of midnight, it once seemed hopelessly unapproachable; compared to what came later, it now sounds eerily similar to the existential late ’60s Scott somehow in the process of disappearing. There were few interviews to promote it, one being a meeting with NME’s Richard Cook where the singer added to his peculiar legend by offhandedly stating that, in his down time, “I like to watch people throw darts.”
Thereafter, the hiatus was back on again in earnest. In March 1985, sessions for an album to be produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois were abruptly abandoned. Scott would next break cover in 1987, seen alongside Dusty Springfield, Sandie Shaw and other ’60s teen idols in a Britvic 55 orange juice advert. Billed as ‘Man In Café’, it could have been the subject of a song on Scott 3.
“That was a long time-out,” he says now. “At that point I was going on to do some painting and just get away from whatever it was. Nobody was beating on my door, I didn’t have a manager, and I’m not given to hustling. I’ve always been on the point of not continuing, but when I think it’s gone, someone’s called me and dragged me back.”
There were stirrings in 1992; two new songs for the Isabelle Adjani movie Toxic Affair, and the belated release of the first four solo LPs on CD. Three years on, new album Tilt finally saw Scott come out of hiding, yet somehow he remained hidden. An anti-matter collision of rock and modern classical music with the singer operating in his higher registers, Tilt variously touched on the death of Italian film director Pasolini, the Holocaust, and, in Bolivia ’95, a man talking to the corpse of Che Guevara. “I wanna catch this terrifying moment as much as possible,” he explained at the time.
He succeeded, as he did with The Drift 11 years later. Likened by the singer to a conceptual art piece, the album shockingly gathered together threads as disparate as artist Joseph Beuys, the Yugoslav wars and Elvis Presley’s stillborn twin Jesse conflated with the 9/11 attacks. The soundtrack was sclerotic and stygian, with moments of hellish beauty and the darkest humours. With our interview reaching cessation, and Scott’s manager hovering to show us the door, it remains only to ask: operating in such uncharted territories as these, how does he know where to go, or even if it’s going to work?
“You know it,” he replies, possibly relieved that the ordeal is coming to an end. “If you asked Joyce or anybody, they would tell you that it feels right, instinctively. But I don’t want to get into trying to deconstruct it, because God knows where it comes from. It does move into a very dream-like situation, and if you try to dissect it, everything starts to sound very logical, or everyday. Really, your intention was never to do that.”
Come mid-October, and the internet briefly spasms with a bittersweet kind of trivia; David Bowie has been photographed in New York getting a takeaway. Bowie’s current anonymity is referred to in a follow-up phone interview with Walker a few days later. The two have mutual admiration; on January 8, 1997, Scott had left Bowie speechless when he recorded an affectionate message for a Radio 1 celebration of his 50th birthday. “He’s probably been my idol since I was a kid,” gulped Bowie.
“He usually isn’t stuck for words,” says Scott, more relaxed on the phone than in person. “Well, he’s stuck for words these days, I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. It’s odd, he was always around, there was always something cooking. I wish he’d make a record.”
It’s a curious turning of the tables, that someone who’s spent so much time in silence is asking an Old Master to make one more album for those who admire him. Scott seems aware of this.
“I feel that I should keep rolling along while I’ve got the opportunity,” he says. “Though I’m surprised every time I’ve been asked to do more, and I’m very grateful. ’Cos when an idea you had is working well it’s fantastic, you know? That’s worth it all.”
With this blessed state in mind, he says, he now intends to disappear again, to “go back into work hibernation, and see what happens”. Until his next transmission, Bish Bosch will exert a powerful influence on those who are open to it, as it strives to comprehend existence in all its horror, beauty and farcical comedy. That’s one thing Scott wishes to stress, he says, that Bish Bosch, like his other late works, should not be confused with simple agony.
“Franz Kafka used to get angry when he used to read his stuff to friends and no one was laughing,” he says with mild pique. “I do think that, at times. Because I don’t think my work is just one note, it has many layers. I think people ought to just start trying a little harder.”
This article originally appeared in MOJO 230.
Photo: Michael Putland/Getty