The pioneering singer-songwriter died on March 22nd
“I HAVE a very nightmarish imagination,” Scott Walker said in 2006. “I’ve had very bad dreams all my life.” The musician, who died on March 22nd, fashioned brilliant compositions from this darkness; the jarring, unexpected and gloomy songs were unlike anything produced by his contemporaries. He took traditional instruments and pushed them towards abstraction, detuning guitars and rattling timpani; his influence can be felt in the music of David Bowie, Nick Cave and Pulp.
Mr Walker, born Noel Scott Engel in Ohio in 1943, rose to fame in the 1960s as part of the Walker Brothers, a crooning vocal group . After a stint as the bass guitarist—he had worked as a session musician on the Sunset Strip as a teenager—he became the band’s lead vocalist. His melancholy baritone on “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine ” and “Make It Easy On Yourself” helped to turn the group into teen idols, particularly in Britain.
By the time “Scott 4” was released in 1969, though, Mr Walker had tuned out the crowd-pleasing ballads and amped up the weirdness. Many listeners moved on to rock. Mr Walker retreated for most of the 1970s, recording substandard covers on mediocre albums, perhaps to meet contractual obligations, and reuniting with the Walker Brothers for a string of unremarkable soft-rock records. But “Nite Flights” , the band’s avant-garde swansong, reignited his ambition.
A number of records followed, increasingly adventurous in form and lyrical content. The seminal “Tilt” featured “Farmer in the City”, a haunting song envisioning the real-life murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian poet and film director. “The Drift” explored similarly grim subject matter with songs such as “Cossacks Are” and “Clara”, a track inspired by the newsreel footage of Mussolini’s death that had haunted Mr Walker since his youth.
Mr Walker’s output was visionary, re-evaluating sounds as well as the song form. He worked slowly and devotedly, challenging his musicians to avoid practising or even knowing the melodies; he tasked producers with finding the sound of braying donkeys, or of raw meat being punched, to create an original soundscape. He found inspiration in strange and dark corners, and his genius was to wrest an unruly beauty from those nightmares.
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