When journalist Keith Altham visited the Walker Brothers’ London apartment in late 1965, he noticed a Victorian front door stashed under one of the beds. It came, he was told, from a house where Jack the Ripper had committed one of his murders. The moptopped heartthrobs had purchased it at an auction. Genuine or not, such a door was a portal to a plethora of horrific memories, inspired by a pileup of fictions, heinous acts of barbarity and unsolvable mysteries. Here, possibly, are the seeds of Scott Walker’s extraordinary, contrarian late style.
His career set sail on a sunlit schooner of orchestral balladry and closed with a twilight voyage to the heart of darkness. As Walker declined during the mid-70s, his work became an alcoholic blur of faux country and western, sleazy funk and lightweight movie themes. But in the two years between Stretch and Nite Flights, released in 1978, Walker read Chomsky’s writings on US foreign policy and human-rights abuses and stepped out of the cabaret into the killing fields. In The Electrician, from Nite Flights, a torturer’s nightmare is temporarily transported to a soaring orchestral rhapsody with Latin overtones, before returning inexorably to the horror of the penal chamber.
Edward Said characterised “late style” as a form of fragments, expressing the idea of a civilisation in ruins. Ornament and harmony are rejected favour of dissonance and silence. Artists with a late style transcend the conventionally acceptable, while stubbornly refusing to satisfy popular demand. Said cited Adorno’s vision of the disillusioned romantic “who exists almost ecstatically detached from, yet in a kind of complicity with, new and monstrous modern forms – fascism, antisemitism, totalitarianism and bureaucracy”. For me this perfectly sums up Walker’s position from Tilt onwards. Like a kidnapper bundling you into a car, he forced you into a scene of disorientation, trauma and violence. From the sun lounger to the electric chair.
The music he painstakingly crafted after Tilt, notably The Drift , Bish Bosch and Soused (with US noise band Sunn O))))), revealed a forbidding zone of voids and vacuums – sonic magic realism, cutups and dystopias crumpled into malformed packages. Rhythm in Walker’s late music is often heavy and lumpen, supplied by rock drums and bass, or tiny cowbells or chimes. His songs were highly controlled, including passages where time itself seemed to hover in suspension. He talked of “big blocks of sound”, like the dense masses of looming tone and drone in the work of Xenakis, Ligeti or Lachenmann. It cleaved to the postwar avant garde of Europe, rather than the mechanical minimalism of American contemporary classical music.
As for his lyrics, Walker once told me: “It starts with something we know – a political issue – and then it drifts into another world, and into something else. All kinds of disparate elements then take place.” A single song might refer to molecular biology and sulphurous farts, or zoom from a dwarf in the court of Attila the Hun to a distant star cluster. His lyrics revel in unfamiliar words and technical terminology. Stare too hard at his most opaque phrases ( “Turnshoes”, “mouse bells”, “tapir noshers’ phuts”, “can’t go by a man with brain grass”, “Epicanthic knobbler of ninon”) and you find yourself flailing adrift in a cognitive void. The only remedy is to follow the advice implanted in Track Seven of Climate of Hunter: “Try and hear your own way out.”
From the backbeats of Tilt to the jackhammers of Corps de Blah and the drone metal of Herod 2014, if anything defines Walker’s late sound it’s the tension between orchestrated textures, sound effects and gunning explosions of overdriven rock force. Walker also hitched himself to robotic repetition familiar from industrial music. Despite being marketed as arock artist, nothing else around sounded like Walker’s late style, though artists including Diamanda Galás, John Zorn, Jonny Greenwood’s Penderecki-inspired soundtracks, and the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson employed subject matter that intersected with Walker’s own. David Bowie, a lifelong friend and admirer, allowed himself similar stylistic swerves, but never approached Walker’s immersion in modern humanity’s horror show to the same extent.
Very little music of the past hundred years is as bleak, bruised, disturbed, demented and diabolic as Walker’s. Yet it also abounded in black and scatological humour, and the man was very different from the material. “Most of my songs,” Walker once confided to me, “are about frustration, of being unable to hold on to a spiritual moment, always losing it. Most of my songs are spiritual at the core. I try not to be too cynical about things, ’cause it’s too difficult otherwise.” In the Noel Engel universe, “spiritual” should not be confused with “religious”. But this great constellation of flickering ashes remains one of the most miraculous reinventions in the history of popular music, a swan song perpetually on the wing, trailing feathers that never quite float to earth.
