Scott Walker. (RIP March 2019)

This morning in my room

A little swallow was trapped

It flew around desperately

Until it fell exhausted on my bed

I picked it up

So as not to frighten it

I opened the window

Then I opened my hand

The cracking voice on the last line is devastating.

the Joe Meek comp from 95 was my piece de resistance

oh, my partner and i bonded over this being in both of our collections. we both know all the songs by heart. it's fabulous. i've gotten several joe meek compilations (even a big box set) since and it's just too much of a good thing... the CD you put together is a perfect distillation of his work. so thank you!!!!!

Heartbroken.

Scott Walker was, and is, the greatest for me. My lone, and only spirit animal. We all try to hold or clutch onto things or people. For me, it was him. His presence in my life is a meandering red line stretched from playing old Walker Bros lp's of my mum that I put on the turntable when alone in the living room, curious to hear who and what were behind that corny cover; up to me echoing his dilly-dally yet incisive poetry of the latter works in my daily life.

That's a nice suit, that's a swanky suit.

There isn't a single artist that made me feel so completely at home in music, in a mind like my own, like he did. Who bridged two very different worlds - his 60s and his reinvention starting in the 80s - in which I both feel completely, utterly at home, at peace, at rest. No other musician, nor any human being, encompassed this feeling: that someone out there knows your dreams, the romance, the love, the foolishness, and - it's seems not to have been mentioned on first glance but damn - the humour! He made me feel there was someone out there I could identify with, especially in his/my growth. This is like losing a parent, in some way, for me.

A compass unlike any other. Scott Walker was my constant. And my constant he will remain.

The cracking voice on the last line is devastating.

― Acting Crazy (Instrumental) (jed_), Monday, March 25, 2019 11:43 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Fitting. I wanted to quote this, too. It's been in my head all day since I heard the news.

does anyone have a link where i can read the entire le monde editorial? the version i found requires a paywall to read beyond the first few paragraphs.

Scope J is really immense, I think it's my favourite Scott moment from the later era and he's not even on it! I think I read in an interview that it was originally slated for his next album (which would have been The Drift) but he gave it to Ute Lemper when she asked for a song. Would have loved to have heard a Scott version of it though!

That 1984 interview posted upthread is great. It's amazing to me that it appeared not in some niche publication but in a mass circulation weekly. How times change...

I forgot to mention that it is indeed behind a paywall. Sorry GG.

xp

One track on The Drift is very quiet, and then Donald Duck makes a guest appearance.

iirc, yelling "what's up doc?" which is actually Bugs Bunny's line!

I believe it makes the Pola X soundtrack redundant for Scott completists, too

no fuckin way man (uh, imo)

pola x sdtk has some of his most conventionally lovely cues, almost debussy-like

All 11 Scott pieces from the Pola X OST are on the Five Easy Pieces boxset.

really? i gave the discogs page a glance and thought otherwise. sorry.

Walker was haunted by the spectre of encroaching fascism and mass brutality in America and the history leading up to it, Tilt / Drift / Bisch Bosch were urgent on this front when no one was really talking about the subject seriously. that trilogy sounds even more terrifying now

— bernie slanders (@naxuu) March 25, 2019

xp - still, would be interested to hear the Smog & other non-Scott stuff on that. I picked it up and put it down a few times in shops that year... was always something crazy (for 1999) like £18.99. Maybe it was only an import.

Just for some levity: when singing 'Boy Child' in an impressionist's Scott-voice, I often change the line following "City after city/" with "/Had your fill with quadrilles" (from Roxy Music's 'Do the Strand').

I wrote this obit from the POV of a non-fan.

i like your comments on climate of hunter and on his voice, alfred. you have more to say about this guy whose music you don't know well than many do of music they can sing backwards and forwards.

i do think this might be a bit overstated :

In Walker’s later music it would have been a principle betrayed

his music, even the later stuff, has its own sort of hooks, and he isn't afraid of a good climax if he wants one. he just hardly does so consistently. i really don't think that, as contrarian as much of his late work may seem, he was being determinedly "weird" or working systematically counter to the usual expectations. it's a cliché but i genuinely think he was just kind of following his own path.

I always thought the line was "I opened the window / then I opened my head" and was a reference to Satie ("Ouvrez la tête")

Anyway re-listening to first-four-albums selections this morning got me in my sads again about Angela Morley also, what a fucking genius duo, the two of them

Love Angela Morley
Watership Down OST imo

i can't seem to find the link but there's a radio show from a few years ago, where jarvis cocker interviews scott for over an hour about those early records (which SW didn't often talk about) and they talk about his arrangers quite a bit. worth a listen or two.

also i don't recall scott doing much press around the time of tilt (when i first discovered him), so his relative accessibility to journalists and others in the 21st century came as a pleasant surprise, as did the fact that he was a totally unpretentious and mellow dude. i gues when i first heard his music i expected him to be like an antonin artaud type or something...

xp Oooh I would love it if you could track down the link, or I'll try to

I rate Angela's work as highly as Nelson Riddle or Mary Lou Williams, she wrote effortlessly

I do remember a Scott walker cover issue of the Wire I think around the time of tilt.

I have that issue under the bed somewhere

good wank material?

sorry, that was disrepectful in a RIP thread.

listening to "You're All Around Me" right now, hadn't locked on the Roy Orbison debt before

xp
That issue had an interview with the same journalist as the 1984 interview linked upthread. It's here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130405163815/https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/scott-walker_tilting-at-windmills

xpost

that's (orbison) a reference pt i hadn't thought of!

SW himself in the '60s declared himself influenced by jack jones, a name that mostly conjures up the word "huh?" now. but you can kind of hear it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EAELtJgD6A

i think walker's singing on the early records is more bombastic in the orbison mold and lacks the conversational intimacy of sinatra, who he is sometimes compared to. sinatra never wrote something like "big louise," though.

Sinatra didn't write, period.

do you intend "bombastic" as description or criticism? Orbison's choice of approach on "It's Over," "Running Scared," "In Dreams" is appropriate to the songs he wrote.

that's my point!

xpost

description, not criticism. i adore orbison and sW!

I remember Jack Jones popping up on aging WW2-generation-friendly TV variety shows in the '60s and '70s. His dad Allan was the boring musical relief in the Marx Brothers' two best MGM movies.

With that record I mentioned I hear Orbison in the arrangement just as much.

yeah jack jones was one of those slightly younger guys who seemed to appeal to the greatest generation, like maybe bobby darin.

The Jones of "Jolson and Jones" references Jack Jones's dad Allan. It shares lyrics with Jones's Donkey Serenade

!!

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GD6qtc2_AQA/maxresdefault.jpg

and Jack Jones did the Love Boat theme

that song has the most musical use of a donkey's braying since the opening of au hasard balthazar.

xpost lol

alternate universe where scott walker sings the love boat theme

Jack Jones also had the lead role The Comeback, a slasher flick directed by British sleaze merchant Pete Walker - Jones definitely sounds quite Scott-like at about the 47s mark in this trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhdFiw-tOCU

Some talk of Jack/Allan Jones in this Scott interview: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/scott-walker-not-easy-on-himself-6101790.html

jones kinda has a face made for radio tbh

“You’re all around me” is a great tune. It actually gets stuck in my head constantly even though I haven’t listened to it in years. I like the part where he thinks about the pigeon.

not that anyone needs reminding but this is an extraordinary song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIJzTWk6bSw

i can't seem to find the link but there's a radio show from a few years ago, where jarvis cocker interviews scott for over an hour about those early records (which SW didn't often talk about) and they talk about his arrangers quite a bit. worth a listen or two.

I believe the interview has now been repeated on 6music, so will now be on the BBC player

Jarvis: "I've got a recording of an interview you gave a few years ago, can I play a bit of it to you?"

Possibly the only person who could get that one OK'ed by Scott

I love how Scott had Jarvis add "The second side of 'Til The Band Comes In" to the list of substandard things in Bad Cover Version

He didn't - Jarvis wrote it before Scott was on the project, he claims that Scott never noticed it - certainly never said owt.