My own shadows surround me,
They won‘t go away.
Scott Engel and John Franz – ‘A Young Man Cried’ (1966)
The myth of the early Scott Walker as a kind of campy cabaret entertainer had its origin at the height of The Walker Brothers’ success.
It was in March 1966 that their management booked them into the Tito Club in Stockton on Teesside, in England’s Northwest. It was for a full week’s residency and feelings were mixed. “Scott and I were upset by the idea of playing in cabaret,” insisted Gary; “It was… a bad move for us as a group,” seconded John.
It did at least make financial sense: the nightclub had a maximum capacity of 3,000; instead of tickets selling for a uniform price of under £1, as at the concert halls, the cheapest tickets at Tito’s were selling for £10 – although this likely included a chicken-in-a-basket meal.
Scott, who admitted to being exceptionally nervous at the time, must have noted how the older audience were attentive to his performance, only cheering or whistling at the end of each song. Although supposedly reluctant to embrace the cabaret scene,1 it would mark the first time that he moved away from the concert-hall circuit into the supper-club set.
Apart from the R&B/soul standards that the Walkers had kept in their set since the Sunset Strip days, Scott and John brought the house down with ‘Summertime’ – the George Gershwin song from his opera Porgy And Bess. Listen to the recorded version released later that year and you’ll feel a dramatic tension in the sudden switching between lead singers; Engel and Maus are sweetly and evenly balanced at first, before a saxophone break by Barrie Martin of The Quotations momentarily takes off into free-blowing jazz. Little wonder that the Stockton crowd gave it a standing ovation.
Back ‘home’ in London, Scott had only the minimum of time to bitch about his social milieu to the pop press – “I spend most of my evenings down at Ronnie Scott’s. You find a lot of pseudos and hippies there but not as many as the ‘In’ clubs” – before setting off on a 27-date tour.
In the tradition of sixties package tours, the Walkers were not the only big name at the top of the bill. More surprising was that the headliner was Roy Orbison, the USA’s monolithic ‘Big O’ – a king of neurotic romanticism since before the Walkers had even played the Strip. Despite the brothers’ current all-time-high popularity, it was the affable Texan Orbison who topped the bill.
Also on the line-up was 17-year-old Scots singing star Lulu (born Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie), who recently had her first hit with a cover of The Isley Brothers’ ‘Shout’. “Not only was this 16 year old [sic] mad about him, but so was every 16 year old in the country,” she much later acknowledged of Scott Walker.
In the pop weekly Disc, Scott and a chubby-faced young Lulu were photographed together as the readers’ ‘Mr and Miss Valentine’. In the actuality, his feelings for the much younger woman were more paternal. “I got to tour with them, with The Walker Brothers, so it was kind of a divine torturous experience,” she laughs, “because he would kind of pat me on the head.”
The opening night of the tour was March 25, 1966 at the Finsbury Park Astoria, later more famous as the Rainbow. Scott ensured that his mother and her sister were brought over to witness how far the trio had come in their single year across the ocean. Betty (or Mimi, as Scott was wont to call her) and Aunt Seal stayed at the Grosvenor House Hotel – where they were forced to eat supper in their hotel room, besieged as they were by Walker fans. Nothing in the juvenile career of Scotty Engel can have prepared Betty for the teen hysteria she witnessed.
‘WALKER FAN MANIA!’ ran one subsequent pop press headline.
“Last Saturday’s Walker Brothers-Roy Orbison show at Hammersmith Odeon proved as eventful as any opening night!
“One girl fan got through the skylight during the second house2 and [hung] suspended over the stage curtains, refusing to come down unless the Walkers spoke to her. Failing amplifiers and screaming girls added to the confusion.”
The Hammersmith date saw Orbison’s 30th birthday, with the Walkers and other artists on the bill attending a special midnight party in his honour at the Dolce Vita restaurant in Soho. Despite classic ballads like ‘Only The Lonely’, ‘Running Scared’ and ‘Blue Bayou’, which elevated heartbreak to a near-operatic level, only John had watched him reverentially from the side of the stage. Scott admired his work, but found his southern gentlemanly manners and his overall ‘niceness’ a little cloying. (He and Gary rather cruelly rechristened Orbison “the Big Slow”.)
In any case, the Big O was quickly becoming a secondary feature on the bill. The kids were showing their impatience with this troubadour from the older generation, with one fan in Bradford later claiming they’d pelted him with sweets. Small wonder, perhaps, that when Maurice King asked him if the Walkers could close as the final act towards the end of the tour, he graciously conceded, “It’s all the same to me” – just as he had to Brian Epstein three years earlier, when Beatlemania hit.
According to Gary, he and the physically sporty Scott had countered many nights of whisky drinking on tour by playing badminton – although John suffered a serious head injury that required hospitalisation, incurred while escaping a car surrounded by frantic fans (“the angry villagers”, as Scott only semi-affectionately called them). The peak of the tour for Leeds was clearly the final night in Coventry: “Scott appeared on stage riding a bike, John was on piano and I did lead vocals.3 It was probably one of our best shows.”
In April, the month after the tour, it was a measure of the industry’s current esteem for the Walkers that Maurice King played host at the NME poll winners’ concert – with a performance by his ‘boys’, of course, who came third in Best Group (after The Beatles and Stones).
It was also the period that inspired a retrospective complaint from Scott, during his early solo days: “I was working like a badger. The other guys were just enjoying things. And it really made me angry that people weren’t digging the music as much as the image.”
The remark would draw offence from John, who by then had come to feel totally sidelined, and even the loyal Gary. But all the evidence suggests Maus and Leeds were more comfortable in the secondary role of celebrities – appearing at a motor-racing event at Brands Hatch, for example, knocking back champagne with the ‘dolly birds’.
To Engel this kind of life was anathema. He didn’t wear the obsession of the creative artist lightly – agonising over the choice of material and musicians, actively participating in song arrangements and production techniques, whether he’d be credited for it or not. To which can be added the neurosis of the novice songwriter – a status he had yet to transcend.
The almost ever-present sunglasses (“Everyone’s on this daytime kick, it’s awful”) were no longer enough to provide him with a semblance of anonymity. “That’s when he went into The Disguise Period,” said Gary Leeds. “One time he adopted the look of a building-site worker, complete with hard hat and long coat. But it was about 80 degrees that day, and everybody else was in shorts and T-shirts. Obviously, everyone was looking at him.”
After the music press had inadvertently given away his latest change of address – to the McCartneyland of St John’s Wood, NW8 – Scott was perturbed to hear Walker fans were scouring the streets for him. It prompted a further move back to west London. In the middle of the night, Gary and Maurice King helped him move under cover of darkness to a flat on the Fulham Road. His new peace of mind would not last long.
“Then sometime the next afternoon he rang up and yelled: ‘They’ve found me! I can hear ‘em screaming outside!’” confirmed Gary. What Scott himself had actually found, without realising it, was the Saturday afternoon home crowd for Chelsea FC at Stamford Bridge. Tens of thousands of men, mostly, screaming in unison – and not for The Walker Brothers.
In their spring 1966 tour of northern Europe, Scott would find some of the female attention more welcome. In late May/early June, the Walkers played two nights at the Carousel Club in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was here that a statuesque 19 year old came to their attention. “Both Scott and I noticed her,” John acknowledged much later, “commenting to each other on how attractive she was, and we were all introduced to her. She may have been known to somebody connected to the show, because normally we didn’t meet fans or audience.”
Mette Teglbjaerg hailed from Lyngby, a northern suburb of Copenhagen. Pretty, leggy and curvaceous, in a way that women were still allowed to be even in the Twiggy era (without being labelled ‘fat’), she impressed both singers. Scott was interested to hear that she was considering coming to London, to join her older sister. Their meeting at the Carousel may have clinched this.
In mid-July, the Walkers returned to the BBC’s flagship chart show Top Of The Pops to mime to their new single, ‘(Baby) You Don’t Have To Tell Me’. Another troubled love song, it lacked the orchestrated angst of ‘The Sun…’ or ‘Make It Easy…’ – which was the appeal for Gary, who suggested covering the obscure US pop 45 by Bobby Coleman as a change of pace. (Its B-side was ‘My Love Is Growing’, a folk rock number co-written by John Stewart and sung by his best buddy.)
It also failed to repeat the success of the earlier epics (making it only as far as number 13 on the chart), but it was certainly more danceable. In fact, among the female TOTP audience gyrating along with Scott and John can be glimpsed a particularly animated brunette in outsize shades. Her sunglasses obscure part of her features, but in all other respects she resembles the few photos that survive of Mette in the mid-to-late sixties.
Whether or not it was her or just a pretty doppelganger, this marks a period when Irene Dunford seemed to gradually fade out and Ms Teglbjaerg took her place. “One thing that set her apart from most of the girls whom he met was that she didn’t idolise him,” John later reflected with obvious approval. “She wasn’t starstruck but really cared for him. In fact, she took the mickey out of him when the occasion called for it. Also, she seemed emotionally stable, with a very even temperament, which benefited Scott…”
“… Femininity is a state of mind, not a mode of attire,” Scott had insisted of his taste in women the previous year. “I don’t expect her to come to see me every evening with her hair done. I like sensitive people, but most of all I like girls who try to understand or at least listen with some sympathy.”
On the same day ‘(Baby) You Don’t Have To Tell Me’ was released, Ready Steady Go! devoted an entire edition to The Walker Brothers. Sadly, no videotapes of it exist – but Scott’s downtempo version of The Beatles’ ‘We Can Work It Out’ at least suggests an ambiguous attitude to the band he regarded both as overrated and as affecting balladeers.
As part of a glut of Walkers material in 1966, ‘I Need You’ was simultaneously released as the title track of an EP. An emotional ballad by Carole King and Gerry Goffin (contemporaries of ‘Love Her’ composers Mann and Weil at the Brill Building), it was a US hit for soul singer Chuck Jackson in 1964 and was given a serviceable treatment by Scott.
More worthy of note were ‘Looking For Me’ – principally for being the second Engel cover of a Randy Newman song, though its West Side Story-ish tale of trying to dodge your girlfriend’s ex’s buddies on the street is lively enough – and ‘Young Man Cried’. The latter is a rare collaboration between Engel and producer Franz. An affecting piece of epic melancholia, even if its standard lyric (“You’re gone again / and a young man cried today”) is not quite the equal of its Cinemascope arrangement. This was the work of Reg Guest.
“Unlike Ivor Raymonde,” said John, “who basically followed the arrangements of the original tracks and beefed them up a bit, Reg was far more imaginative, created tailored arrangements to enhance our recordings in every way possible, always taking what Scott and I did into consideration.”
“My attitude to Scott was to let him be Scott and not interfere with his far-out ideas,” acclaimed former session player Guest in return. “I let him be the way he was because as musical director I felt it was my duty to let him express himself.”
“Johnny [Franz] was already starting to distract Scott away from The Walker Brothers with material and ideas intended to showcase his talent,” John lamented later. But that particular train was already on the track, and at first it wouldn’t be derailed.
The ongoing popularity of The Walkers had been underlined by their appearance on Lew Grade’s popular variety show Sunday Night At The London Palladium the previous month. Their new EP was also picking up praise in the most unexpected quarters, as the following letter shows:
JONATHAN KING ENTERPRISES LTD
DIRECTORS:
Kenneth G. King James E. King
14th July, 1966
JK: CW
Miss Pat Jefferies
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
London SW7.
37 SOHO SQUARE
LONDON W1
Dear Pat,
Thank you very much for your letter. I am afraid that as a matter of principle I never ask Scott for his autograph for friends or anyone because he is busy signing autographs and doing business all day and likes to relax in the evenings. However, I suggest that you send it to Capable Management at 185 Bickenhall Mansions, London W1, and he will probably sign it personally as that is his manager’s office.
I feel exactly the same as you do about their EP.
I will be finished at Cambridge at the end of next year and with a bit of luck will pass those exams too. Most of my vacation will be spent in plugging records I am afraid, which is another form of work, so your holiday will be more rewarding than mine.
Anyway, many thanks again for your letter. Sorry about the autograph, I am sure you understand and if you write to the above address you should get a result.
Yours,
Jonathan.
If the above reads as surprisingly thoughtful and courteous, it’s because it originates from one of the more egocentric figures of the sixties British pop scene. Jonathan King had his first major hit under his own name (as opposed to the pseudonyms he later used) at 19 – his 1965 single ‘Everyone’s Gone To The Moon’, a catchy, kitschy celebration of the space age.
Since then, he’d simultaneously pursued a pop career (as performer/composer/producer) and a journalistic sideline (for Disc & Music Echo) while taking an English literature degree at Trinity College, Cambridge. He and Scott had first met on a TV pop show, bonding over a shared recognition that they worked in one of the more ridiculous quarters of the entertainment industry – King with glee and Engel with a degree of enervation.
While the bearded, flamboyant King might venture forth in full period Cossack costume and Scott was mostly comfortable in the same old beat-up corduroy suit, they managed to find common ground.
“We were very similar in many ways,” King later insisted. “We were exactly the same size and used to swap each other’s clothes all the time.4 We both, in a sense, had intellectual pretensions in that we didn’t want to be just interested in pop culture. One of his fascinations was Jean Genet and it was through discussing the character of this rather bizarre man that we found we had a lot in common.”
If Scott saw parallels with Genet, it was presumably because King was known to be gay in a society which still criminalised homosexuality.5 King may have carried the cachet of a figure verging on social outsiderdom, as personified by Dirk Bogarde as the anguished barrister in the 1961 film Victim, with its glimpses of a gay underworld below the surface of inner London’s streets.
But Jonathan King was actually an irreverent pop entrepreneur who later churned out harmless (if irritating) pieces of fluff like ‘Johnny Reggae’ by The Piglets; an inherent social conservative, he was perhaps the only former British pop star who’d record a loving tribute to Margaret Thatcher (she of the notorious Clause 28 – which banned ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local councils) when she retired as Prime Minister.
Jean Genet, on the other hand, was a Parisian state-reared thief and male prostitute, christened ‘Saint Genet’ by an enthralled Sartre. In his memoir, The Thief‘s Journal, he wrote: “… Criminals are remote from you – as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Theirs smells of sweat, sperm and blood… it was because the world contains these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil.” Released from prison into the strangest kind of literary celebrity, in his plays Genet empathised with marginal figures often despised by the rest of the world: the Palestinians in The Blacks; two convicted murderesses in The Maids. Little wonder, perhaps, that English public schoolboy King should consider Genet ‘bizarre’.
Scott, for his part, regarded Jonathan King as “the Cocteau of the pop business”.6 “He could never handle his own situations, but he could certainly handle mine,” he’d later remark almost cryptically.
“I’ve never known anyone who hated stardom so much and from about the second day of knowing him, I was well aware that he was not going to keep putting up with it,” King later observed of Engel. Just how accurate this was became apparent on August 15, 1966.
Immersed in recording the Walkers’ second album, Scott did not respond to an early evening call from the band’s driver, Bobby Hamilton. Alarmed, Hamilton kicked in the door and found an unconscious Engel in his flat’s kitchen at Fulham. In a classic scenario, the oven door was open and the room smelled heavily of gas. Fighting to protect his own respiration, the record company minder dragged Scott out into the communal hallway and enlisted the neighbours’ help in calling an ambulance.
On being revived, it seemed no long-term damage was done – although a croaky Scott was unable to sing for several days. On questioning as to whether he’d actually attempted suicide, a seemingly abashed Engel blamed “a lot of pressures and a personal problem. I think it all woke a lot of people up, includin’ myself… But pressure wasn’t the only reason. Nobody has the right reasons and I’m not tellin’ anyone the right reasons.”
The Daily Mirror had already fuelled speculation by reporting two weeks earlier that Scott’s alleged marriage proposal to Irene Dunford had been turned down. (“I did not take him seriously because he was so unstable at the time,” she’d later claim.) Due to Scott’s disinclination to discuss his private life, the fact that the relationship with Ms Dunford was already superseded by his closeness to Mette Teglbjaerg was overlooked.
The response of the other Walkers was one of incredulity. To them, Scott’s cryptic teasing spoke of an ulterior motive. “… Starting in 1966, a new and increasingly dramatic series of events associated with Scott began to ‘feed’ the press, so I’ve always wondered what came first,” a cynical John later reflected. “If Maurice [King] did not know what was going on, then the whole event may have been a ploy on Scott’s part to make the management treat him with a great deal more deference – as in ‘Before we do anything else, we’d better check with Scott first.’”
“This so-called suicide attempt was, I think, just another publicity stunt to increase record sales,” surmised the usually loyal Gary. “I was under the impression that Scott was too strong a person to do that kind of thing, or maybe I don’t know him as well as I thought I did,” he at least conceded.
“It was a very bad period,” Scott later explained to Disc & Music Echo. “I thought everyone was trying to destroy my life. I had this idea that the press were people who misquoted me; fans were the ones who wouldn’t stop ringing my phone, smashing my door and making me move flats. It was very immature of me. But to someone going through a paranoiac stage it all seemed to make sense.”
For his part, Jonathan King had few doubts that Scott had intended to harm himself. (“I can’t keep on having to dash to your bedside,” he later claimed to have scolded him, “either commit suicide properly, in which case I’ll never be pestered again, or you’ve got to stop.”) Both men fuelled further speculation by taking a holiday together in Sitges, Spain, to help Engel convalesce.7
It’s known that Scott got teetotal control freak King drunk on tequila in Spain, while he himself was loaded on the tranquillisers and sleeping pills doled out at the time by the medical profession. In terms of what we now think of as substance abuse, the performer was mostly not attracted by the voguish illicit drugs of the day – abandoning marijuana after a few sessions as it made his throat hurt.
Booze and downers were a different proposition, however, despite the fate that lay in store for stars from Judy Garland to Jimi Hendrix.8 Scott would soon find that he could maintain his work rate on this chemical combination, as his tolerance to the pills increased. For all its dangers, the depressive twilight zone these stimulants created could also be a realm of creativity – at least for a while.
Back in the UK, the release that same month of ‘Another Tear Falls’ showed The Walker Brothers at their most lachrymose. The remake of a Bacharach and David song first crisply enunciated by refined Nat King Cole-alike Gene McDaniels (who augmented his performance in Brit movie It‘s Trad, Dad! with some serious cigarette smoking, in the days when such things were allowed), it was another classically atmospheric Guest arrangement of a standard lost-love lyric, this time introduced by sinister woodwind.
The B-side, ‘Saddest Night In The World’, did much the same thing only better. Beginning with a gently folky acoustic guitar, this further variation on the theme of the world being transformed by sadness when you lose your girl was bolstered by the backing vocals of its composer – one John Maus.
“Shop window girls smiled through the rain / And the wet, grey figure called me looks for a man he used to be.” The former guitarist tapped into the essence of his vocal partner’s romantic melancholy. John had written a perfect early Scott Walker lyric, even before the vocalist himself could pull off a similar feat.
Despite the quality of both sides of the 45, ‘Another Tear Falls’ didn’t quite make it into the Top 10. It was a respectable showing, in the days when records really did sell in high quantities, but the maestros at Philips considered it a relative failure. Walker supporter Keith Altham, at NME, suggested John Franz was cleaving too closely to a formula. Even Scott blamed himself for over-ornate orchestration, though it’s hard to see what difference a more pared-down approach would have made. This was still one for aficionados of heartbreak.
“It gets kinda lonely, only there is no solution to the loneliness,” Scott tried to describe his own state of mind in an interview the following year. “To stop being lonely you have to share your life and your mind with people, and I can’t do that.”
As imaginatively inspiring as a state of melancholy might be, it was obvious that Scott (whether in his daily life or in his role as a song’s narrator) was not suffering the loneliness of the average poor sap who had no luck with women. His was the loneliness of the long-distance Walker – a much-adored pop singer who could virtually pluck girls from the trees, should he so desire. The distance he felt between himself and other people appears to have been a form of emotional alienation, an altogether profounder sense of being alone in a city of millions of people.
That autumn also saw the release of Portrait, the second Walkers album. Before they headed out on a promotional tour, a direct overture to manage the band was made by Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ manager, which was turned down by Scott on the basis of a reluctance to be funded by “Beatle money”. Despite the Walkers’ (particularly Gary’s) friendliness with the Fab Four, his ambiguous attitude toward the most popular band in the universe remained.
The album itself fulfilled much of the promise of the previous year – and of Reg Guest as an arranger, augmented by Scott himself. Despite this, the arrangement of the emotionally foreboding opener, ‘In My Room’, was based on the original English language version by Verdelle Smith (another black American singer with sharply crisp enunciation). While Guest was credited by many with the dread chords of Bach’s ‘Toccata In D Minor’ running throughout the song, its tones of doom had already been present. Most stunning was how the Spanish love song ‘El Amor’, by Joaquin Prieto, had been translated by Tin Pan Alley hacks Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss into a ballad of devastating despair. The abandoned (or possibly bereaved) narrator remains confined within his tiny apartment, going quietly insane awaiting the return of the wife he knows is gone forever: “Over there is the chair where I held her whenever she cried / Over there by the window the flowers she left – have all died.”
It’s a classic early Scott Walker performance, a Euro-ballad that combines its emotional sweep with a sense of domestic claustrophobia. (It’s also a less sophisticated prelude to the time when Jacques Brel’s lyrics would be translated into English.)
The first Engel original on the album, ‘Saturday’s Child’, now seems uncharacteristically jaunty, with a bass riff apparently lifted from ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ (the latter recorded at the time Scott was hanging around the Spector studio). A lyrical blast at London’s club and party set, it mirrors its time by making the object of its scorn a girl: “Saturday’s child who used to say / That she could dance the world away… just hangs her head and cries today.”
Scott’s baritone takes precedence over John’s lighter tones when they sing together, but there are still some great duets here: ‘Hurting Each Other’ is a cover of a 45 by Canadian band Guess Who, but more redolent of the sensitive Carpenters hit version that followed in 1972; Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ had become a high point of their current stage set, with an immaculate vocal arrangement by John; ‘Living Above Your Head’ is another uptempo cover, this time of the obscure Jay & The Americans, and once again it lets those flighty chicks have it: “Living above your head, girl / Something has got to go wrong”; Scott takes lead again on ‘People Get Ready’, the two big brothers’ duet on The Impressions’ gospel-inspired song of “a train a-comin’” – Engel may have been an existentialist, but he was also a social liberal whose emotions jibed with lyricist Curtis Mayfield’s promise of divinely inspired social justice. (Gary later claimed they were among the few white performers Mayfield would license his songs to.)
John puts in a couple of sterling performances of his own on the Ray Charles ballad ‘Just For A Thrill’ and Leiber-Stoller’s ‘Take It Like A Man’, previously recorded by Gene Pitney. Just as Maus reputedly chose ‘In My Room’ for Engel’s angst-ridden soul, so Scott is said to have selected ‘Take It Like A Man’ for him, in which he comes over like a raspy, laissez-faire ‘anti-Scott’ (“Don’t cry… she’s gone!”).
Scott’s own rendition of the thirties jazz standard ‘Old Folks’, previously covered by many (including torch singer Mel Torme), was, according to John, “a song he’d always wanted to do”. Sentimentally describing the twilight years of an old boy known colloquially as ‘Old Folks’, who spends his time fishing and wandering about town, it concludes, “Children’s voices at play will be still for a day / the day they take the Old Folks away.”
Those with hearts to touch will still be moved by it. But there were those who mocked how, in an age of purple hearts, LSD and guitar feedback, The Walker Brothers were retreating into mawkish show tunes. It may not have mattered to them that this was Scott’s tribute to his father, still only in his mid-fifties, with whom he had recently been reconciled – or indeed that the tune may have signified Noel Sr.’s own recent parental loss. Over a year beforehand, when the Walkers were playing their first British concerts, the Hamilton Daily News had run the following notice:
SCOTT H. ENGEL
Obituary: May 29, 1965 Hamilton, Butler Co; Ohio… collapsed on 2nd & High Street and never recovered.
The obituary showed a fastidious-looking old geezer in rimless specs and bow tie. Grandpa Scott had been in his 85th year and remained active till the last.9
Less weepy but infinitely more moody, ‘I Can See it Now’ carries a typically muted sixties trumpet and handpicked strings. It’s also the second of the few tracks to carry an Engel/Franz credit, celebrating romantic heartbreak rather than wallowing in it: “Maybe today a lonesome man / Is gonna find a dream again…” ‘Where’s The Girl?’ is more effective still, with young Scott’s voice reverberating in sombre regret: “The canary stopped singing the moment she walked out the door.” Another Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller ballad, this further remake from the Jerry Butler songbook carries a dated (and all the more poignant for that) stamp of a man left alone without his female half. (“You can tell that this apartment and I are in need of a woman’s touch.”)
The two singing brothers regroup their forces for the closing number, Tom Springfield’s ‘No Sad Songs For Me’. “[It] struck Scott and me as the most beautiful love song we’d ever heard,” John later testified. “I sang lead on that, a departure from our usual format.” It was also the first time that the Walker voices (in a duet this time) substituted the effortlessly dulcet tones of Dusty Springfield – who first sang the song as lead vocalist of her brother’s folk group. “Pretty soon our love will be / Just a memory / It’s all over” – sung as a melodic elegy, it’s as if the closing track is marking the end of a life rather than just a love affair.
With a cover shot by society photographer Cecil Beaton which was replicated in a pull-out card, Portrait matched the Top 3 success of its predecessor. It was promoted by a 33-date tour, which Scott prepared for by having his formerly lustrous locks shorn short. The tour – a package supported by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich and The Troggs – was undertaken “out of greed” according to Engel, who already seemed to be tiring of the tour-record-tour routine. Not so, said the other brothers, with all of them being paid retainers of at least £40 per week. It was a good living wage, but all the same – they needed to record and tour in order to live.
As the dates wound towards their conclusion in late October/early November, the schedules were derailed in a way that Engel can neither have wished for nor anticipated. On October 22, 1966, the Walkers were scheduled to appear as guests on BBC TV’s Billy Cotton Band Show – a family variety show hosted by the jolly entertainer whose son (Bill Cotton Jr.) also happened to be the corporation’s Head of Light Entertainment.
“Being on this show was a prestigious opportunity but, during rehearsals, Scott complained of having a bad headache,” John later recalled. “We sent one of the television staff to get some tablets, specifying no aspirin, as Scott would have a terrible reaction to it. Within minutes of taking them he was having difficulty breathing and his face began to swell up. We had no choice but to leave, because obviously we would not be able to perform on the show.”10
After his allergic reaction died down and his teen-dream features returned to normal proportions, the Walkers had to complete a further week of dates. Scott lasted out the schedule by retreating to his hotel room and marking out extracurricular creative plans. Among these were writing a screenplay for a “surrealistic pop film with a contemporary of Ingmar Bergman’s”. The filmmaker in question remains unidentified and it’s perhaps a pity that we were never treated to The Walker Brothers’ equivalent of The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, or The Monkees in Head.11
More practical and realistic were production plans for Alec Noel – the partnership with best friend John Stewart, by now a regular figure among the Walkers’ camp in London. The single ‘Light’, by a Wolverhampton beat group called Finders Keepers, was produced after the tour for Fontana, Philips’ pop offshoot label. Stewart-Engel laboured hard over the number (a mundane tune about “the light of my life”, composed by Stewart) and the group were amazed at how a deep mix and chiming bells transformed it.
Production duties were also performed for Dutch band The Motions and a group with a female singer called Carol & The Memories, whose ‘Tears On My Pillow’ (c/w ‘Crying My Eyes Out’) was pitched somewhere between Spector and Merseybeat. None of these singles made for a hit, but Alec Noel at least remained a productive enterprise.
It wasn’t to last, sadly.
While John Stewart was increasingly seen as ‘the fourth Walker Brother’ (to the extent that some people anticipated he might join the group), one absentminded motion put paid to it all. One day that November, he was crossing the road in Birmingham, part of Finders Keepers’ Midlands stomping ground. Momentarily forgetful of how most traffic in Britain approaches a pedestrian from the right, he walked out in front of a car and was knocked down.
Scott rushed to his friend’s hospital bedside, but injuries to his head and leg were substantial. Engel is said to have covered Stewart’s private medical fees before flying him back to LA. He would never return to Britain.12 Scott Engel was suddenly bereft of his closest friend, left ever more dependent for camaraderie on the maverick Jonathan King – himself something of an outsider.
The show had to go on. On November 29, 1966, the Walkers made their return headlining visit to the London Palladium for a Royal Gala performance in front of the Duke of Edinburgh. They acquitted themselves well with a medley of their greatest hits, lining up at the end of the show to exchange pleasant obsequies with Prince Philip and Princess Royal Margaret. The story got around that Scott had declined Margaret’s invitation to party with them the next weekend.13
If something had to give in the tension between the nature of Scott Engel and what was expected of him by the entertainment industry, he pre-empted it himself the following month. “Reg Guest and I are hung up on the Gregorian chant,” he’d told the Melody Maker. “It’s one of the earliest forms of music and… when I play it softly it just takes me away from everything.”
The fascination with ancient monastic chanting could later be heard in short vocal bursts on ‘The Seventh Seal’, from Scott 4. But for now, “just takes me away from everything” was as profound a need as terpsichorean study. Engel made an arrangement with the monks of Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight to spend some time on hiatus within their hallowed walls.
“The retreat has no religious significance. I am going simply to find time to think and to sort out my life,” he explained at the time. Studying early ecclesiastical music would be merely a part of this, but Gary Leeds later commented on how the atheistic Engel might have made a very good monk.
It was not to last long. The Melody Maker ran the following report in December 1966:
‘FANS FORCE SCOTT TO QUIT MONASTERY’
Scott Walker has been forced to leave a monastery on the Isle of Wight – because of his fans.
Scott’s plan to go to the monastery was exclusively revealed in the MM which did not disclose its whereabouts. Unfortunately, other newspapers did.
He had planned to stay for at least 10 days, primarily to study the Gregorian chants studied by the monks. But invading fans this week made it impossible.
On Monday, his publicist, Brian Sommerville, told the MM: “Scott has been asked to leave the monastery because so many kids invaded the place.
“He is bloody angry about it all. He seriously wanted to go there to rest and to learn about Gregorian chants.
“Now he has been asked to leave. Apparently the monks were spending all their time answering the telephone. Fans kept ringing up and others were trying to get into the place.”
“[Scott] always enjoyed learning more about older Western music, and had a vast record library of classical and related recordings,” John later confirmed. “He didn’t discuss his trip there with me, but the whole thing turned into a ridiculous media-fest involving photographers and other press, who somehow got wind that he was there… [It] was a publicity dream, whether it was planned or not.”14
Press treatment of the monastic sojourn only served to underline the image of ‘Scott Walker – neurotic romantic outsider’. In one sense, his very reluctance to play the fame game was a gift to a publicist like Sommerville.
On the business front, at the height of the Walkers’ success, Maurice King had formed his own music publishing company called Miracle Songs. The ultimate outcome was that any revenue from the Walkers’ own compositions would be channelled via King and Capable Management – as their other earnings already were.
It was a classic fifties-style arrangement, hanging over into the decade that followed. That it was allowed to persist was largely due to the unworldliness of the group themselves.
“All the money that we earned went directly to our managers,” John later admitted. “We never actually saw any of it, didn’t think about it at the time… Scott and I had just come from Hollywood – otherwise known as ‘rip-off city’ – and were overly wary of scams, yet here we were, unquestioning. Later, sadly, we would find out that, like other artists in the sixties, we never saw all the money that we were due.”
Scott was sanguine about the arrangement almost to the point of being boastful. “I don’t even have a bank account,” he said at the time.
1 Cabaret, in this milieu, tended to denote tuxedoed performers crooning as an accompaniment to diners eating meals. The term was redeemed over the ensuing decades by the Ebb and Kander musical (Cabaret) evoking the musical satire of Brecht and Weill during Germany’s Weimar years, as well as by an eighties London cabaret scene which dared show its teeth on occasion. In fairness to the Walkers, they belonged to none of the above camps.
2 The evening, as opposed to matinee, performance, as some tour dates were doubles.
3 On other dates, Gary’s ‘lead vocals’ amounted to a histrionic mime to Scott singing Sinatra’s ‘Strangers In The Night’ offstage – then a current hit, which Engel considered way substandard to Ol’ Blue Eyes’ classic fifties Reprise albums.
4 Those familiar with the rotund latter-day King and the still slender Engel may find this extraordinary. In the mid-sixties, however, both were thin young men.
5 The 1967 Sexual Offences Act would selectively decriminalise many gay sex acts – though some have claimed that police persecution of homosexuals for ‘indecency’ continued unabated for years.
6 Jean Cocteau can also be said to have been a ‘bizarre man’, as well as an internationally revered artist. This post-romantic variously dabbled (almost always successfully) in poetry, drama and film. A homosexual contemporary of Genet, he supported the thief’s release from a life sentence harshly imposed for a series of petty crimes. How Cocteau compares with the man who made ‘Una Paloma Blanca’ a hit is not entirely clear.
7 “But I thought Scott Walker was gay?” is a cry that still goes up today, despite all evidence to the contrary. In the sixties, he may have amused himself by declining to confirm or deny such rumours, given the appealing outsider status of gay men. In turn, it served to fuel disinformation about ‘The Walker Sisters’ which reflected on John too.
8 When Hendrix’s death is attributed to his drug use, it’s often overlooked that the fatal combination was wine and prescription sleeping pills.
9 Engel Dry Cleaning ran for a long time from the same house in which Scott spent the first two years of his life. The local Hamilton paper carried its ad with an amateurish cartoon that showed an old fellow of similar vintage to Scott Sr. in moustache, tie, collar and hat: “MAN is the only living creature that can be skinned more than once,” ran its oddly macabre slogan. It reads almost like a fragmentary line from a latter-day Scott Walker lyric.
10 The story that Cotton Jr. subsequently banned the Walkers from appearing on BBC TV, which supposedly stayed in place till their mid-seventies reformation and appearance on The Vera Lynn Christmas Show, appears to be a myth. Scott himself appeared as a solo artist on Cotton Sr.’s show one year after the event – singing the highly incongruous ‘My Death’.
11 Given Scott’s anti-psychedelic sensibility, perhaps any pop-movie opus would have ended up closer to Peter Watkins’ sombre Privilege, with Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones – which, as David Bowie has noted, is a sixties curio that grows better (and more prescient) with age.
12 Stewart had to undertake an extensive course of rehabilitation before becoming active again. When last heard of, he was working at Tower Records on Sunset Strip in the mid-seventies. His promising career in pop music was lost to him – contrary to a common misapprehension, he was not the folk-rock singer John Stewart who gifted ‘Daydream Believer’ to The Monkees.
13 John and Gary later denied that the invitation even occurred – though, given Margaret’s party-girl antics with Performance actor/career criminal John Bindon and the scandalous allusions in recent film The Bank Job, it might have proved an eye-opener.
14 Relations remained cordial with the monks of Quarr Abbey. In the summer of 1967, Scott ran to the bedside of Father Altham Dean after he suffered a heart attack. “Supposedly he was given a key to the abbey, which he wore on his belt,” acknowledged John. “… I asked him what it was for, and he said, ‘To make people ask me what it’s for.’” The key can be seen hanging from his belt on the cover of the deleted 1969 album Scott: Scott Walker Sings Songs From His TV Series.