“All through the wintertime he hid himself away… all through the winter in his lonely clump of wheat.”
– Frank Loesser, ‘The Ugly Duckling’, as sung by Danny Kaye
Fisher: “I’m going to see Europe again… for the first time in years. But Europe is not the same. I have arrived at dusk. The trip has made me restless. I cannot sleep. Water, water everywhere… and not a drop to drink.”
Therapist: “The story – what is the story?”
– Lars Von Trier, The Element Of Crime, a screenplay produced in 1984
The Scott Walker that began to slowly pique the interest of a cult audience in the early eighties was a phantom presence.1 At first almost as inaudible as he was invisible, with all of his classic Philips LPs long since deleted, his works had to be resurrected by an evangelist.
J.D. Beauvallet, founder and music editor of French magazine Les Inrockuptibles, would later be instrumental in the revival of interest in Walker’s music that took place in the nineties. His own curiosity was engaged a decade earlier: “I was too young to remember The Walker Brothers, I mean I know the songs, but I think like many people I discovered Scott through the punks – because the punk generation, through people like Julian Cope, people like Echo & The Bunnymen, they all really worshipped Scott Walker. So we thought, ‘Why? Who is this guy? Why is he worshipped by our heroes, this old Californian guy, by our punk heroes?’”
In fact this was the slightly younger generation that immediately followed punk. Engel’s personal Saint Paul was the latter-day Saint Julian of Tamworth. Julian Cope, lead singer and lyricist of psychedelic pop band The Teardrop Explodes, had been a part of the Merseyside scene which produced fellow post-punk bands Echo & The Bunnymen and Wah! Heat, whose vocalists, Ian McCulloch and Pete Wylie, had started off by rehearsing in a bedsit combo called The Big Three.
After Teardrop made hits of their first two catchy singles, ‘Reward’ and ‘Treason’, Cope displayed the amiable motormouth tendency of championing his favourite long-forgotten or neglected performers. His choices were often esoteric: one particularly engaging interview in NME (with Cope photographed in his ‘jamas) ran like a playlist: from forgotten psychedelia to ‘krautrock’2 But it wasn’t all wig-out music. Among his favourite solo vocalists were soul singer Don Covay and – in particular – Scott Walker, last heard of on a string of Walker Brothers cabaret dates after they delivered their audacious third reformation LP and promptly disappeared again.
Later in 1981, when the name ‘Scott Walker’ was becoming just a legendary rumour, with the artist unseen for years and the music seldom heard at all, Cope talked Teardrop’s independent label, Zoo Records, into licensing a number of original Engel compositions from the unavailable classic Philips LPs.
Fire Escape In The Sky: The Godlike Genius Of Scott Walker featured the best dozen songs that Zoo could afford: ‘Such A Small Love’ / ‘Big Louise’ (after whose attic boudoir the album is named) / ‘Little Things (That Keep Us Together’) / ‘Plastic Palace People’ / ‘The Girls From The Streets’ / ‘It’s Raining Today’ / ‘The Seventh Seal’ / ‘The Amorous Humphrey Plugg’ / ‘Angels Of Ashes’ / ‘Boy Child’ / ‘Montague Terrace (In Blue)’ and ‘Always Coming Back To You’.
It was as if a forgotten and almost forbidden part of pop music’s golden sixties era had been preserved only in this one slightly shabby artefact. Betraying its small-label origins, the light grey cover featured only ornate typography (watching from a distance, Engel later admitted, “I guess I was embarrassed by [the subtitle]”) and an empty space on the back where a picture might have been – reserved for a photograph that never showed in time for printing, it served to underline the sense of mystery and absence now surrounding the artist.
“I was sent Cope’s compilation and I put it on and listened to this young guy singin’,” Scott told the NME several years later, “thought, hey, that’s not bad. But one play was enough.” As his later output would demonstrate, he’d been set on a new path that began at the tail end of the seventies, with Nite Flights, and in any case, Fire Escape In The Sky would be deleted early after the struggling Zoo failed to pay royalties to Philips/Polygram.
When Stephen Kijak was making his bio-doc in the mid-noughties, he contacted Cope to talk about the subsequent Walker revival. The latter-day psychedelic druid gave no direct input but sent the following gracious email:
From: headheritage
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2004 7AM
Subject: scott walker film
Hey Stephen
Excellent to hear from you, and I’m very glad the film is going well.
My reason for releasing the FIRE ESCAPE IN THE SKY: THE GODLIKE GENIUS OF SCOTTWALKER compilation in 1981, was because I’d been buying up his LPs for between 80p and £1.20 all over Liverpool and Birmingham, and giving them to friends and/or anyone who would listen.
Furthermore, I really felt Scott had been utterly lost in terms of culture because of his willingness to include MOR slop right up until SCOTT 3.
All the subsequent compilations pushed his ‘housewife’ appeal and totally ignored the really great compositions.
However, by that time it was too late and my grey post-punk photograph-free design allowed people to enjoy Scott without feeling they were buying into some dodgy 60s MOR icon.
I really felt the job was done, and I’m very glad that Scott’s career was reclaimed to such a great extent.
I am pleased that someone remembers that the FIRE ESCAPE IN THE SKY LP started the deluge.
Good luck,
JULIAN
Cope, who has led an intriguingly esoteric solo career post-Teardrop Explodes, including as an author of books on historical, occult or musical arcana, later described his lack of sympathy for the more recent music of Scott Walker.3
By the time of the next Walker album release, the NME tried to engineer a meeting between the two performers but Cope ultimately didn’t go ahead with it. “His attitude was rather the same as mine when I had the chance to meet Brel in Paris,” said Engel. “I just chickened out. He did for the same reason.”
It seems to have had much to do with the wise option that says ‘avoid meeting your idols’. Cope had already opined in an earlier article that he wouldn’t want to meet another personal favourite, ex-Velvet Underground songwriter/vocalist/arranger John Cale, in case he got irritated by the Teardrop man’s effusiveness and said, “Look, I’m only John Cale!” But in any case, the revival of interest in Scott Walker was about to slowly permeate pop culture now.
In 1982, camp electropop singer Marc Almond4 of Soft Cell formed an occasional group called Marc & The Mambas to indulge his more esoteric musical interests; their debut double album Untitled features a faithful cover of ‘Big Louise’. The bisexual Almond can’t have been blind to Engel’s obvious sympathy for the outsiders of gay culture; he would later make ‘The Plague’ a regular part of his solo act at a time when that phrase was often synonymous with AIDS. He’d also become a regular re-interpreter of Brel’s songs – his more limited vocal range but pleasingly histrionic mode of performance making him a kind of gay alternative to late-sixties period Scott Walker.
“The thing that really got me into him was someone did me a cassette of his solo records, because his solo records weren’t really available,” says Sheffield-born post-punk vocalist Jarvis Cocker, who performed sporadically with his band Pulp in the eighties but would not see success till the nineties Britpop era. “This would be like the mid-eighties or something, and it happened that I had flu at the time, and I was in bed feeling sorry for myself. And it was very strange because, you know you get a bit feverish when you’ve got flu or something, and I thought, ‘Maybe I’ve imagined that music? I can’t believe that it really exists.’”5
Music to emulate the psychic immersion of fever dream would follow later in Engel’s career. For now, a long tunnel had to be followed that would arrive back in the recording studio.
***
In the early eighties, having signed a contract with Virgin Records, Scott would speak sanguinely in retrospect of his living conditions: “I was lucky to have so much time on my hands, time to read, to watch movies, to do things I like to do.”
Viewed with the naked eye, however, his situation was rather more precarious. Having put some of his own money into the completion of Nite Flights, he received virtually no royalties from that album and ongoing funds from the first two GTO Walkers LPs (for which he wrote none of the songs) was minimal; his Philips LPs were all by now out of print, apart from the odd compilation which, as Julian Cope points out, focused on his MOR output. In fact, diminishing funds prior to signing with Virgin had forced Engel to sell off his entire extensive collection of classical and jazz records.
And when he did sign in February 1980, demo tracks for the first Virgin album were not forthcoming – despite an advance of £20,000.6
The following year, Scott promised Virgin MD Simon Draper that recording would begin in the spring – when plants, flowers and other vegetation were in bloom and he would feel his creative energy replenished. Draper had no problem with that, but was perturbed at a subsequent meeting to be told, “They’re shoutin’ at me beneath my flat. Makin’ noise and disturbin’ me.” Scott apparently blamed this psychological onslaught on Virgin.
Draper was momentarily struck by fear that his new signing was a paranoid schizophrenic, but on closer investigation the assertion made some sense. Engel’s current flat was in a side road off High Street Kensington; in the office below was a counselling group for single mothers, philanthropically funded by Richard Branson. It was their noisier sessions which were disrupting the concentration needed to compose his new songs.
It was a tenuous, almost subterranean connection, but it was real. It was also a mode of thinking that would display itself more vividly on his later musical output.
By mid-1982, Virgin was becoming increasingly concerned at the lack of contact with Scott Engel. He had, however, become friendly with its PR Al Clark, who he’d meet in the tearoom of the Kensington Hilton to discuss their shared love of cinema, and A&R man Arnold Frolows (later renowned for Australian radio show Ambience), who was interested in modern jazz and became Scott’s squash partner.
Engel’s apparently leisurely lifestyle seemed at odds both with his contractual obligation and his financial state. Much of his advance from Virgin was already exhausted and he’d had to move from no less than three flats over the last three-year period after either defaulting on repayments or not meeting the rent.7
It was against this background that Clark tried to break the impasse by recommending that Scott solicit the help of Ed Bicknell as an intermediary.
“I had a friend at Virgin Records called Al Clark, who later went on to make Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert,“8 confirms veteran rock industry manager Bicknell. “Al and I just used to talk music – this is in the early eighties. Somehow it emerged that we were both huge Scott Walker fans, and I’d been a fan of Scott not just from the Walker Brothers period but particularly the four albums he did for Philips, pretty much after he left the group. I just said I thought he was great and all the rest of it, and thought no more about it. About a year later, the phone went in my office and I happened to pick up. This voice came on and went [in mellifluous tones]: ‘Hi, this is Scott Walker.’ And I literally dropped the phone – it’s one of only two occasions when somebody’s called where I was really intimidated. Kind of picked myself up off the ground, picked the phone up and he was looking for management.”
As an ardent music fan, Bicknell seemed far from precious in his regard for Scott Walker and The Walker Brothers: “It was great music to fuck to!” he insisted to the Kijak film crew. “It is – it’s slow and it bumps along,” he laughs, harking back to the uses he made of it in his university days. He was rather more daunted, however, by the prospect of meeting the man behind the orgasmic orchestral epics.
“There is a kind of received notion about him, his Garboesque leanings towards seclusion, the fact that he was always photographed wearing scarves and dark glasses and always seemed to avoid attention. And when he came in I was absolutely crapping myself! I was so nervous. I was kind of pacing up and down in the office, and he came in and we were kind of pacing up and down past each other. And I actually said to him, ‘I’ve got all your records.’ Which is the most obsequious and greasy thing you can say to an artist – but I literally had got all of his records.
“I must say we had some fantastically funny and interesting meetings. One of Scott’s favourite places to meet was the old bar in the Kensington Hilton hotel, because it was completely dark. And we used to sit in a booth with the curtains closed, in total darkness. He’d be three feet from me and I couldn’t see him.”
The affably garrulous Bicknell soon realised the mechanics of the Virgin deal were not going to work out. “I managed Dire Straits, Mark Knopfler,9 Bryan Ferry, Gerry Rafferty and The Blue Nile,”10 he reels off a list of late seventies/early eighties names. “And Scott stands alone as being, as far as I can tell, completely unmotivated by money. I mean that not just in the musical sense but as a human being. I never ever got the impression that he would do anything for money.”
Which, of course, had its implications for the Virgin contract. “It was one of the most disgraceful deals I’ve ever seen. I work in a business that exploits the talent and the consumer almost equally. This one was a 12-album deal,11 and I calculated on the basis of Scott’s work, what he could produce, he would probably be around 200 years old by the time he got to the 12th album.”
Engel initially solicited Bicknell to get him work as a producer. When Virgin saw this as a delaying tactic, the manager went to work with Scott on a strategy of isolation which would allow him to produce material for the new album.
“The way I used to write albums back in the old days quite quickly, I believe now that I wrote my fourth album in about two months, maybe,” Scott reflects. “That’s very fast. I could be wrong there, but I seem to recall that. It wouldn’t happen today.
“There’s always urgency. It drives you really crazy, but you can’t push it because if you do it doesn’t work. It has to be exactly what it is and you’ve just got to sit around and do it. And years can go by and… nothing. It’s different for everyone, maybe I’m just slow. But for me that’s how it is. It’s very difficult.
It was the arrival of a publisher’s cheque which allowed him to replenish his diminishing resources and take off from London for a while. “And I remember he went to the New Forest, I think, and hired a cottage,”12 says Bicknell, “and rang me up one day and basically said, ‘I’ve got the songs – I’m ready.’”
After the eventual completion of the album, Engel would be interviewed by DJ Alan Bangs for British Forces Broadcasting Radio, who asked him of the six intervening years between it and Nite Flights, “Did you spend a lot of time during those six years actually on your own?”
“Uh yes, rather a lot of time,” he answered pensively. “All the time, the six years, I was working towards what I call a silence, where it would come to me rather than me force it. It was very important that it flow to me, rather than me force it and so I was looking for the right atmosphere. And time and perception seemed to arrive at once. I’ve found that it’s kind of a kaleidoscopic process, I don’t know, I don’t like to talk too much about the process because I don’t really understand it. When it got to this album it got away from me, and I’m a little superstitious so I don’t talk about this too much.”
With a series of impressionistic lyrics now produced in total seclusion, all that remained was for them to be sonically sculpted into an album. It was to be a similarly painstaking process, though on a much accelerated scale. First he hired a hall in Islington to test that his maturing vocal cords could handle the word structures and tone poems he’d been composing. No longer au fait with developments in studio technology, Engel also required a new producer. The means of selection included listening to the production work of people currently active in the eighties.
Among these was a young engineer-turned-producer named Peter Walsh, who’d produced the classic early eighties political dancepop of Heaven 17’s Penthouse & Pavement album and turned former electro-rockers Simple Minds into a stadium act with their New Gold Dream. For all the extreme variability in this repertoire, Engel deemed Walsh’s studio approach “more total” and a meeting was set.
“I met him in a hotel in Shepherds Bush,” recalled Walsh. “‘He’ll be the guy with the baseball cap,’ they said, sitting in this dimly lit restaurant, chewing a match. I was a little bit surprised by the amount of mystery that was there… I’d gone into the first recording without actually hearing any demos at that point, because there weren’t any.”
The album would be recorded at London’s Town House, EMI and Sarm West Studios between October and December. It would cost Virgin several times what they’d already paid Engel for his advance. It would also, unfortunately, outstrip any profit they’d hoped to make on it.
“I realised that we weren’t going to get a conventional record because there was no aspect of making it that was conventional,” laughs Bicknell. Indeed, the studio sessions were dictated by an artistic agenda quite alien to most pop musicians.
“The guitarist on the session was heard to play the melody,” confirms Walsh, “and Scott actually went crazy: ‘Who’s playing that melody? Stop the melody! I don’t want to hear any melody – and nobody else is to hear any melody either.’”
“I even keep things from Pete till the end,” Engel confirms of what is now a long-term working relationship with Walsh. “When you tell people, this banal thing starts to happen again. Somebody will pick up on a lyric and start joking about this, and suddenly the song is in another place. You know, it’s not in the concentrated place it should be.”
“So we actually recorded the whole album with the melody as a closely guarded secret,” laughs Walsh of his 1984 Walker initiation. “As a producer, or co-producer if you like,13 it’s quite a big thing to be missing as you’re working.”
“It keeps everything a little more disjointed,” confirms Engel, as if it were the most natural process in the world. “There’s no chance of anyone ‘swinging together’ too much – which is not what I want, I’m not making groove records.”
Scott was aware of improvisational sax player Evan Parker from his interest in the Euro-jazz scene. After being recruited to play on the songs ‘Dealer’ and ‘Track Six’ (many of the album’s eight tracks would be ascribed numbers rather than titles – though some Engel-philes tend to refer to them by their opening lines), Parker admits, “I was a bit puzzled – why does he want me? Because I wasn’t known to be a session player. I think the first thing he said is, ‘This is not a funk session. I know your work. I’m thinking about clouds of saxophone, and I’m thinking about Ligeti14 more than anything else.’ So we drank some Chablis, I remember – a very good Chablis at room temperature, very interesting, maybe two bottles quite quickly. Meanwhile they’re setting up the amp in the room that I’d played in, but the guitar player was in the control room. I’d never seen that done before.”
The resulting album, Climate Of Hunter, is emblematic in its title of its creator’s juxtaposition of words and possible meanings.15 Engel acknowledged the influence of Lieder – the Teutonic melding of classical music and lyrics which composers such as Schubert or Mahler, whose mournful Kindertotenlieder (‘Songs For The Death Of Children’) is a classic of the genre. But no such overriding theme can be ascribed to Climate Of Hunter – an album that would perplex many.
From its opening sound of a cowbell shaking, the sharp clarity that Walsh brought to Climate made it a quintessential (if not overtly commercial) eighties album; years after the event, some of the elements (particularly the cleanly pounding sound of Peter Van Hooke’s drums) seemed to date it to 1984. Played now it sounds contemporary again, as if the archivists of analogue music have rediscovered and reintegrated the sound of electronically polished eighties rock.
The cowbell opens ‘Rawhide’, an in-joke for a menacingly dramatic piece that has nothing to do with cowboy imagery (except as wordplay – raw hide = raw body): “This is how you disappear out between midnight,” Scott sings with the unyielding clarity of his late Walker Brothers period, and there’s a sense that he’s singing not of his own elusive qualities but of an entire species. The organic construction of physical imagery on this album (later supplanted by images of movement or objectified tools on what followed over the next two decades) verges on the grotesque: “Foot, knee, shaggy belly, face, famous hind legs.”
To quote Julian Cope’s literary mentor, Colin Wilson: “It was. Robert Ardrey who first made the general public aware that one of the most basic impulses in all animals is the urge to establish an area that belongs to the family or the tribe, and from which all invaders are repelled.” It was also anthropologist Ardrey, in his book African Genesis, who posited that the evolution from ape to Neanderthal to primitive human came as the result of our being aggressive, carnivorous killers. Something similar is going on here: “Cromagnon herders will stand in the wind, / Sweeping tails shining, / And scaled to begin.”
‘Dealer’, which follows, combines the coldly arpeggiated bursts of electric guitar that punctuate the album (courtesy of Phil Palmer) with Parker’s drifting, nagging jazz textures. In his book Another Tear Falls, poet Jeremy Reed makes the obvious case for ‘Dealer’ as a drug-culture song – which seems only partway there, as the writer seems to accept.16 Where he does seem to be correct is in its ephemeral/ethereal use of drug-culture imagery: “Keeping ice junkies packed hard on a seam. Move a circuit on the white, / And he can’t feel a thing,” and the surreal picture of “hissing brains boiling up”. William S. Burroughs, an on-off junkie throughout his life, appropriated the imagery of junk addiction, ‘the sickness’, as the perfect metaphor for our unnatural cravings and desires in our techno-consumer culture. These days we’re all jacking up something, it seems; fortunately, for most people opiates are off the menu, but it’s as difficult to dissuade a wage slave from working for the new iPad, say, as it was to wean them off their CD Walkman in the eighties.
As Engel said back in the day, this was “edge work”, skating around the edge of meaning. But it now seems retrospectively attuned to a world where the word ‘interface’ was about to become a verb and where, in a decade, people would become literal addicts of the virtual reality of something called a ‘worldwide web’. It’s the cold, hard music of a still corporeal world where, as in ‘cyberpunk’ science fiction, technology and human flesh will have to learn to exist on equal terms.
But if there’s an organic antithesis to all this, it’s in the beautifully hypnotic closer to side one of the original vinyl album: “In the time of an exile / From the jails of another,” sings Scott, his lightened baritone reaching skyward, almost towards soprano, as anyone with the necessary sensitivity discovers their nerves are tingling, “Where soundings are taken / Raw to his eyes.”
The absence of a literal meaning or linear logic can’t disguise the oneiric beauty of ‘Sleepwalkers Woman’. Orchestrated by classically trained keyboard player Brian Gascoigne, this is Engel’s Lieder – stretching back through a hypnotic lineage that passes through ‘The Electrician’, through ‘Boy Child’ and back into Scott 3. But as Engel said at the time, “now [i.e. in his forties] is the best age to sing at”, before the inevitable decay of all things physical in his next decade. He never sang more powerfully than on ‘Sleepwalkers Woman’17 – pointedly without a possessive apostrophe, so that the woman who “will fold him away in his badly changed hand” may not be anyone who belongs to him – or anyone that exists outside of his dream.
“For the first time unwoken / I am returned” Engel intones several times over, sounding somehow exultant and elegiac at the same time. It’s a mesmeric meditation on his own sense of alienation – a self-willed exile, as he acknowledges, from the time and place and culture that bore him. In Kijak’s documentary, an extract from ‘Sleepwalkers Woman’ plays over shots of a lake that may or may not have been close to the cottage where he composed Climate Of Hunter; it’s a haunting testament to how the human mind can seek solace in its own lonely detachment.18
The glacial nightmares continue, however, on side two of the (vinyl) album: “It’s a starving reflection if he dies in the night,” asserts ‘Track Five’, which opens to similar strange solitary sounds as the first side; “We chew up the blackness to some high sleep,” announces the strange bio-oneiric imagery. “The ceilings are rising and falling / The ceilings are shining and slow / Peeling tongues from the ice hums,” describes ‘Track Six’ which, apart from ‘Track Three’ (the token single), is the most urgent-sounding, guitar-driven piece on the album, augmented by Parker’s sax squealings. ‘Track Seven’ (sometimes referred to as ‘Stump Of A Drowner’, its opening line) continues the bad dream but is the most shiny metallic eighties track of the lot, complete with what sounds like syn-drums.
On the final track, Scot Engel retreats into his past and into his own sense of isolation: “When I crossed the river, / With a heavy blanket roll,” – it’s strange to hear Mark Knopfler, Bicknell’s boy, playing highly competent blues guitar here, a conventional British rock musician who adopts American affectations – “I took nobody with me, / Not a soul” – especially to a minimal lyric by Tennessee Williams, from his play Orpheus Descending – “I took a few provisions / Some for comfort, some for cold,” – Engel asked a recording assistant to find the filmed version of the play where Brando kind of mumbles the song in tune, as he couldn’t remember the title; in that pre-internet/pre-DVD era it took several days of searching before a recording assistant found The Fugitive Kind – “But I took nobody with me / Not a soul.” It offers the perfect lonely coda to so much that has been strangely impressionistic or obscure.
The cover photo of Climate Of Hunter finds Scott Walker apparently caught mid-gesture – extending a hand, looking expressively at the camera, youthfully middle-aged but still long-haired, without his trademark aviator shades to hide behind. On his promotional rounds for the album’s release in March 1984,19 however, he tended to retreat behind his shaded glasses again – or at least he did on The Tube, Channel 4’s Newcastle-based eighties rock/pop show for Friday evenings. Interviewed not by hosts Jools Holland or Paula Yates but by pixie-ish Scot Muriel Gray (who went on to become a broadcasting media darling through much of the eighties), she was comically ill-informed and Engel’s response is squirmy to watch.
After asking him lame questions about Ready Steady Go! and having once been a heartthrob, she nervously laughs about how “some of the tracks have got rather unusual names – because you’ve got ‘Track Three’, ‘Track Five’, ‘Track Seven’, ‘Track Eight’. Why haven’t you got names, Scott?”
“Yeah, well, I guess the old creativity kinda ran out,” he genially shrugs. “I just thought they were finished as they were, and putting a title on them might have lopsided them or overloaded them. I don’t know if this is original, somebody else might have done it.”
“On the new album you’re very much part of a band,” she continues, “whereas in The Walker Brothers it was just three men singing [sic] and all this orchestration in the back. Are you happier doing this now? You don’t ever get a yen to just get up and sing a song again on your own?”
“No, no, I’m not a get-up-and-sing-a-song singer,” he laughs. “Pretty much a singer when the circumstances are totally right, especially now.”
Going by his own itinerary, however, it seemed the moment had already passed. The excruciating banality of the interview was alleviated by the uncredited promo film for ‘Track Three’ – Scott Walker had entered the eighties video pop world.
“Delayed in the headlong / Resembled to breaking-point…”
Scott’s urgent vocals are echoed unseen by Billy Ocean,20 the ex-GTO soul singer who praised the former Walker Brother as the best singer he’d ever heard. The video is noir-ish black and white, with Scott observing the action on a south London housing estate as he mimes to the song. A balding hawk-nosed actor leaves a car at night-time. Scott watches from the wall just around the corner – raising his face from his hands to mime urgently to the camera. He and the actor have both imprinted dark smudges on their foreheads – like some bloody mark of Cain.
“The blood of our split back without his prisoner / The distance rigged in his eyes…”
A still body seems to be lying under a sheet – cut to a wild-haired woman lying on a bed, staring toward the camera. The bald guy kicks over dusty ground which is like one big sandpit and drops to his knees to dig with his hands. He dips his face in darkish fluid which may be blood (the black and white photography obscures this). Another vehicle (apparently a Cortina – indicative of the video’s budget) rounds the corner of the estate to find Scott singing alone and accompanying himself on bass in a very rock-video manner.
“From the host of late-comers a miracle enters the streets. He is shaking to wash the murder away…”
The driver of the other vehicle is a Michael Gambon lookalike with a tattooed hand, who drops two dice into the dust. The first man frantically digs for this obscure object of desire, before being pursued by the not-very-fast-moving Cortina through the postindustrial landscape as the short, frantic bursts of a guitar solo open up. The second man drops another obscure object into the dust – this time a piece of fruit (an apple?). The first man bites the dust just as the object does – and becomes the covered prone body we glimpsed shortly before.
It ends on the refrain, a wordplay subversion of a popular funeral hymn: “Rock of cast-offs, / Bury me, / Hide my soul, / And pray us free.”
The video is very much a piece of low-budget eighties surrealist noir – its atmosphere has something in common with The Element Of Crime, the debut film by Danish director Lars Von Trier21 and the first of his Europa trilogy. (As The Element Of Crime wasn’t released till two months later, we have to assume it exerted no influence over the video’s director – unless he saw it previewed at a film festival.) But the clipped, urgent tones of Scott’s track might have made a novel stand-in for the usual Jan Hammer soundtrack on Miami Vice.
In a parallel eighties universe, Climate Of Hunter might have instituted a craze for surrealist noir (in both music and film) while ‘Sleepwalkers Woman’ would be praised for the sublime musical apex that it reached.
“I think there is a direct line,” opines Stephen Kijak of the music’s evolution, “especially if you follow it through to Nite Flights and Climate. In Stretch and We Had It All,22 I’ve got to say I listen to those records more now because I just don’t need all the other stuff so much. Now I’ve made the film it’s like, ‘Oh, I haven’t really listened to this one so much.’ Yeah, they’re not his songs but some of them are fantastic. The voice is still there and clearly full of emotions – either it’s resolved or it’s melancholy, because they weren’t really happy years for him. But the actual creative work you can line up in the writing – from [Scott] 4, Nite Flights and beyond. Obviously those intervening years altered him – you can’t help but be changed by that stuff.”
In the actuality, Climate Of Hunter gained an unenviably novel reputation as Virgin’s worst seller of all time. Figures of 1,500 sales were mooted back in the eighties, but the sum total was closer to 10,000 copies internationally – still no world breaker. The record label was reputedly shocked by its failure to perform.
“You get unbelievable, or even believable people being picked up all the time who aren’t selling records,” complained a bruised Scott a few years later. “It’s puzzled me. People expect a lot more sales out of me than are generated. So they’re vastly disappointed. Whereas with other artists they’ll eke it out.”
Ed Bicknell tried to salvage the situation by suggesting a cover versions album of songs by contemporary writers23 – like a step back into the final days of Philips or CBS. Predictably, Scott mulled over the idea but wasn’t interested.
Once again – this is how you disappear. “I didn’t immediately think next year we’ll be doing the follow-up,” reflected Pete Walsh. “I didn’t expect to wait 10 years.”
***
It wasn’t till 1986 that Bicknell again saw Scott, who’d been living in the west London suburb of Stamford Brook. When asked how he was occupying his time, he told his part-time manager he was painting.
“Oils or watercolours?”
“Oh no. Paintin’ and decoratin’.”
There may have been an element of leg pulling in this as, in the autumn of the following year, Scott Engel would begin a foundation course in fine arts as a mature student at the Byam Shaw School of Art in Archway, north London.24
In the meantime, however, as Engel had already been introduced to his admirer Brian Eno by Al Clark in 1981, Bicknell went all out to hook him up with Eno and his production partner Daniel Lanois – who had recently completed work on U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, which would become one of the commercial blockbusters of the decade.
Sessions were set up with Scott and the producers at Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera’s studio in Chertsey, Surrey – and within two weeks they collapsed. At Engel’s insistence, Bicknell had to put an injunction on EG Records, Eno’s record label, to stop them issuing an album of the unused backing tracks Eno had prepared.
“I remember a quote when Scott turned down Bowie,” says Stephen Kijak, “I think he self-deprecatingly said: ‘I’ve ruined my career, I don’t want to ruin his as well,’ something to that effect – you know, ha ha. But I don’t know – again, the unproduced albums, the aborted projects, they’re not unique to him, these things happen all the time: they get together, they start to record, something isn’t right, the collaboration isn’t going to work, they move on, something else happens just down the road. And that I think was the case with Eno and Lanois – I can only imagine what it would have been like. I’m a huge fan of the work Lanois did with Emmylou Harris, Wrecking Ball, and they were coming after The Unforgettable Fire, so sonically it could have been a fantastic match, but it wasn’t meant to be, sadly.
“He did find a fantastic partner in Pete Walsh, who’s been at the helm ever since. Obviously Eno and Lanois are huge personalities in the studio and the thing is Scott himself, he doesn’t get credit for producing a record but he knows his way around a studio. He’s been involved in every aspect.”
“We met and talked a little too quickly,” said Engel himself a few years after. “I didn’t like the studio anyway, it was way out of town, and, I don’t know, it transpired that it became an irritation. [Eno] brought Daniel Lanois along and I just couldn’t get along with that guy. It became too many cooks. I left very quickly before any major damage was inflicted. Except I got dropped from my record company deal.”
The working relationship with Bicknell was also coming to an end – not out of any animosity, but simply because there was no work to collaborate on. “The thing about working with him was it was always interesting,” reports Bicknell to Kijak. “It was never the standard way of doing anything. In the period I looked after him, I remember I made about £350 commission in five years – and I loaned him £500. At the end of it I had a net loss of £150 – and I’d do it again tomorrow, I’d do it like that.
“People say, ‘Oh he should have done this!’ Why should he? You know, if he’s not driven toward that kind of [thing] … Scott Walker would be a complete non-fit with the way things are now. I mean, I think it would be tragic to see him trying to perform on the MTV Awards, between Dr Dre and Puff Diddly-Widdly.”
In his small number of press interviews for Climate Of Hunter in ‘84, Scott had informed NME that he liked spending his time in pubs, watching people play darts. It became the latest urban myth about him: this was supposedly what the Invisible Man of modern music did all the time.
Before enrolling on his arts course, he could actually be glimpsed for the last time in public – or at least on the screen – for many years. Strapped for cash, he made the kind of bizarre commercial compromise that he would never apply to his music any more.
In cinemas during 1987, an ad for Britvic 55 (the sparkling version of the orange juice drink) played that featured a group of middle-aged hipsters from the swinging sixties strutting about in the fashions of their youth. It played to Dusty Springfield’s ‘I Only Want To Be With You’, with Dusty herself (who that year had a hit with the Pet Shop Boys on ‘What Have I Done To Deserve This?’) as the driver of a sports car, giving the camera an embarrassed smile at the end; there was Sandie Shaw, last seen backed by three quarters of The Smiths on ‘Hand In Glove’, strutting about in kinky white boots; The Tremeloes fooling around a telephone box like a bunch of longhaired schoolboys; a figure credited as ‘Man in Park’ as Dusty drove past was a smiling Georgie Fame; and the ‘Man in Café’, looking apprehensively around him in shades, was Scott Walker. It was a strange epitaph to a brief eighties career.
Not that Scott didn’t periodically try to become musically active; he had taken up again with his old friend John Maus. They were creating demos of John’s latest songs with his current wife, Brandy, which later resulted in a single called ‘Dark Angel’, a clichéd rock ballad (with the odd eighties disco boom! boom! on the backing), issued on a small US label.
The demos he produced for John and Brandy were initially hawked to Geoff Travis, director of prominent independent/post-punk label Rough Trade, then home to the disbanding Smiths. Unsurprisingly, Travis wasn’t interested in John’s MOR rock – but signing Scott Walker was a different proposition. He wanted him for his smaller subsidiary, Blanco Y Negro, but this label had been bought out by Warner Brothers and the US corporate suits nixed the deal.
In the spring of the following year, Engel took one more tentative step toward getting back into music by signing with a new manager, entertainment lawyer Charles Negus-Fancey. The son of prolific low-budget British film director E.J. Fancey, Negus-Fancey had become increasingly involved in music via working for the Robert Stigwood Organisation, which was behind the hit film musicals Tommy, Saturday Night Fever and Grease. He was also, at the time he met Scott, the UK representative of Mort Shuman – the man who had popularised Jacques Brel in English.
Negus-Fancey would prove particularly patient over many years with his extraordinary charge. By the beginning of 1990, he was trying to resurrect the deal with Geoff Travis, this time with parent company Rough Trade, as brothers Jim and William Reid of The Jesus & Mary Chain (who cited The Walker Brothers’ ‘After The Lights Go Out’ as one of their favourite tracks of all time) had expressed a wish to produce Scott Walker.
Again it came to nothing. Rough Trade’s distributors were facing bankruptcy and the deal was blocked. “I have a totally different record I want to do now,” Engel was quoted as saying around this time, “because I discovered all the new things I can use in the studio. But I have to wait. This is a waiting game.”
No way back to the past. Pathway to the future blocked.
1 As we’ve seen, only one Noel Scott Engel seems to inhabit the world – but there are myriad permutations of Scott Walker.
2 The wave of post-psychedelic German bands like Can and Faust.
3 Cope described the ethos of latter-day Walker as “pale European intellectual” in his second volume of memoirs and denies interest in it. As an esotericist whose subjects embrace pagan prehistory and who is influenced by the occult writings of the polymathic Colin Wilson, he may share ‘positive existenalist’ Wilson’s attitude to pessimistic existential playwright/author Samuel Beckett: Wilson reasonably states that humankind cannot live without hope and cites Beckett’s hopelessness as near-criminal; Scott Engel, on the other hand, acknowledges Beckett as a major influence on his later work.
4 Peter Mark Almond coined himself ‘Marc’ after his idol Marc Bolan and had his first hit with a cover of Bolan’s lover Gloria Jones’ northern soul classic ‘Tainted Love’.
5 Interviewed on Later With Jools Holland in the nineties, the archive pop clip selected for Cocker was Scott singing ‘Mathilde’ on Dusty Springfield’s show.
6 Obviously a more considerable sum of money in the early eighties than it would be now – although its terms covered a staggering number of recordings.
7 It’s unclear whether Scott had rented or bought these flats – although in the seventies he’d been a householder at a large flat near Regent’s Park.
8 Clark produced the nineties comedy film.
9 Both as Dire Straits’ frontman and as a solo artist.
10 The Blue Nile are an eighties-formed trio who play synth-pop on an epic scale. They have been periodically active throughout the ensuing decades.
11 Virgin claimed at the time it was for eight albums.
12 Engel’s own recollection suggests a caretaker’s cottage near Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in August and September of 1983.
13 Peter Walsh makes no bones about Scott Engel’s own uncredited role as co-producer.
14 Gyorgy Ligeti – the Hungarian composer whose polyrhythmic ‘Lux Aeterna’ chorale was featured in the moon monolith scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and which influenced ‘The Bed’ on Lou Reed’s Berlin album.
15 Particularly in the lack of a definite article – it is not an allusion to The Night Of The Hunter.
16 Despite the old-fashioned tradition of middle-class arty types seeking to experience ‘bohemia’ by dabbling with heroin, it’s hard to imagine Scott Engel ever giving himself over to such an all-consuming substance; nor is there any reason to doubt him when he says he’s never touched it.
17 Despite the lack of commercial success experienced by Climate Of Hunter, post-punk/Gothic songstress Siouxsie included ‘Sleepwalkers Woman’ on her My Top 12 for Radio One, soon after the album’s release. She seemed taken aback by what she described as “such confident singing”, completely sui generis in the world of modern popular music.
18 It may possibly be only this writer who can hear the brief melancholic passage of Danny Kaye’s ‘The Ugly Duckling’, from the movie Hans Christian Andersen, in a section of ‘Sleepwalkers Woman’: “All through the wintertime he hid himself away / Ashamed to show his face, afraid of what others might say.” But then the song’s composer, Frank Loesser, was familiar with the Lieder form and Scott Engel’s favourite city used to be Copenhagen.
19 This time around there would be no live shows to promote the album at all.
20 He had a big hit with ‘When The Going Gets Tough’ in the eighties.
21 A controversial figure who later headed Scandinavia’s Dogme cinema movement.
22 Scott’s country and western covers albums – see Chapter Nine.
23 The mooted figures included Mark Knopfler, Difford & Tilbrook of Squeeze, Joan Armatrading and Boy George. It sounds as if it might have been horribly inappropriate, had it come off.
24 Reputedly, none of the lecturers realised their student had been famous in a past life, until one pointed at a painting and said: “Scott Walker did that.”