Scott Walker (singer)
Noel Scott Engel (January 9, 1943 – March 22, 2019),[1] better known by his stage name Scott Walker, was an American-British singer-songwriter and record producer who resided in England. Walker was known for his emotive voice and his unorthodox stylistic path which took him from being a teen pop icon in the 1960s to an avant-garde musician from the 1980s to his death.[2][3] Walker's success was largely in the United Kingdom, where he achieved fame as a member of pop trio the Walker Brothers, who scored several hit singles, including two number ones, during the mid-1960s, while his first four solo albums reached the top ten during the later part of the decade, with the second, Scott 2, reaching number one in 1968. He lived in the UK from 1965 onward and became a UK citizen in 1970.[4]
For other people named Scott Walker, see Scott Walker (disambiguation).
Scott Walker
Noel Scott Engel
January 9, 1943
Hamilton, Ohio, U.S.
March 22, 2019 (aged 76)
London, England
- Singer-songwriter
- record producer
- multi-instrumentalist
- Vocals
- guitar
- keyboards
1958–2019
After the Walker Brothers split in 1967, he began a solo career with the album Scott later that year, moving toward an increasingly challenging style on late-1960s baroque pop albums such as Scott 3 and Scott 4 (both 1969).[5][6] After sales of his solo work started to decrease, he reunited with the Walker Brothers in the mid-1970s.[2][3] The reformed band achieved a top ten single with "No Regrets" in 1975, while their last album Nite Flights (1978) marked the beginning of Walker taking his music in a more avant-garde direction. After a few years hiatus, Walker revived his solo career in the mid-1980s, progressing his work further towards the avant-garde;[6][7][8] of this period in his career, The Guardian said "imagine Andy Williams reinventing himself as Stockhausen".[3] Walker's 1960s recordings were highly regarded by the 1980s UK underground music scene, and gained a cult following.
Walker continued to record until 2018. He was described by the BBC upon his death as "one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in rock history".[9]
Life and career[edit]
Early life[edit]
Noel Scott Engel was born on January 9, 1943, in Hamilton, Ohio,[10][11][12] the son of Elizabeth Marie (Fortier), who was from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and Noel Walter Engel.[13] His father was an oil industry manager whose work led the family to successive homes in Ohio, Texas, Colorado, and New York. Engel and his mother settled in California in 1959. Engel was interested in both music and performance and spent time as a child actor and singer in the mid to late 1950s, including roles in two Broadway musicals, Pipe Dream and Plain and Fancy.[14] Championed by singer and TV host Eddie Fisher, he appeared several times on Fisher's TV program. Engel cut some records including one named "Misery", which saw him briefly promoted as a teen idol.[2][3]
Upon his arrival in Los Angeles, Engel had already changed both his taste and his direction. Interested in the progressive jazz of Stan Kenton and Bill Evans, he was also a self-confessed "Continental suit-wearing natural enemy of the Californian surfer"[2] and a fan of European cinema (in particular Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Robert Bresson) and the Beat poets. In between attending art school and furthering his interests in cinema and literature, Scott played bass guitar proficiently enough to get session work in Los Angeles as a teenager.[2]
In 1961, after playing with the Routers, he met guitarist and singer John Maus, who was using the stage name John Walker on a fake ID to enable him to perform in clubs while under age. The two formed a band, Judy and the Gents, to back John Walker's sister Judy Maus, before joining other musicians to tour as the Surfaris (although they did not play on the Surfaris' records). In early 1964, Engel and John Walker began working together as the Walker Brothers, later in the year linking up with drummer Gary Leeds whose father financed the trio's first trip to the UK.[15]
Collaborations[edit]
As a record producer and guest performer, Walker worked with a number of artists and bands, including Pulp, Ute Lemper, Sunn O))), and Bat for Lashes.[51]
Personal life[edit]
He is survived by his partner, Beverly; his daughter, Lee, from his marriage to Mette Teglbjaerg, which ended in divorce; and his granddaughter, Emmi-Lee, who lives with her mother in Denmark.[16][52]
Born an only child, Walker was always reclusive and reluctant to discuss his private life. "He suffered depression, drank too much, took too many drugs and, like many of the great musicians of the 1960s, went missing in action", reported Simon Hattenstone in 2012. "He rarely talks to the media" and "has come across as sombre and taciturn." When asked, Walker agreed that he had found fame hard to deal with. "Well, I was an intense young guy."[3]
Death[edit]
Walker died at the age of 76 in London on March 22, 2019. His death was announced three days later by his record company 4AD, which announced cancer as the cause of death,[53] while calling him "a unique and challenging titan at the forefront of British music" and summarising his career highlights online.[54] Tributes included those from Thom Yorke, Marc Almond and Neil Hannon.[55][56]
Artistry and compositional approach[edit]
Initially working as an interpreter of other people's songs, Scott Walker had developed his own songwriting skills by the heyday of the Walker Brothers and by the time of his first solo album in 1967. In a 1984 interview he spoke of difficulty in writing songs: "I don't write songs for pleasure. I can only write when I have to – like I'm under contract, or to finish an album."[57]
Walker's late 1960s and 1970s work was relatively conventional. On a superficial level, it followed the melodic orchestral pop template used by singers such as Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams and Jack Jones – mainstream artists whose career path he was initially expected to follow. Crucial differences came via the more avant-garde orchestrations of his arrangers (primarily Angela Morley (at the time known as Wally Stott), Peter Knight and Reg Guest) and by Walker's own approach to lyrics, which involved a cinematic mise-en-scene approach once described as "unsettling short stories, all the more creepy for their delicate orchestral backdrop."[3] As his solo career progressed, Walker began working political themes into his lyrics. Among the first of these was "The Old Man's Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime)" (from Scott 4). Further references came via his dramatisation of the work of a CIA torturer on "The Electrician" (Nite Flights).[33]
Walker's next artistic development as a songwriter came when he jettisoned his remaining conventional lyrical concerns along with his remaining connections to formal popular song (and, by extension, the easy-listening ballads which he had been famous for). The New York Times described Walker as arriving at "the point where he barely needs melody anymore. Instead, there are whirring synthesizers, great orchestral blocks of sound, noises of unknown provenance."[40] Despite the radical alteration of his methods, Walker commented that he did not consider himself a "composer" in the established sense of the term: "I think of myself as a songwriter, but I agree they are maybe not traditional songs. I know what people mean, but what else can you call them?"[3]
Walker described his lyrical technique (assembling short blocks of text containing images that are sometimes seemingly unconnected and disparate from each other) as being similar to "a general, assembling troops on the battlefield." The Wire has noted that the short blocks of white-on-black text presented in the CD insert for The Drift is reflective of this. The roots of this compositional technique are apparent as early as the Scott Walker tracks on Nite Flights – the lyrics insert for the album clearly feature the technique, albeit with a black text on a white background.[41]
Walker stated in the documentary film Scott Walker: 30 Century Man and in numerous interviews that for his entire career he had not listened to any of his own work after completion, either due to exhaustion from the project or self-criticism.[58][59]
Legacy[edit]
In 2018, Walker published Sundog, a book of selected lyrics. The book is divided into six sections: "The 60s", "Tilt", "The Drift", "Bish Bosch", "Soused" and "New Songs". The foreword to the book was written by Irish novelist Eimear McBride.[60]
Many artists have expressed their admiration for Walker or cited him as an influence, including David Bowie,[61] Alex Turner,[61] Marc Almond,[61] Bauhaus,[62] Goldfrapp,[61] Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy,[61] Julian Cope (who compiled the Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker compilation in 1981),[63] Jarvis Cocker,[61] Anohni, Thom Yorke and Radiohead,[64] Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree,[65] and Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth[66] (particularly expressed in their joint project Storm Corrosion),[67] Tim Bowness of No-Man,[68] Leonard Cohen,[61] Efterklang,[69] East India Youth,[70] Kevin Hufnagel,[71] Ihsahn,[72] Russell Mills,[73] Dennis Rea,[74] John Baizley of Baroness[75] and Brian Eno.[61]