SCOTT WALKER

SCOTT WALKER: ICONOCLAST/TROUBADOUR

We all experienced to some degree, lockdown in covid-pandemic purgatory, with only a cloak of loneliness to provide some degree of comfort, if only for a little while. This will make us familiar with Scott Walker’s unique brand of lugubrious gloom. His is an intellectual form of melancholy.

Scott Walker went from experiencing fame, of proportions not entirely dissimilar to that of Beatlemania in the 1960s, with the Walker Brothers — to becoming the English version of the Belgian troubadour, Jacques Brel. His first solo effort Scott, released 6 months after The Walker Brothers’ last 1960s album Images, featured the translated Brel songs, ‘Amsterdam’, ‘Mathilde’, and ‘My Death’. Let’s not forget though, that the early recordings of The Walker Brothers were magnificent in their own right. Featuring a "wall of sound" similar to the one that Phil Spector created.

Brian Eno said of Walker: “He was a real and serious artist, a conscious artist, who really thought about the medium he worked in.” Eno was serious with his compliments of Walker too: “He took music to a place where it hasn’t been since.” Scott Walker’s music and legacy will live on for generations to come, of that there is no doubt. And while his more avant-garde records may not be fully embraced in the imminent near period, there’s certainly a future where they will be revered as heroic moments of soothsaying success. As artificial intelligence grows and civilisation continues to eat itself, it’s easy to see how Walker’s compositions could soundtrack the dystopian future that looms in the news headlines of our nightmares. The fact is, whether Scott Walker was a pop maestro or an experimental troubadour, he was always laying down a vision of the future.

Written and Presented by Thom McKeown © 2021