THE CURIOUS LIFE AND WORK OF Scott Walker

The man who now traversed the canals and bicycle paths of Amsterdam had reverted to being ‘Scott Walker’. “Fuck it, I don’t care, y’know?” he shrugged. “A name doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Maybe it didn’t any more. For the time being though, his singing career still did. Even that was going through a kind of hiatus while he visited art galleries, walked his dog in the streets without fear of harassment, or downed bottles of Heineken with whisky chasers in local bars. “I had this thing once a year when I called everybody and said I’m quittin’,” he told Chris Welch at the Melody Maker in March 1970. “The last time everybody said: ‘We thought you already had.’”

When presented with a best male vocalist award (and a cup of hot sake) by perennially faithful Japanese magazine Music Life that same month, while in Tokyo to play a concert, he gave a (very approximately translated here¹) appraisal of his immediate plans: “I will make Scott 5, but before I have to make one LP and also one single.”

It’s not exactly clear what he had in mind – but the mix of Engel originals and covers that would see release by the end of the year would be as close to Scott 5 as he’d ever get.

“I [also] want to sing in other countries’ languages, for example Hungarian, Russian and Japanese… and also of course French.”

All these ambitions would fall by the wayside. But in the decades that followed, Scott Engel would become an artist who skirted around the edge of language – who found his own meaning in collages of sounds and words.

For now, however, when asked if he thought he had changed, he replied (in that quaintly translated English):

Now I don’t think I’m going to fight things like before. Except pushing myself into things… certainly like concerts, I’m quite fixed on that. At the last moment I retreated at the wall, I was scared of everything. It was always so. Before, sometimes, I lost my head.

Q. When are you happiest in your life?

I’m happiest when I think about the ‘creativity of man’. when a man creates something… Of course I’m happy when I go see movies and I’m hearing music. Now I’m most pleased when I go see operas and movies.”

Q. For you, what do fans mean?

First of all I dislike the word ‘fan’. It’s very disagreeable, the word should not be used, I think. Once I was one of The Walker Brothers, but now I think there are no hysterical fans. How do you feel if I call them ‘the listeners of my records’ or ‘the audience of my concerts’? They can keep me alive or kill me…

There then followed a series of questions and word associations that mainly relate to the end of the sixties, which subsequently ran in Engel fanzine Scott Times:

Q. What do you think about the activities for peace of John and Yoko?

S. It’s only a devotion to egoism.

From the next word, please tell me the thing that you imagine:

1) God – Mankind

2) Death – Mankind

3) Love – Mankind

4) Woman – Out of Space

5) Human Being – Mankind

6) Man – Earth

7) Hippy – Hallucinations

8) Japan – I can’t say it in one word

9) Religion – Fascinating

10) War – Fascinating

11) Scott Engel – Man

12) Sex – Exhilarating

13) Mother – Past

14) Father – Non-Existent

15) Politics – Good exercise

16) Fashion – Waste of time

17) America – Waste of time

18) Time – Waste

19) The Beatles – Overrated

20) Marriage – Necessary evil

21) Baby – Very necessary

22) Elvis Presley – Very necessary to my past

23) Bob Dylan – Beautiful²

24) Jean-Paul Sartre – Beautiful

25) Marijuana or Acid – Useful and distracting³

Asked if he’d had plans to appear in a film, he replied, “Yes, I was going to appear in a movie made in Czechoslovakia but I stopped it for one simple reason: I’m not interested in working as an actor at all.” Instead, according to the translation, his ambition was to direct “movies of no form” (i.e. abstract films).

“I would love to direct,” he confirmed in an English interview. “That’s more of a reality now than ever before. I’ve seen some great continental movies recently, like [Visconti’s] The Damned.“⁴

Scott remained as disinterested as ever in contemporary American film trends: “I saw Easy Rider, but the only thing I liked about it was Phil Spector’s appearance as the pusher at the beginning.”

Film directing would remain an unfulfilled ambition, however. What would coalesce, in time, was a melding of musical narrative and abstract imagery.

Back in London, for all that he now divided much of his time between Denmark and Holland, Scott was granted British citizenship in May 1970. His musical career may have been in stasis, but he had put down new roots.

As for his immediate musical plans, at first he was at a loss. He reverted to the ‘plan B’ he held in store for times when he was undergoing a crisis of confidence, offering his services as a bass player to bands. But Eric Clapton’s new supergroup, Blind Faith, had already recruited their bassist, and neither Georgie Fame nor Alan Price returned his phone calls.

And so he began writing again. Observational songs, based on overheard snippets of conversation, or people he met in bars, or (most especially) the other figures who inhabited his block of flats in Holland. When stoked by his imagination and contained within an imagined environment, it began to gel into that quintessentially seventies artefact: a concept album.

In September Scott took a holiday in Greece, where he played on his acoustic guitar and developed character sketches of the disparate figures inhabiting his apartment block of the mind. On his record to Holland he called up Philips to tell the label he was ready to record again. He would be returning to London soon – with his new manager in tow.

Ady Semel was a sophisticated Israeli who dressed expensively, was well versed in classical music and reputedly spoke five languages. Engel had first met him when one of his charges, the exotic Esther Ofarim, had appeared on his BBC1 show 18 months previously.⁵

He also respected Semel enough to allow himself to be put back into live performance. After the fiasco the previous year, when he’d irritated his audience by reiterating ‘Black Sheep Boy’ (an incident he later blamed on painkillers for an injury sustained in a car accident), Scott happily took a cabaret residency at the Frontier Club in Batley, West Yorkshire.

(It later emerged that he’d been offered a lesser number of nights at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall at this time. As he admitted, “I never had the guts for the big concert stuff. I’d rather rationalise the frequency of my solo appearances to this one club every year for more money than some of the others combined.”)

Descriptions of the gigs suggest he was professionalism itself. Perched atop a stool, he sang a smattering of early Walkers classics, his own most recent hit 45s, a touch of Brel and The Beatles’ ‘The Long And Winding Road’ – a McCartney ballad he particularly admired, by a band he still considered grossly overrated.

Then it was back to Stanhope Place to record the new album in time for a Christmas release, most of which had been written in the space of two weeks. But this time Engel was working with a collaborator, as he explained – or at least a kind of lyrical editor.

“I came back from Greece with the tunes and most of the lyrics done and worked on them with my new manager,” he told the Sunday Mirror in late November 1970. “He really stopped me going overboard on the songs which I have a tendency to do. He came up with some nice ideas, better ways of getting across my original idea… He acts as my censor, vetting all my lyrics and striking out the words likely to harm old ladies.”

It was a big climbdown from his former refusal to compromise. But then Scott was likely to accept interference from the aesthetically attuned Semel in a way that he never would have done with the philistine Maurice King. As to how far Ady Semel actually participated in the lyric writing he was co-credited for, it’s unlikely he went beyond toning down the most vivid imagery or language. (Others have suggested it was a purely financial arrangement the manager insisted on; more straightforward, perhaps, than how Colonel Tom Parker insisted on a co-writer’s credit for Elvis on his earliest hits, while pocketing much of the royalties himself.)

Not that the album – intended as Scott 5, until changed (possibly at Philips’ insistence) to ‘Til The Band Comes In – was a complete set of originals. Side one was a particularly vivid set of songs arranged by Wally Stott, while side two mostly consisted of five covers under the auspices of Peter Knight.

Semel, who by now was so omnipresent in his client’s career that he actually sat in and made comment on press interviews, wrote sleeve notes which described the album as the combined narratives of “an old-age pensioner, a kept cowboy, a resigned girl lover, a telephone crank, a landlady’s grasp of an unneighbourly stripper, an immigrant waiter”. The unifying concept is the apartment block in which they all reside, though this cosmopolitan bunch are not only of different nationalities but sometimes seem to be inhabiting different countries.

The album opens with a short ‘Prologue’, which suggests Scott Engel’s classical proclivities may be about to get full reign again. A cello quietly and mournfully scrapes in the style of Brahms while children’s voices are heard, doors slam closed and a shouting adult voice is just about audible.

“I like film music,” explained Scott, “I respect Jerry Goldsmith and I admire Alex North.⁶ They belong to a bygone age, which was very rich and interesting.” ‘Prologue’ segues into ‘Little Things (That Keep Us Together)’, which is cinematic music of a different kind, its insistently upbeat rhythm recalling the Pearl & Dean ad sections heard in British cinemas at the time. Its lyrics, though, are of the blackest pessimism: “It’s on days like these / When your… brother falls from your hands / Jumbo jets can die / Killing 81 / Little things that help us get by” – our shared tabloid morbidity being the explanation of “Why the war’s going on.”⁷

The bleakness doesn’t end there – although it’s a more conventionally tuneful melancholy than on any of the Scott albums. “As old Joe sat a-dyin’ / The baby down the hall was cryin’ / “Someone had a party goin’ on,” runs the musicial obituary of ‘Joe’, one of the older tenants of the apartment block. The music is lounge piano crooning but, once again upbeat, with Scott taking his existentialism in his stride. (The line, “A postcard from Sun City was found laying by your side” was an obvious jibe at the promoter who tried to get him and John to play South Africa. It’s unlikely that a lonely British pensioner, who lived on meals-on-wheels and had “no one left to call me Joe,” would have contacts in what was then a playground of the rich and conscienceless.)

‘Thanks For Chicago, Mr James’ is simply stunning when heard today. Despite the fact that it was never issued as a single, its ‘big pop’ string arrangement and uplifting chorus (based around the title) can seduce you into believing you’re listening to a big hit of the early seventies. Perhaps the reason for its neglect was that the grateful narrator of the song is a “kept cowboy” and the gay element is fairly overt: “Thanks… for all the shiny suits / And all the shiny names / The things a country boy can’t grace / Without the look of shame.” It was only half a decade before Glen Campbell would sing about a ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’, but Scott Walker was there first.

‘Long About Now’ is a beautiful oddity that seems to belong to Scott 2 or 3 – except that it’s sung from a female perspective by Esther Ofarim, as a dreamy precursor to the female vocalists who would later interpret the contemporary Scott. (“Long about now / He’s… back from the rain / Burned to the ground / His ashes will rise black butterflies / Tapping at my window pane.”)

The arrangements for the album are nowhere near as intricate as those which preceded it over the classic 1-4 – but there’s a virtue to that, in that at times it’s more accessibly poppy, and it’s easy to imagine that Bowie may have given it at least one listen before recording his similarly eclectic Hunky Dory the next year.

‘Time Operator’ sets the tone of pastiche for the next two tracks. To a laid-back ersatz jazz backing, the narrator feeds chat-up lines to the recorded time announcer of the General Post Office’s phone service. (“At the third stroke, the time will be…” It sounds almost archaic now, but it’s as much of its time as downloadable apps would be today. It’s also intrinsically British, whereas the apartment block seems to be a microcosm of the world.) Its seedily humorous tone – “And I wouldn’t care if you’re ugly / ‘Cos with the lights out I couldn’t see you,” sings Scott, tongue-in-cheekly comparing himself to Paul Newman (as others had done) – leads into a track that’s all-out burlesque.

‘Jean The Machine’ is simply good fun, its ragtime jazz parody already sounding familiar by the early seventies.⁸ A Cold War-era comedy tune set to a striptease beat, it tells of a Hungarian ‘exotic dancer’ whose landlady believes she’s a ‘commie spy’. “Jean come back (we forgive you!),” runs the joyous ending, “Jean come back (Boy Scout’s honour!) / Jean come back (Spiro Agnew!) / Jean come back (to the Bolshoi!)”, and for a moment it’s like Engel has joined The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

‘Cowbells Shakin” is a leftover from Scott’s miniatures. Running at under two minutes, its folk-country guitar covers the genuinely moving scenario of a former cowboy adrift without work: “And tell your fat momma the life we’ve been keepin’ / Your head waiter brother won’t give me a job / And I’ve walked these streets till I’m breakin’ …” It abandoned the apartment block conceit (though, as stated, the building seems to be a universal microcosm), but it hinted of the highways and prairies where Engel’s career would take a detour.

Side two eventually dispenses with the concept altogether, although not in the first two Engel/Semel originals. “Here on the outskirts of life / It’s a world with voice of caretaker’s wife,” opens the title track, and its this loose concept that links the tracks. “The times we sat and sang of all the hidden things we knew / Did they ever come up true? / And it’s the time to sing a song / Across the emptiness between us…” It’s as if Engel is lamenting the death of his recent career, in vocal and musical arrangements that are less demanding of his listeners.

‘The War Is Over (Epilogue)’ is a concluding statement – though exactly what it’s saying is characteristically not obvious. It’s not a peace anthem per se, like the John & Yoko Christmas song of the following year: “Raise your blinds / The war is over / Let me get some sleep tonight.” It sounds like a temporary respite in the drama of his characters’ lives, a little relief before ‘the war’ begins all over again.

But the album still has time to run, and there are five cover versions which, if not entirely selected by John Franz or the Philips top brass, would at least be regarded by them as inoffensive enough for inclusion. “Cornball shlock,” Scott would later dismiss them,⁹ but their variable quality means that some are at least listenable. ‘Stormy’, a cover of Classics IV’s 1968 US hit,¹⁰ where Scott Walker pointlessly performs funk-lite. ‘The Hills Of Yesterday’ is much better, with lyrics by Paul Francis Webster and music by Mancini, taken from the Sean Connery-Richard Harris movie The Molly Maguires. Well sung and well orchestrated, it’s to the standard of the lesser cover versions on the early Scott LPs. Then ‘Reuben James’ comes along and undermines the whole set-up – a lightweight hit for Kenny Rogers, it’s country music for liberal folks, telling of a poor white boy saved by a black preacher. It also gives the impression that Scott Walker covering straight country was a bad idea (which was surely not the case).

Side two does at least end on two high points. ‘What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life?’ was co-written by Michel Legrand for the 1969 film The Happy Ending. Overtly sentimental, with flowery orchestration, it had already been covered by Jack Jones and Frank Sinatra – and here their young counterpart steps up to show himself, at the very least, their equal. ‘It’s Over’ is a hearbreak ballad by folk-rocker Jimmie Rodgers that would become a hit for Elvis in 1973. Anyone who feels a warm tingle at Presley’s opening lines, “If time were not a moving thing / And I could make it stay,” should hear Scott sing the song and take an even deeper emotional bath. But as to what relation it bore to what, overall, was a concept album, well…

Engel dutifully undertook a round of interviews and TV appearances for ‘Til The Band Comes In, one of his most tuneful and accessible solo albums. And it stiffed.

In a short space of time, the name ‘Scott Walker’ on a record had come to signify a living byword for lack of airplay and public indifference. A strange commercial void into which even some of the most compelling pop music could sink.

Engel himself was becoming fatalistically self-deprecating about it all. “Oh, here he goes again,” he imagined a listener hearing the opening ‘Prologue’, “‘Gloomy Sunday.”‘

Scott and Mette left their apartment in Amsterdam, dividing their time now between Copenhagen (where she mostly resided) and London, where he had, perhaps ill-advisedly at the time, bought a large flat near Regent’s Park: “I’d bought an apartment, which was giving me nightmares, a huge place I was wandering around in, like Xanadu.”¹¹ Always fond of a drink and not averse to mixing it with sedatives, by his own account the early seventies became something of a blur for Scott Engel.

On April 28, 1971 (her 61st birthday), Scott’s mother, ‘Mrs Betty’, wrote a letter to her respectful correspondent Kazuie of the Scott Times fanzine. She advised her that Scott’s fan club in London (which formerly had 16,000 members, more than that of the now-defunct Beatles) had closed down, but had been superseded by a new fan club in Manchester. She gave an interview around this time that Kazuie headed ‘They keep In Touch with Telephone More than with Writing – “I wanna live with Mama”‘. In touchingly pidgin English, the Anglo version of the interview ran as follows:

How does Scott write to you, often or not?

He writes to me once in a great while. But he phones me once in three weeks certainly.

When Scott phones you, what do you speak about?

We don’t have such a serious talk. Scott won’t tell me about his troubles or his works or the details of his works. I think he will think that I’ll worry about him… But thinking about him who is troubled alone, I worry about him more. He usually phones me with such a simple reason that he would like to hear my voice suddenly…

I decided to ask if Mrs Betty would like to live with Scott in future. Mrs Betty considered for a while hearing my question but suddenly she told me like this certainly.

This spring when I enjoyed travel with Scott in England he said he wished I’d work with him forever. And I asked him if he was sad alone. He answered that this was sometimes so. Scott seemed that he wanted me to stay with him as he seemed to have had a lot of troubles. He would like me to be his comfortable place rather than his consultant. When I heard it from him I would like to stay with Scott going to England. But it was my momentary feeling. It is for himself that he goes the way alone that he would wish to go. If I’d lived with Scott in England, it would not be for Scott though my momentary wish would be satisfied… it would only trouble him. I cannot stand to trouble him. At first, if we did so, I would hurt him.

Now is it impossible for Scott to come back to America?

I cannot tell that. But I can tell to [be] American is not for him. Scott seems to have got accustomed to the life in England and likes such life.

The same fanzine dutifully reported their hero’s professional activities later in the year, when he replaced a veteran of the late fifties/early sixties British pop scene onstage:

Adam Faith was due to appear but was taken ill and Scott took his place. This show was started on Sunday 29th August and closed on Saturday 4th Sept. It was said that Scott took the place of Adam Faith confidently. At the last night of the show, Scott wore black jacket with suede lining, black trousers, blue shirt and black shoes. He had a black belt but his key wasn’t there. His songs that night were as followed: ‘Amsterdam’, ‘The Long And Winding Road’, ‘Make It Easy’, ‘Stormy’, ‘Joanna’, ‘Cincinnati’, ‘Jackie’, ‘If You Go Away’ and a curtain call, ‘Lady Came From Baltimore’.

Scott appeared on BBCTV show Top of the Pops. This show was televised on 21st Oct… in order to introduce his new single ‘I Still See You’. On 20th Oct Scott recorded ‘I Still See You’ with a navy blue anorak and moccasins, and he wore brown trousers, blue shirt (open-necked) and his key was around his neck on a chain.

‘I Still See You’ added lyrics by Hal Shaper to the theme music of The Go-Between, by Michel Legrand. Starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, the 1971 film was an adaptation of L.P. Hartley’s novel of illicit love and social duplicity in late Victorian England. It begins with the novel’s most famous lines: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”

When movie veteran Shaper (who had worked with Engel on ‘The Rope And The Colt’) offered the song to Philips, John Franz felt it would be a natural for his dejected charge. The job was accepted and Scott turned up with a young woman in tow (presumably Mette), bemoaning to Shaper how little time he was granted in the studio to perform his vocals. He was also in the process of getting soused, and kept pouring himself a drink from at least one vodka bottle he was carrying in a satchel.

Shaper was clearly perturbed. This was not the young professional with the get-the-job-done attitude he remembered from Paris in 1968. Scott, the frustrated songwriter, also insisted on making changes to the lyric: “The original line was: ‘I see the fields / So green and fair / The silent ghosts / Are everywhere,’ which fitted perfectly into the film, but Scott insisted on singing: ‘I see the fields / In still green air / The silent ghosts / To dance their hair.’”

For all his indulgence, the voice is as warm and as resonant on the single as it is on any of his early seventies work, and as ever, it suits Legrand’s fluid theme. The lyrical change, while partly nonsensical, is only really apparent if you’re listening for it.

The B-side, ‘My Way Home’, is an Engel-Semel original. A superior song, it has been noted¹² that it bears a strong historical resemblance to the period described in ‘It’s Raining Today’. In fact, it’s a more authentically ‘on the road’ lyric: “Watching greyhounds / Through the giant dawn… Lost in a dream / Where windows open out on stars.”

The rich arrangement might have fitted Scott 2 or 3. Nobody knew it at the time, but this was the last hurrah of the Scott Walker who had captivated listeners throughout the late sixties. Neither would there be another original Engel lyric recorded for six years.

Scott did his promotional duties on ‘I Still See You’, appearing on the 200th edition of ATV’s The Golden Shot¹³ as well as Top Of The Pops. All to no avail. The 45 mirrored the lack of success of all his recent recordings.

With his career apparently in stasis, Scott confined himself to the equally complicated business of living. Back in 1968, he’d told Rave magazine: “I want a woman to have my children, but without having to marry her… I know how to handle children, how to educate them. They represent security to me. It’s a kind of spiritual thing I believe in, to have something left of mine when I die. I could do more for children than the average person. I know how a child should be raised – in material security, free from pressures, completely relaxed with no mental hang-ups. These are all the things I wasn’t!”

Scott and Mette’s daughter Lee was born in Copenhagen on 30 August 1972. This writer has seen colour photostats taken from the Engel family album of the child’s first Christmas:¹⁴ baby Lee, on a sofa, looks in bemusement at the camera, already exhibiting her mother’s Nordic features; Mimi (Betty) is there, looking admiringly up at her son (drink in his hand) as she clasps his arm, surrounded by seasonal decorations; in their very comfortable-looking apartment, Mette and Betty sit on the sofa, the younger woman holding her mother-in-law-to-be affectionately.

Scott’s early aversion to marriage was overcome when he, Mette and Lee went to visit Betty at home early in the New Year of 1973. The wedding took place at a private ceremony in Las Vegas. (“In case I have to get a divorce, it’ll be real easy,” Scott joked to Gary Leeds.) There was no reception, but the happy couple flew back home to Copenhagen for a celebration with Mette’s family.

There was now a dependent little mouth to feed. Art for art’s sake would have to wait.

“The signals were out really that I had to try something different or else I’d have to go into this situation that eventually arrived, where I was making records for the company basically,” Scott more recently told the Kijak documentary team. “To see out contracts, because they actually thought some of these records were going to do something. I didn’t – no. At that time it started to bother me, not because of the success or failure or anything, but the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to do any more albums like that. That was what really got to me, I wasn’t going to be able to have all that at my disposal.

“After the fourth record, ‘Til The Band Comes In was kind of a signal of ‘We’re getting off you as a writer, we want you to do something else,’ you know. That’s when I started imbibing a little too much and things like that.

“John Franz, who was a dear friend of mine, came to me and said, ‘Look, let them have a couple of albums they want, and down the line we’ll sneak in another one.’ It’s that old thing and of course it never happened, you see. And so it got worse and worse, and I got worse and worse with the imbibing.”

The first part of Franz’s masterplan to save his protégé’s career was The Moviegoer – an album of film theme songs recorded (once again, with some haste) at Stanhope Place soon after Scott’s daughter was born. “I just sat back and copped money for whatever it was they wanted me to do,” Scott said later in the seventies. “If they wanted me to do movie themes, man, I would pick the best movie themes that I thought were possible and I would do them.”

In the event, The Moviegoer didn’t so much demonstrate the range of Engel’s cinematic and musical interests (which would have been truly interesting) as anthologise a load of songs from contemporary films of the late sixties/early seventies – although, as with ‘I Still See You’, some were lyrics that had never actually appeared in the films themselves. The cover showed Scott in cowboy’s Stetson and rolled-up sleeves, with a ‘rear stalls’ ticket taken from the cinema. Combined with the seventies typography, it had a very budgetalbum effect.

Within a year, in fact, that’s what it became, when it was reissued on the Contour Records label after no success with Philips. The sleeve notes read:

His approach to these songs reflects the mood of each piece, varying from the powerful lyric to the pure story line. The orchestral backing never obtrudes, and allows the full scope of his tender voice and clear diction to take command and thrill you.

With composers like Henry Mancini, Michel Legrand and John Barry, plus the talent of Scott Walker[,] you have a formidable middle of the road, easy-listening album.

The above is as fair a summation as any. The album was helmed by the Franz-Olliff team, with the substitution of Robert Cornford, founder of the London Sinfonia, for the arrangers on the classic Scott records. Despite the bargain-rack product that it ultimately became, some of the vocal performances couldn’t help but give the album several high points.

‘This Way Mary’ added Don Black’s romantic lyric to Barry’s violin and cello requiem for the doomed Mary, Queen Of Scots. “This way Mary / Run, Mary / Our love was meant to be,” seems particularly incongruous, given that “this way” is the direction that Mary, post-Reformation Catholic pretender to the throne, is taking to the executioner’s block. Still, the sadness in Scott’s voice gives the bland lyric its undertow of melancholy.

‘Speak Softly Love’, the English version of Nino Rota’s love theme from The Godfather (as sung by Al Martino – who played Johnny Fontane in the film) is as sweetly handled as one would hope, with smooth vocals and Spanish guitar. Neil Diamond’s ‘Glory Road’ is from WUSA, a now obscure (as with many of the pics represented here) but interesting picture with Paul Newman, adapted by Robert Stone from his politically liberal novel A Hall Of Mirrors. When Scott sings, “Hey friend, have you seen Glory Road?” and multitracks his voice, he briefly becomes a one-man Walker Brothers.

‘That Night’ is a well-orchestrated and sung (but not otherwise notable) theme from a film briefly controversial in its day – The Fox, from a D.H. Lawrence story about a clashing love triangle and lesbian affair. ‘The Summer Knows’ is a powerful performance with an arrangement briefly touching on discord, from a more anodyne film (wartime coming-of-age drama Summer Of ‘42).¹⁵

‘The Ballad Of Sacco And Vanzetti’ is another high point. Adapted from the Italian docudrama Sacco E Vanzetti, about the controversial conviction and execution for murder of two Italian anarchists in twenties Massachussetts,¹⁶ Scott’s low-murmured “Oh father, I am a prisoner,” strips away the piety of original vocalist Joan Baez, the voice of earnest US liberalism, replacing it with spaghetti-western tension. (Understandably, since the music’s composer was Morricone.)

‘A Face In The Crowd’ opens with traffic-noise discord that briefly suggests Edgard Varèse,¹⁷ before going into the theme song from the Steve McQueen racing movie Le Mans. ‘Joe Hill’ isn’t as bad as some suggest (it’s certainly better than ‘Reuben James’), but its cowboy-ballad encounter with the executed trade unionist of the title only just about puts over how Hill is mooted as a similar miscarriage of justice to Sacco and Vanzetti. Things do get really bad with ‘All His Children’, a Legrand-composed song from another liberal Paul Newman drama, Never Give An Inch. Black country singer Charley Pride may well have believed that we’re all God’s children, but Engel sounds unconvinced – to the point where it seems he’s disguising his voice (or maybe he’s just plain drunk).

Again, the final two covers are a couple of high points. ‘Come Saturday Morning’ is a refreshing ‘let’s hit the road’ ballad, nominated for an Oscar, from Alan J. Pakula’s otherwise inconsequential Pookie with Liza Minnelli.¹⁸ ‘Easy Come, Easy Go’ is a genuine barroom ballad from They Shoot Horses Don‘t They?, Sydney Pollack’s great adaptation of Horace McCoy’s story of an exhausting Depression-era dance-athon. Scott carries it and closes the album beautifully, sounding like he’s setting up the drinks – if he hasn’t got one in his hand already.

As already intimated, the album did virtually nothing on its release. Scott headed back to cabaret at Fagin’s Club in Manchester, in early 1973, to keep the coffers filled. With a family to support and a career that seemed to be slipping out of sight, he tried to remain philosophical. Indeed, he remained an existentialist: “I would rather have gone off totally and experimented with standards and had that experience than not,” he later remarked. “It’s just as important to exist as write… Existence is worth everything. So I wasn’t dead, you know?”

Commercially, Philips may have found the latter remark debatable. But the label still hustled him back into the studio in early ‘73. The resulting album, Any Day Now, contained anodyne sleeve notes that referred to “this much misunderstood artiste” – misunderstood by whom, the ‘artiste’ may have asked? Philips Records?

Again, given the near-impossibility of the vocalist putting in a totally bad performance, there are inevitable high points. The Bacharach music of the title track plays like pretty cheesy loungecore today, but it’s still as catchy as hell. (The song itself has a lyric by Bob Hilliard rather than Hal David, which calls his lover “my wild beautiful bird”, and was previously a hit for Chuck Jackson, as well as covered by Elvis.)

‘All My Love’s Laughter’ is the first time Engel covered a song by Jimmy Webb. It’s regrettable it wasn’t either of the Glen Campbell hits, ‘Wichita Lineman’ or ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’, love songs with an unusual evocation of time and distance. But this is one of Webb’s own solo tunes with a modern country feel – “Don’t lose your heart to that beautiful sinner / She walks without shining her light now” – and it contains some incredible pedal steel guitar playing for a song recorded in west London.

‘Maria Bethania’ is another standout track – though mostly for the wrong reasons. It’s a tribute to a major singing artist in Brazil, in the classic bossa nova and samba styles (although her music has apparently taken on a slightly harder edge in recent years).

The song was written for her by her brother, Caetano Veloso, another famous musician in Brazil, who was exiled by the military government in the late sixties/early seventies, along with Gilberto Gil amongst others. (They spent most of their exile living in London.) Hence the chorus: “Maria Bethania, please send me a letter / I wish to know things are getting better.” Which is very commendable and in tune with Scott’s liberal conscience – apart from the odd cod-West Indian accent he adopts over the bossa nova beat, which kind of predicts Sting’s mock-Jamaican tones in his early days. This is bookended by strange scat singing which seems to be based around the word ‘dong’. Quite how drunk one has to be to achieve all of this remains a matter of conjecture – but still, once heard never forgotten.¹⁹

At the other end of the scale, even a Scott Walker contractual obligation album has to contain one bone fide classic. Since his early championing of Randy Newman with The Walker Brothers, Scott had seen Newman turn from professional jobbing songwriter to solo artist in his own right. On Any Day Now, the Engel vocal does justice to (and partly transforms) the brief and mournful ‘Cowboy’, an out-of-time frontiersman’s lament for the coming of urbanisation: “Cold grey buildings where hills should be / Steel and concrete closing in on me… Cowboy, cowboy… too late to fight now, too tired to try.”

‘When You Get Right Down To It’ is pleasant but pointless, faithfully close to Ronnie Dyson’s 1971 soul hit but too polite to add anything. The same goes for his version of David Gates’/Bread’s ‘If’, which is too tastefully done to compete with Telly Savalas’ gruff spoken-word hit version of 1975²⁰. Ditto Bill Withers’ ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ – nicely respectful to the original, but why bother? ‘The Me I Never Knew’ is an odd one – a cover of a Don Black/John Barry song from the 1972 British film of Alice‘s Adventures In Wonderland; the original did little justice to Lewis Carroll’s wonderfully demented imagination and Scott’s version is only a slight improvement. (It would be released as a single, but fell into the same void as all his recent records.)

As with the two previous albums, the final two cover versions almost justify Scott’s gun-for-hire status of the time. ‘If Ships Were Made To Sail’ is the second track on the album by Jim Webb, almost making one wish for a similar long-term dalliance with the songs of Webb as with those of Brel or, to a lesser degree, Newman. Low-key and almost whispered to a simple piano backing, the listener can hear Engel’s currently trapped status in Webb’s dreams of ultimate escape: “I’d find a forest hill and clean fresh air / If I could go to Alpha Centauri / Then I would be a-living there.”

‘We Could Be Flying’ is an altogether wackier dream of escape, and is notable only for that reason. Taken from a long-forgotten 1971 concept LP called Wings by French composer Michel Colombier, its lyrics were by Paul Williams: the diminutive US songwriter who, among other credits, contributed ‘Fill Your Heart’ to Bowie’s Hunky Dory and (later) the lyrics to kiddie gangster musical Bugsy Malone.

Strangely, the track (which was presumably recorded a year earlier) was showcased in a London Weekend TV show called 2Gs & The Pop People in July 1972, which centred on a flared-trousered pop dancing troupe called The Second Generation.²¹

Scott walks godlike among them in a tightly tailored light brown suit: “A new kind of light surrounds us all / And if we could we’d all be flying / I’ve always felt that deep inside / We’re trying, we’re trying.”

Accompanied by a post-psychedelic phased guitar freakout, people in multi-coloured trouser suits, Scott himself and hippie musicians are all superimposed very primitively, some arm in arm, onto cloud backdrops – including guest DJ/horror movie star Mike Raven in a Dracula cape.

At the end, Scott passes through the centre of the Second Generation dancers who gaze on him with adoration, before miming a Swingle Singers-type ba-ba-ba-ba backing. Scott may have ridiculed psychedelic drugs, but this is a very bad trip indeed – now available to watch online but recommended only for the strong in mind.

Scott’s contract at Philips was up for renewal, but the restrictions on him writing his own material had urged Ady Semel to seek a new deal elsewhere. He was getting no resistance from the top brass at Philips.

John Franz and Peter Olliff, who were still with Scott on Any Day Now, had collaborated with him since the mid-sixties on some of the most powerful popular music of the 20th century. But they, like him, knew the time had now passed.

Notes

1 Asked about his health, the apparent response was “I had a typhus long ago and I had a cracked physique recently” – presumably meaning a rib.

2 Scott’s attitude toward Dylan by this point seemed to be that he was a skilled wordsmith but a harmonically limited musician.

3 The translator may well have meant “useless and distracting”. While some have conjectured that Engel may have experimented with hallucinogens when writing some of the more surreal lyrics on Scott 1-4, he himself had nothing but scorn for the psychedelic generation.

4 The story of a decadent industrialist family under the Nazis, starring Dirk Bogarde.

5 The young woman was half of married duo Esther and Abi Ofarim, who had a number one hit with ‘Cinderella Rockafeller’ in 1968. According to Gary Leeds, Esther and Abi didn’t regard themselves as “exclusively married”; Leeds was of the opinion that Scott and Esther had a fling before he got really serious with Mette – who he’d have known for almost three years by this point. But then Scott once opined that he didn’t believe in permanent relationships as he didn’t believe they really worked, viz that of his parents. By 1970, while still unwed, he’d come to regard marriage as a “necessary evil”.

6 North was an orchestral composer for Hollywood, who worked for Stanley Kubrick on Spartacus but whose score for 2001: A Space Odyssey was dropped; the original North score would later be recorded by Goldsmith, whose own music often entailed more avant-garde elements. A veteran of TV who created the scarily dissonant theme for the original Planet Of The Apes, much of Goldsmith’s most noted work was still ahead of him when Scott Walker recorded ‘Til The Band Comes In.

7 Maybe Vietnam, which by then had dragged on half a decade with no end in sight – or perhaps, more universally, any war at any time.

8 It’s not unlike ‘The Ballad Of Bonnie And Clyde’, a 1968 hit for Georgie Fame. It also echoes in later seventies music like the early 10cc (discovered by Jonathan King) and their own cinematic pastiches on albums like How Dare You!

9 “Like The Planet Of The Apes on TV / Like side two of ‘Til The Band Comes In,” sing Pulp of pop-cultural disappointments on their 2001 piss-take of Band Aid/celebrity collaborations, ‘Bad Cover Version’. The track was produced by Scott Walker and Peter Walsh, cementing Jarvis Cocker’s group’s status as an ironic Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band for the new millennium.

14 I’ve no idea who gained access to the photos or how they took the copies, which are distinct if grainy – though it does illustrate the depth of obsession of some fans, even at this low point of Scott’s career.

15 In his meandering though sometimes interesting book-length essay on Scott Walker, Another Tear Falls, poet Jeremy Reed makes the following point: “‘The Summer Knows’, and ‘Come Saturday Morning’, from The Moviegoer, are distinct inner readings of commendable material. The songs differed little in surface quality from the covers on his first solo album, numbers that included ‘When Joanna Loved Me’, ‘Through A Long And Sleepless Night’, and ‘You’re Gonna Hear From Me’.”

16 Doubts about the fairness of Sacco and Vanzetti’s trial remain a festering sore on the American liberal conscience. Shuman and Blau reference them in ‘Marathon’, their rewrite of Brel’s ‘Les flamandes’ – though their scramble through world-historic events from the twenties to the post-war years has nothing to do with Brel’s original lyric.

17 Anthony Reynolds also suggests George Gershwin’s ‘An American In Paris’.

18 Pakula went on to distinguish himself with paranoid thrillers like Klute and The Parallax View – and indeed All The President‘s Men, about the Watergate investigation.

19 It’s widely believed the track ‘Maria Bethania’ is the reason Scott Engel has never allowed Any Day Now to be released to CD.

21 Presumably after The Young Generation – the premiere long-haired pop dancers on British variety TV.

Chapter 8

Easy Come, Easy Go

Notes