Scott: The Curious Life & Work of Scott Walker

by Paul Woods

The extraordinary personal and professional journey of Scott Walker who went from golden-voiced sixties pop-singer to iconoclastic musical adventurer. Author Paul Woods examines how the celebrated vocal range and philosophical concerns of Noel Scott Engel - aka Scott Walker - continue to challenge the accepted territory and subject matter of popular music.

Genres: Music, Biography

376 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2013

Reviews

[Iain · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a teen I feasted my ears on various off kilter artists but none was more individual in their vision than that of late career Scott Walker. Bish Bosch blew my mind. Even then only half understanding the lyrics and over all vibe of the album I loved it and it's constant gliding between dissonance, primal rhythms, soaring instrumentals and ethereal textures. I say all of this up front to let you know where I'm coming from in relation to Scott and his body of work. Born in 2000 I was not raised on the 1960s Walker Brothers tunes, I am a child of his final phase. A descent into some of the darkest music spawned by man on those final 4 albums. Bare that in mind when reading my thoughts.(Side note: I also haven't seen 30 Century Man and couldn't give a toss if this book uses parts of it. If you're surprised this book took info from the only authorised biography of Walker in which he participated, frankly you're an idiot. Yes I direct this at the other reviews of this book.)

Scott Walker is enigmatic. He is an artist truly against fame, or at least the embarrassing adulation that comes with it. Reading about his childhood and short child stardom was news to me as was the notable niche the Walker Brothers carved out of the 60s landscape. Dethroning "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones with an orchestral number in "Make It Easy On Yourself"? Brilliant, as is having Mick Jagger petulantly throw unlit cigarettes at you in a restaurant for unseating him from the peak of the charts. Scott and his bands decampment to the UK was perfectly natural (their struggles in California were interesting but didn't come to much). Scott finally had a place which would appreciate his perennially stiff upper lip, a place he would live for most of his life. I must note I don't love 60s Walker Brothers, while I appreciate the lush arrangements and Scott's voice, it's not my kind of music. It is linked to the time it was written whereas his later material is both out of this time and this world. Still, without a foundation such as this brilliance could not appear later. The rabid nature of their fans was genuinely terrifying to read about. Their car was literally flipped upside down in Dublin in the 60s. The Beatles who had gone to the states had to deal with a wall of screaming, The Walker Brothers had to deal with chunks being torn out of them. Hair and shirts being ripped off their backs, the fans wanted pieces of them as souvenirs. The giddy almost Beatle-esque heights of the Walker Brothers 60s output of course would disappear but this never dissuaded Walker from pursuing his art in the many forms it took.

Scott would make his eponymous solo albums until the commercial failure of Scott 4, easily attributed to releasing it under his actual name rather than his stage moniker. These albums were the first true glimpses of Walkers personal artistic intentions. Part of this came from the music of Jacques Brel. These albums are brilliant Scott 3 and 4 are my favourites given there's more Walker penned matierial. Scott dropped a kind of concept album with Til' The Band Comes In. This album did not perform well and left him without a label at the start of the 70s. Scott of the 70s was a gun for hire and then strangely (in this reviewers opinion at least) made country albums. There's a lot I'm glossing over here but Woods does a great job explaining why and when each phase in his career occurred. The Walker Brothers reunite, the highlight of this period of course being Nite Flights. When Woods describes the Nite Flights Scott tracks it's clear that, like myself, he deeply loves Scott's contributions to that album. Shut-out, Fat Mama Kick, Nite Flights and The Electrician are genuinely masterpieces each in their own right. Then a few disappointing performances followed and the Walker Brothers were no more once again.

The 80s would mark only one release from Walker with "Climate of Hunter" in 1984. I had not listened to the album until reading this book. It's quite fascinating, it's like the Nite Flights material but no longer frenetic and desperate. This more spaced out atmospheric album was a sign of the coming trilogy of albums which would close out Walker's career as a solo artist. Woods does a great job putting across what was going on with Scott here, he had become the recluse his reputation made him out to be. It's such an overlooked period of his life and career it's fascinating to hear anything about it. A tv ad for Britvic 55 was the last thing Scott did in the 80s. Several albums started to happen but never came to pass.

The highlight of the book is the same as my personal highlights of Scott Walkers career. From the 90s onward he descended into a new kind of music. A kind of poem more than song backed by some of the most terrifying or beautiful instrumentals, depending on what he wanted to evoke. I must give huge praise to Woods here, each album is examined from top to bottom. The Tilt chapter is great making use of Walkers dictated answers on a promotional CD which was given to press on the albums release. Rather than face the press he answered a list of questions on the CD which Woods has accurately dictated here and provided great adjoining passages like a series of explanatory umbilical cords.

Further out into the doom laden almost Beckettian landscape, Walker released The Drift. Again there is darkness and moments of beauty and way too much inspiration backing the songs to divulge in this review. I must say though Clara is the truly haunting apex of the album and Woods does a great job relaying the story of Il Duce and his voluntarily doomed lover and the way that story had a personal relevance in Walkers life.

After a much shorter period than most of his late career came Bish Bosch. The final solo Walker album. A towering marvel about the decay of everything. Like Blackstar by Bowie, Scott beat him to the punch once more although not in death itself. Whereas Blackstar is the end of one man's world, Bish Bosch feels like the death of the universe itself. It's not all doom and gloom though it's the only album I know of with a tubax, machetes being sharpened and fart sound effects. Other than Nite Flights this is my favourite thing Walker ever did, and although only written shortly after the albums release Woods again provided a great analysis of the album and it's inspirations. It's the final in a trilogy of the most haunting atmospheric music out there, the capstone on a magnificent career. The end to a great book recounting the life of an icon.
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The book is relayed in a fairly academic manner by Woods, he gives his opinion here and there and it never felt unsubstantiated although I may have at times disagreed. He cares more as the book goes on and begins to cover music he clearly loves more. I liked some of his footnotes and found others superfluous. The useful ones should have been incorporated into the text and the excess should have been binned by a more discerning editor to stop readers flipping back and forth (also some footnotes reference things without saying what he's referring to, "for those who know" well I don't Paul so you've just wasted my time). This isn't Infinite Jest for God's sake. In saying that, I still think he's done a great job exploring Scott's life and I commend him for even attempting to do so. It was definitely not an easy task to cover such a long, varied and (to outsiders) perplexing yet organic career.


(If you read this book the best way to deal with the footnotes is to slap a book mark at the end of the chapter you're currently reading. That way you can easily flip back and forth. It's still annoying but it will make it less so. I had 2 bookmarks, one for the chapter end footnotes and one for my place in the chapter in case I had to drop the book to do something else.)

[Will · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this, but it's far too dependent on the '30th Century Man' film and interviews with the Director of that project, and as such almost reads like a companion book to the film rather than a concentrated narrative in itself. The footnotes disjointed the narrative and were often pointless.

Because of Scott Walker's reluctance to give interviews, books and articles will likely use the same quotes, but I still felt this book to be a very standard race through his career and work. There was no real thread running through the book. Stick with the records, and the documentary for more info.

[Frenchy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The very latest book published about Scott Walker, it has the advantage of taking over after many other interviews and publications came out, and most notably after the documentary Scott Walker, 20th Century Man.
As such it is in fact a compilation of pretty much everything that is out there about the musician, so if you've seen the movie and read the many interviews Walker has given over the last 6 or 7 years, you won't learn very much.
If not, the book will save you spending a few hours on the internet finding pretty much the exact same information, with the addition of some newish (?) research about Walker's early life.

I didn't manage to finish it because 1) I've read pretty much everything in it elsewhere, 2) the book draws a lot of its text from verbatim interviews of participants in the documentary (but without handy footnotes to signal the fact each time some famous musician or Walker collaborator is quoted)and 3) quite frankly, the writing style of the author is a bit pompous.

This being said, as a compilation it is handy if you know nothing about Scott Walker. It could be a good starting point, especially considering the book also covers his most "recent" period, unlike the other ones.

But I'm still waiting for a good book about Walker putting back his recent music in a larger cultural context outside of the usual "it reminds me of Joyce/Beckett", but rather considering the influences of contemporary classical music, industrial and metal music and 20th century vernacular music on what Walker has been doing for the last 30 years or so.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Woods traces the life and work of Scott Walker from his early life in small-town America and stint as a teen idol through his major-league successes with the Walker Brothers and the acclaimed solo albums of the late 1960s, through to the avant-garde work he has done in recent decades. The book was published in 2012, and the last Scott Walker album it covers is Bish Bosch. That means that you won't find anything about Walker's subsequent work (i.e. his collaboration with SunnO))) and film score for The Childhood of a Leader, and further).

The book is very detailed when it comes to Walker's childhood, the 1960s, his creative slump in the early 1970s, and his brief reunion with the Walker Brothers in the mid 1970s. While Walker is a private man and a respectful fan doesn't demand too much salacious detail, Woods does describe Walker's early relationships in England, eventual marriage, heavy drinking at his nadir, and eventual divorce, facts that do reveal the writer of these powerful songs to have been a normal man like anyone else with all the struggles life entails. Scott Walker's early solo records covered songs by Jacques Brel, and Woods gives a pretty detailed background on this Belgian songwriter, and he even brings in some contemporary musicians who specialize in Brel songs to compare and contrast Walker's performances of this material to Brel's originals.

From the 1980s on, Scott Walker has been extremely protective of his private life, and though not quite a recluse when it comes to discussing his work, he has done only a relatively few interviews. Many great fans of Scott Walker's work are likely to have already read these interviews from the last decade, which are generally available on the web. The biggest insight into Walker's life and thinking in his late period is Stephan Kijak's documentary film 30 Century Man, and unfortunately Wood is forced to base the last few chapters almost entirely on the documentary , making the book rather superfluous for anyone who has already seen the documentary (the documentary is widely available on the net and well worth watching). That reliance on the documentary also perhaps hindered him from doing more of his own investigations into Scott Walker's work of the 1990s. For example, he quotes Ute Lemper’s bit in the documentary where she reads the lyrics of Scott Walker's song “Scope J” and expresses her bafflement, but he never mentions that passage of the song was taken from Herbert Ponting's “Sleeping Bag Poem” in the film Scott of the Arctic.

There is also a fair bit of padding, mostly found in the footnotes. For example, it's worth mentioning that Scott Walker has been an enormous cinephile from an early age and that it has often informed his work, but we don't need the entire plot for Citizen Kane (given as an example of one of the art films that Walker might have seen in the early 1960s).

So, ultimately I have mixed feelings about this book, but at least half of it is solid and informative, and not just about Walker's own work but the 1960s English pop scene in general in terms of its business side, who was making those orchestral arrangements and what kind of money artists were making for recordings and gigs.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly matter of fact, and clearly written from a fan's sometimes biased perspective. Although what would be the point of writing a book like this without love for the subject?

Covering ALL of Scott's working life, from his earliest attempts at teen idol status, through to Bish Bosch, with at least a nod to his occasional forays into production for other artists, this is the most comprehensive look at the enigmatic Mr Engel I have read to date.

Granted it does lean on Kijak's documentary, and has no direct input from the man himself, which is why this rating is a star short of top marks, and the only other complaint I have is that my newfound awareness of some of Scott's more obscure or unpublicised work is going to cost me in the coming months!

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was indeed a "curious" career, completely explicable by looking at Walker's oft-mentioned tastes in films and what we might term "alternative" culture. This tends to be the unavoidable arc outlined in biographies on Engel: starts out as a teen idol with fan club and everything, drops that to become a beat group bassist, joins Righteous Brothers-type boy band and goes to UK, becomes lead singer of the boy band, releases solo albums with salty subject matter and lots of Brel, gets bypassed with the onset of the late 1960s freak scene, drinks too much, churns in neutral with a return to MOR albums, reforms Walker Brothers with a No. 1 countryish song in 1975, heads for the ditch with Nite Flights and its Berlin-era Bowie tropes in 1978, then puts out effectively one inscrutable "room-clearing" album per decade up until his death at age 76.

Okay, "curious" enough. Like an ancestor of Justin Timberlake who goes off-grid and morphs into… who, exactly? But what is also interesting is that the pull of the uncommercial was so strong for Engel even when he was on top that it makes you consider that is was actually stranger that he ever became a matinee idol. Certainly someone with such morbid musings and antisocial urges would never be allowed to let such things on in major label interviews these days.

What all this gave us was the sweet spot of his Scott 1-4 albums, where essentially a classic crooner with crystal-clear diction was able to come up with something new, literary, racy and still affecting. It is hard to tire of those albums, so much is there within the songs, whether Brel covers, Engel homages to the selfsame Belgian, or more country or MOR-sourced numbers. He sounds truly divine on them, to the point where the combination of that rich baritone with lyrical snippets ("Do I hear 21, 21, 21…") is difficult to reconcile, even for a fan. That latter song ("Farmer in the City") for example has a devastating quasi-operatic chorus, but each relistening to the verse accentuates the cerebral, where the true strength is the keening emotion in the non-lyrical chorus. This is a tricky dichotomy for the singer-songwriter to bridge: you have an idea to get across, but sometimes it comes across more successfully in the setting (or "showing") than in the actual telling. Sprinkled across his experimental albums are beautiful, moving, funny moments, but rarely do they have the completeness of the approach used in the Engel-Franz albums. He seems to be creating esoteric games, acting like the main character in The Magus, making us look into ourselves through oddly-refracting shards of broken mirror. In all honesty, I have to wonder whether I would give these albums as much as I have if they had not come from the man who made that awesome 1960s tetralogy. And while I would like to think that yes, I am open to the avant-garde and to attempts to push the envelope, I also have to have to consider that I do not give myself over fully to this music, despite wanting to.

This book gives us some of the backdrop for these years but they are difficult years to disentangle from the legend or the lengthy silences. We don't really get to see much of Walker's songwriting method, nor, I imagine, would he be particularly keen to explain that much about his creative inspirations. Walker gamely wades in. He looks at the Mussolini angle, and the traumatic Newsreel footage of the slain dictator, he also finds some of the source material Walker was using to create his oblique lyrics. More than any other biography of Walker that I have seen, there is an attempt to place his difficult later work into a new context more akin to the way we would look at a painter's oeuvre.

And so we come to "curious": since Scott Walker's output has come in the world of commercially sold music, and his place in the avant-garde has come about because of the few hardy zealots who were willing to follow him across the desert (or sign him up to an album deal that would allow him to cross the desert) and not a new influential crowd of young hipsters, he is an eternal outsider, an entirely peripheral figure. Who would have imagined that of the golden-voiced star if the mid-1960s?

[Pete daPixie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Being old enough to be a long time admirer of the 'Walkers' I was drawn to this 2013 publication as a catch up to discover details of Mr Engels' life and work since those swinging sixties.
I have to say that perusing 'Scott: The Curious Life & Work of Scott Walker' has not been an easy read.
Certainly the biography of Engel, John Maus and Gary Leeds' early lives and musical journey was a pleasant stroll down memory lane. The journey became much more difficult once the trio split and Scott's curious life and work was documented by author Paul Woods.
It is intriguing to read of a once famous artist living as a semi recluse, but it is the sporadic recording of sub standard and existentialist works, recorded over a thirty year period that takes up a large part of these pages.
Although many of these albums are long since deleted or little known, the music website Spotify holds these recordings and I have been able to sample them while reading this book.
While I consider having a wide range of musical tastes from 1920's blues to 40's swing into 50's R & R to pop, rock, soul, acoustic folk to indie. I can listen to Captain Beefheart, but Engels albums 'Climate of Hunter', 'Tilt', 'The Drift' and 'Bish Bosch' are, to quote the Captain, "Too much for my mirror!"

[Henry Krinkle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can’t understand why one person mentioned in this book was introduced as a Jew. It had no bearing on any events in the book.