Sick of living/unwilling to die
cut.
clean.
if red/
clean.
blood spurting
dripping,
spilling;
all over her new
dress.
– opening section of a poem discovered etched into a desk at the Riverside City College Library, San Francisco, March 1967, suspected of being the work of the ‘Zodiac Killer’
“… For transports of the size with which Eichmann was concerned, he had to work closely with officials of the German railways. Within the ghettos set up by the Nazis in Eastern Europe, Jewish councils were formed whose function was to supply the SS units with facts and figures They would be told how many people must report at such and such a time and such and such a place for transportation to the liquidation centres. The Jewish elders were ordered to fill in countless forms in quintuplicate so that the machine could run with bureaucratic efficiency.”
– G.S. Graber, History Of The SS
“I ain’t no pussy / With the blues.”
– Scott Engel, ‘Man From Reno’, 1992
In the summer of 1990, the arcane Scott Walker of pop legend re-emerged from history. The vehicle was another compilation album in the vein of the previous decade’s Fire Escape In The Sky. Entitled Boy Child – after his most ambitious early step towards the Lieder tradition, on 1969’s Scott 4 – it contained sleeve notes by the figure who’d taken on Julian Cope’s mantle of the most vocal Engel-phile in modern pop culture.
“… Although on the one side he was the Jack Jones/Tony Bennett style crooner (both were firm favourites of Scott’s) he broke away from that mould to record a series of solo albums that were both rich and dark with songs of death, desire, despair and isolation. His haunted disembodied voice was the supreme instrument for the interpretation of the ‘lonely’ song,” waxed Marc Almond.
“The rumours – ‘he’s dead, he’s mad, he’s become a recluse, he’s recording an instrumental album’. all add to the enigma of Scott Walker. Scott’s recent recordings have been all too rare. He surfaced in recent years with the brilliantly disturbing Climate Of Hunter; sometimes it seems ‘the sad young man has gone away,’1 but just as Brel has been interpreted in many ways by different artists, so I hope will be Scott Walker.”
Boy Child was as near as one could get to a definitive non-Brel anthology of the late sixties period, with a range of the strongest Engel originals from Scott 1-4 and ‘Til The Band Comes In.
Almond, whose own drama-queen tones could rise from slightly warbling tenor to soprano-ish, also made reference to Engel’s own “crooning deep tones and liquid vibrato”. “Lazy journalists always used to say, ‘He sounds Scott Walker-like,’ about any singer that had a voice like a vibrato with a bit of reverb and a kind of a crooning quality. Because there is only one voice like that,” he later elaborated in Stephen Kijak’s film. Which was true enough, but had only really become a journalistic shtick over the past decade, since Cope’s compilation had sold around 10,000 copies (in respectably quick time) and made the great absent baritone a yardstick for the select few who’d been exposed to it.
“I really know very little about him. I don’t even know what he looks like,” his elfin champion admitted in the mid-noughties. At the time of Boy Child, it was clear he was celebrating an almost mythological figure that he really didn’t expect to return.
By then, of course, times had changed; Scott Engel was no longer the sad but androgynously handsome young man staring out of the girl’s reflected eye on Scott 3, singing an accessible mini-oratorio about Big Louise. The decade of compromise that had followed had changed him, as we’ve already seen, into the most uncompromising of performers.
Crowd-pleasing was for the ephemeral. Scott Engel, though in seemingly good health and an admirable state of fitness, was approaching his 50th year, and he’d always felt mortality breathing down his neck. This was no time to be fooling around – or even to be recording music at all, if he couldn’t draw the listener inward rather than having to step out to meet them halfway.
Further nostalgia was indulged when Fontana, Philips’ resurrected pop label, released No Regrets: The Best Of Scott Walker And The Walker Brothers in 1992, which rose quickly to number four in the albums chart. Engel, in the interim, had been renewing contact with his old friends John Maus and Gary Leeds – though with no inclination for any further Walkers reunions, the latter now living in east London and working as a motorcycle courier – and taking a holiday in San Diego to visit his aging mother and Aunt Seal.
And still, at the pace which it takes small constellations to form, he was planning. And thinking. And, eventually, writing.
But to the music-listening public, the recent anthologies had made him a presence again, not just a rumour. This was compounded later in ‘92 when Fontana issued Scott 1-4 on CD, followed soon after by ‘Til The Band Comes In.2 He was no longer only a matter of legend – his music could be purchased again. There were articles about his past work (though never his ‘lost years’ as a covers artist) in the music press – and, predictably, pro- and anti-camps.
In the Melody Maker, Steve Sutherland struck a laddish tone, mocking everything Scott had done since The Walker Brothers and labelling him, with dull unimaginativeness, “daft as a brush”. “Yes, there are people in the world who do not love Scott Walker,” hit back Stuart Maconie in NME. “But what must their hearts be like? This is the voice… of mystery, suffering, heartbreak, nostalgia, yearning and joy.”
It was also the voice of a romantic past; of a performer who, as far as his constituent parts went, no longer existed. But as far as the popular press were concerned, Scott Walker was a figure that existed in the past tense only – even if his corporeal body could be snapped moving along the street. When the No Regrets compilation hit the charts, Sunday tabloid The People carried a shot of a physically fit-looking middle-aged man in baseball cap, shades and padded windcheater, cycling along a leafy west London street in faded denim jeans and training shoes. To those who recalled him in his youth, this was clearly still Scott Engel. The paper even rather obtrusively set up a ‘Walker Hotline’ in case any readers knew his actual address. (Apparently none did.)
“I think he’s got a way of disappearing,” remarks Les Inrockuptibles editor J.D Beauvallet, whose magazine would soon mark the re-emergence of Scott Walker. “If he wants to be seen he’s seen. I don’t think he ever wants to be seen… People always said he had bought a fish and chips [shop] in London, people said he was an interior decorator.” Or indeed that he was sitting in a pub watching people play darts.
Back at the time of his previous re-emergence, in 1984, Engel had insisted to NME: “I don’t have the [old] records. People don’t believe that, but I say you can come and listen to my apartment, like Gene Hackman.”3
Now that the late sixties albums were common currency again, in the Kijak bio-doc a decade and a half hence he’d be asked if he could still hear the songs in his head that a younger generation of music lovers had cottoned on to, for example ‘Montague Terrace’ (In Blue)’.
“Someone will play it or you’ll hear it on the radio and think back,” he’d acknowledge. “But even these days, when people send me round digitally remastered versions of things they’re reissuing for approval, which is very kind of them to do, I can’t do it.”
“We didn’t grow up with The Walker Brothers’ songs as a backdrop of the sixties,” acknowledges Stephen Kijak of himself and his American peers, “they didn’t become part of the seventies or eighties MOR radio. It’s really not in the consciousness the way it is over there. It was more just through an underground hipster cult kind of awareness. In the nineties, when Fontana issued Boy Child and [reissued] 1-4, they imported them to San Francisco. I was hanging out with musicians and it was kind of word of mouth. But once the new records were coming out, in the States they were issued on very cool record labels – Drag City put out Tilt, 4AD released The Drift, a very cool company, so you get that kind of generation. It was a very personal thing – you know, small groups of fans would pass copies around – a very cult awareness, always.”
In London, in what may have seemed like an oddly retrograde step at the time, Charles Negus-Fancey had now negotiated his client a new recording deal with Fontana – the subsidiary of his original label from the sixties, now owned by Polygram. (In another echo of the past, the overall CEO was Maurice Oberstein – with whom Ady Semel had to negotiate to free Scott from his CBS contract.)
“Since the failure of your latest album, Climate Of Hunter, what have you been doing for 10 years?” asked Beauvallet in Scott’s 1992 Les Inrockuptibles interview.
“J‘ai existé,” he answered – ‘I have existed.’
Totally against all expectations, it was in France that the first stirrings of Scott Walker’s new career were heard. Toxic Affair is a mildly diverting romantic drama with Isabelle Adjani as a wannabe writer who psychologically falls apart when her boyfriend leaves her; the film concerns how the self-absorbed young woman is forced to recognise how romance isn’t everything, and to try to reconstitute herself.
Its soundtrack composer is Goran Bregovic, a Bosnian rock guitarist whose band and orchestral music would increasingly draw on the folk traditions of his homeland, as the former Yugoslavia splintered into a number of warring Balkan states.4 The vocalist and lyricist he recruited to work with him on two songs for the film raised a few eyebrows.
‘Man From Reno’, a smoulderingly low-key song with a kind of slowed-down tango rhythm, became the first record by Scott Walker in eight years when it was released as a single. “Can’t follow a man from Reno,” warns Engel in his very controlled latter-day voice to a light female vocal backing, although his barroom pickup in the lyric is told she can follow a man from Zurich or Italy (or indeed Sarajevo). If the song is (only mildly) cryptic, that’s intentional: the title is likely a reference to Johnny Cash’s famous boast of murder in ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ (“I shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die”). But it’s one of the verses that really purrs with homicidal intention: “Zodiac killer / Needs that crack / He wants you back / He’s waiting in the bars.”
The ‘Zodiac Killer’ was an uncaught criminal in northern California responsible for the sadistic murders of at least six young people, often out on dates – and possibly for the deaths of many, many more according to his own cryptic letters. (“Like I have always said I am crack proof,” he boasted in one of them.) San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith had become obsessed by the case during his time on the paper, writing a book called Zodiac which David Fincher would turn into a 2007 film about his obsession; the original book, published in the UK by the Mondo imprint in September 1992, was more concerned with how the Zodiac had made a psychotic art of cryptography – which seems to be the element that fascinated Scott.
‘Indecent Sacrifice’, on the B-side, is similarly languid and sinister: Took the model / And the murder weapon. Took the wallet / With the coral clitoris,” it luridly intones before a Ferry-ish refrain of ‘Give-in-up.” If it played like soft rock, then its lyrics were much harder. “I ain’t no pussy / With the blues” boasts the man who might be the Zodiac on ‘Man From Reno’, and it plays now like a portent of Scott Walker’s career to come. Sensitive young romantics were about to become last century’s thing.
Engel recorded his vocals at Matrix Studios in London, but Fontana would release the single in France only. Even so, it was the first hint of a career reactivated.
“Maybe at the time I just didn’t feel like it was that major a step,” concedes Kijak, who declined to cover ‘Man From Reno’ in his film. “Obviously it was at a time when he was moving toward Tilt. He was moving towards something in the lyrics – bits of it find their way onto Tilt, so he was certainly exploring something but he hadn’t brought it to complete fruition yet, he was still finding his way through it.”
It would be almost another three years before the second truly modern Scott Walker album was released.5 But he was collecting concepts and ideas, some of them fragmentary or elliptical; trying different constructions of word patterns or juxtapositions of images.
As he’d tell The Independent on the eve of its release, evoking his early cinematic hero, “I’ve become the Orson Welles of the record industry. People want to take me to lunch, but nobody wants to finance the picture… In a sense I understand it. I keep hoping that when I make a record, I’ll be asked to make another one. I keep hoping that if I can make a series of three records, then I can progress and do different things each time. But when I have to get it up once every 10 years… it’s a tough way to work.”
Engel would go on to describe his very unexceptional day-to-day life; for a supposed recluse, he could often be found (but not recognised) travelling on London Transport; he’d dedicated most of the last few years to his arts courses as a mature student6 and, like most of us, to his personal relationships. “One very long-term,” he told The Times of the woman Gary Leeds refers to as Libby. “Now I’m in another one. But I live alone and it’s important that I do. I need my own space, as I think everybody does ultimately. It’s the only way through a lot of this.
“It’s been ducking and diving, always. But I’ve had a couple of good friends and I’ve borrowed money.7 And whenever I’d get cheques in, I’d try to clear the debts. What I made from the sixties is enough for me to keep popping up every now and then.”
“Scott was working on his album, Tilt, and we were in touch regularly,” confirmed John Maus of this period. “He was trying to decide whether or not to go with the new digital technology or stick with analogue. In the end, he chose analogue because of the big sound he’d decided he wanted to achieve. He simply recorded everything – playing guitar and singing – on an old-fashioned cassette player and then worked things out with the arrangers, who would ultimately write everything out. Scott never disclosed the material he was preparing to record as a solo artist until he was in the studio, or with his arranger, so everything was kept under wraps until recording time.”
***
Tilt, Scott Walker’s millennial album, was released in May 1995. To try to circumnavigate the need for interviews, Fontana issued a promotional CD that featured Engel answering set questions:
Q1: Why has there been such a very long gap between the albums? How much of the delay was caused by musical reasons?
Yeah, this one’s about 10 years I guess. Uh well, about two and a half years of musical reasons, because it takes me about that long to get the material together. Other than that, no. I just decided to stop for a while and concentrate on art, painting and drawing and things like that. What makes it harder is a lay-off like this, because you just have to reacquaint yourself with everything you do basically in that area, and then try to figure out a degree and angle that you want to take, and that all goes with it. So you’re hoping that it connects somewhere.
“I was an A&R man,” explains David Bates, now director of DB Records, then at Fontana. “I think the first time I met Scott I wanted to sign him. I’d heard Scott was thinking of going back in the studio, and I thought it’s worth having a meeting and finding out. And it was the most sober, sensible of all the meetings one could have. Scott was just saying, ‘The only thing I won’t do is sit in a demo studio churning out songs.’ Oh, this is fantastic! And then The Pet Shop Boys had just had a hit with Dusty Springfield.8 So I thought, I even have the language I can explain to my seniors of how this is going to make perfect sense. And the album that was in the offing, that happened about two or three years later, was Tilt – and I’m really glad,” he laughs. “I would never have been able to explain that one away!”
Q2: In that 10 year gap, has the studio technology changed? Is it hard to make a new album under these circumstances?
Well it is and it isn’t. Because first of all so much of this technology is transient. That shouldn’t scare you too much, that doesn’t bother me that much. So you can mix the old with the new fairly easily, and I catch on pretty quickly so that’s not a big problem for me, and of course I work with people who are very au fait with that stuff, so what I don’t know they know. I would try to get a band’s performance as much as possible with most things, and now and then I’ll layer something. But I try to get them all live because I’m looking for a depth of sound in the picture, rather than say something a synthesizer can give you which is rather a flat sound. So for this particular album I was looking for that. I only use a synthesizer when I’m absolutely pushed, and I have used it here and there, dotted it here and there. When we really can’t find anything else and we’ve all conferred and we’re all digging around for sounds, when we really can’t find anything else then we’ll resort to it. I don’t have a closed mind to any of this, but when I say I didn’t use synthesizers for this, we’re looking for a certain kind of sound and that wouldn’t have been appropriate. So I’m not closing my mind to any of it.
Tilt was recorded at RAK Studios in London. Also present in the studio at the time were Engel-philes Radiohead, who were recording The Bends. Guitarist Jonny Greenwood was particularly impressed by Scott’s backline: “It was the strangest collection of instruments lying around: ‘How’s he going to make a record with a timpani?’”
As Engel would tell The Independent, despite the long period of preparation he was still primed to make the actual recording within a maximum period of two months: “You’re forced to limit the choices, to make radical decisions and take chances. That shows in a record. You can tell a lazy record.”
As for the concept behind the title: “It’s a good word, Tilt. It means so many things today. The way we might feel personally about ourselves and what we might do, radically. It covers a lot of area and that’s what I’m looking for. It’s like Picasso’s universal face, y’know, you’re always looking for one thing and then…”
Q3: After such a long lay-off, do you fear that your voice may have gone, or do you assume it‘s there when you call for it?
I hope it’s gonna be there when I call for it, but because I wait so long before I’ve made a record, in this giant hiatus, I did spend about three months singing at home – which is something I don’t normally do at all – and just warming it up and getting it. Because I know I’m gonna run into these highs here, and along the way I’d better get it to where I can do that. So I’ve just worked with it and brought it on gradually by myself there. So I just hoped I could get it when I got in the studio, because. I don’t have the facility at home to hear it – there’s nothing I have – I have one of these little Walkman tape recorders – that when I get in front of the mike it’s going to come out sounding like something. And that’s the most terrifying moment. When Pete Walsh says to me, “Well, it sounds fine, man,” I know he wouldn’t lie to me – so then it sounds fine and I feel better. In the sixties, when I was doing records with The Walker Brothers, people were starting to say, “This guy can really sing,” you know, so I thought I’d better go and learn something valid9. I quite honestly try to unlearn anything like that; there are a lot of valuable things you can gain from that, breath control and things like that, but you have to unlearn a lot too…
“I had a phone call to say that the album’s finished, and that I was expected at Metropolis [Studios in Chiswick] one late afternoon during the week,” says David Bates. “As I walked through the door, Peter [Walsh] came down to welcome me and I wanted to ask how it was. But he said, ‘Don’t say anything! Scott is upstairs watching.’ As I looked upstairs, from the top balcony looking down, he was obviously very nervous playing it back for the first time. A track came on – it was [‘Farmer In The City’] at full blast. Wow! I had no idea what to make of the whole thing. I turned round and said, ‘Is there any chance we can put it on the small speakers, a little quieter? I’m just finding it a little too much to take in.’ So he agreed. And then Scott stopped it and said, ‘Dave, I hope you don’t mind, I’d like to listen to it on the big speakers again. Because when I make a record and I’ve finished, I don’t really have any intention of listening to it again. So I’d just like to remember it this way if it’s OK with you.’”
“I haven’t heard Tilt since I made it,” confirms Engel. “The moment I finish, I never listen to it again. Because look, I’ve written it over all those years, I’ve produced it, sung it, mixed it – I produced it with my friend Pete, of course. I never want to hear it again. It’s a nightmare.”
***
There is something of cinematic genius Stanley Kubrick in Scott’s behaviour. In the all-consuming method of the process. In the end product being all-important but, ultimately, unsentimentalised. In the obsession that must ultimately (and perhaps mercifully) burn itself out.
Q4: Is Tilt different from everything else you’ve done? Why is the album so gloomy?
Well. I think it’s just a carrying on from my past work. It’s another departure in that way. I always think as well that there’s a lot of dark humour in my records, because you have to have that attitude anyway to bring it off. If you approach it all with darkness then you won’t bring the seriousness off – that’s a strange thing to say but it’s absolutely true. You have to have the balance of humour all the time and although it’s not apparent, the undercurrent of that is apparent within it.
Q5: In this hi-tech society, music can go around the world much more easily… artists like Laurie Anderson use technology and multimedia to make their art.10 Will the people who like her, like Tilt?
Uh, I think today it’s more and more possible to have an audience for these kinds of records. They exist for all kinds of pockets of music we never had before, because there’s so much more music. We are, as you say, living in a hi-tech information situation. These kinds of records will find their audience so I don’t generally worry about that, I’m just trying to do the best job I can. Waiting for what comes to me and in that way using it. I heard a story recently – I can’t remember the name of the major [label] but they signed a new band, and it’s a story that’s around and you hear it a lot. The guy from the major said: “Now remember, don’t make it too commercial!” That’s a great story, and it’s more and more like I think it [is]. You gave Laurie Anderson, that’s an excellent example – she has a market, there’s no reason why I can’t have a market, ‘cos she doesn’t all the time constantly keep a 4/4 going either. I just want to connect with as many people as I can with it, I know it’s not easy but I’m always hoping.
Q6: How do you write? What kind of musicians do you need to help you play your music?
Well all I do is, when I’m composing the songs, I take a long time for the lyric. When I’m doing the melodies, I simply have a Telecaster at home and a little fibre-optic keyboard, it’s not a synthesizer, it’s just a piano. So I keep things simple and then, when I’m prepared, I get together with whoever I’m working with and notate it all, the topline. So generally speaking I have to use guys who can read. Now there are exceptions – musicians who are so wonderful in themselves like David Rhodes,11 for instance, he doesn’t read and he’s kind of beyond music in a way. But if you have readers and they’ve got the topline and the general idea of the bars, we will fool around with it. So generally speaking it’s an old-fashioned way of working. But that’s the layout, they can actually see the layout, and the chords are there as well, because the chords for this album were very unusual and took a little more time in that many of the chords have no names – they were used especially in songs like ‘The Cockfighter’ and the song ‘Bouncer [See Bouncer]’. So we don’t know what the names of the chords are but you just grope around until you find the appropriate sounds for that. And that’s why you have to pick players who are an extension of yourself – an extension somehow of your psychological sound – ‘psychological’ is kind of a bad word to use today, but, uh, the feeling of it, that extension. So for instance all of these players were very specifically chosen for that reason and they’re wonderful players. What were we talking about? Oh yes, getting in and out of it – the reason why is because the lyric dictates everything on these tracks. The lyric will dictate everything to the end, even down to the cover of the record if you get the lyric right. So if the lyric dictates it, I’m in and out quickly on that one. So instead of just riffing and riffing, or making a track that goes on and on like that, I’ve reversed it and work the other way around.
The cover of Tilt is the first of his works not to feature Engel’s face – although he (literally) showed his hand. Combined within David Scheinmann’s photographic and image manipulation concept are bird’s feathers and the eye of a stuffed bird of prey – an owl or hawklet. The effect is both mysterious and febrile.
Q7: You have said on a number of occasions that you don‘t like to talk about the lyrics. Why?
Well, I just think with anything like this that’s very internal, it destroys the magic of it, if you like. Because I don’t exactly know how these happened or what’s going on there, and I’m a little superstitious about it. We’re cheapening language that I waited a long time for, I waited a long time for those words. So they would be talking about something that we can’t talk about, that really is unsayable. We’re working around the edges with the words, and working with just the threads of language. So if we talk about it and try to lay it out, first of all it would be impossible almost, it would take us an interview or more for one song, to try and unlock it all. And second of all it’s just something I don’t care to do. I mean I can indicate things here and there for you perhaps. It’s not autobiographical though, I don’t think. My interest was [in] writing a song about Pasolini, ‘Farmer In The City’, who was murdered in a brutal way, but no one seems to know the bottom line on that, there are conflicting stories about it: where it was, was it a gang, was it a single person, what exactly happened, was it on this road, was it by a deserted football ground, what was it? So I’m quite a fan of his films, but the whole thing fascinated me as an internal exercise, I felt, “Well, I’ll play around with this idea.”
“Do i hear
221
221
221 …”
Subtitled (‘Remembering Pasolini’), ‘Farmer In The City’ opens on Scott’s lilting voice as that of an auctioneer. Melancholic, almost abstract; floating aloft on waves of strings by the Sinfonia of London, conducted by Brian Gascoigne.12 The lyrics, as would be the case from Tilt to the present day, are presented in a booklet as blocks of symmetrically arranged words – almost as much the shapes and symbols of a kind of concrete poetry as songs.
As Stephen Kijak suggests, they also contain a reference to Engel’s elliptical murder ballad ‘Man From Reno’:
“Can’t go by
a man from
Rio
Can’t go by
a man from
Ostia…”
(Lyrics of both songs also make a sinister reference to “brain grass”.)
As with most of the album, a metaphysical conceit accompanies a central theme; the ‘farmer in the city’ (a man out of place who “knew nothing of the horses / “Nothing of the thresher”) is Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian Marxist author and visionary neo-realist filmmaker, who relocated from rural Italy to Rome in his young adulthood. His vision extended from impoverished Roman streetlife in Accatone to the grotesque allegories of Porcile (Pigsty – which shares Brel’s metaphor of the bourgeoisie as pigs but takes it to a cannibalistic conclusion) and Salo, or The 120 Days Of Sodom, his infamous final film which relocated De Sade’s depraved imaginings to Fascist Italy.
Pasolini was murdered in November 1975, soon after Salo was completed, run over several times by his own car. As Engel suggests, the crime was at first pinned on a rent boy (Pasolini was homosexual), but then later attributed to right-wing thugs – and more recently still, to a gang of extortionists. Images of his final night alive filter in and out of ‘Farmer In The City’, including his young boyfriend and cinematic muse Ninetto (not implicated in his death) and Ostia, the scene of his demise. In this, the semi-operatic tone poems of Tilt become like aural art films in themselves.
“Fast forward to Tilt and it’s cinematic in an entirely different way,” concurs Kijak, “they are these weird imagined worlds. It’s called abstract but I think it’s entirely the opposite – it’s concrete, specific. You can argue about the specific meaning, but the lyric and the sound is so powerful. If the old music is like classic European cinema then the new stuff has more of a David Lynch sensibility, something a little bit more nightmare-like, more dreamlike. To me it was epitomised by ‘Farmer In The City’ – there’s something about his music that gives these very visual responses and they hit your subconscious zone where you’re seeing things when you’re listening to this music, you can’t help it. Maybe that helps you try to figure it out, it works on a very cinematic level like that. It was great music for cinema.”
The filmmaker’s Lynch analogy may be particularly apposite. The all-American surrealist director has often opined that he doesn’t wish to analyse his own work too much, in case his own particular magic is lost. Tilt may also bear comparison with Lynch’s debut feature, Eraserhead, in that it creates an oppressive atmosphere which, on first viewing, some people find unbearable. On repeated viewings, the humour becomes more immediately apparent; as does the yin and yang of horror and occasional beauty.
“I feel he is somebody for whom this is a vocation and not a job, so I just think he would not be interested in putting out stuff that he hadn’t really slaved over,” Brian Eno laughs when giving his view of Engel’s later work to Kijak for 30 Century Man. “He very much believes in pain, I think! If it doesn’t hurt then it wasn’t worth releasing!
“For me lyrics, in most songs, are just a way of getting the voice to do something… In Scott’s songs that’s not true at all, the lyrics just draw you further and further into the music. They’re so rich and full of ambiguity that they actually withstand listening to again and again, like music does. They don’t spell it out for you, so you haven’t ‘solved the problem’ in the first two listens. That’s why I say he’s a poet – I’m sure people like Beckett thought about words in the same way. It’s not to do with meaning, it’s to do with making something happen…
“He’s also somebody who clearly has a vision of some kind. You know, you don’t write these things as intellectual exercises, or to puzzle people or something like that. At the core of these things there’s a picture of the world which is very, very dark and rich and confusing actually, there’s a lot of doubt and undertones of anxiety in this world. Well it’s not the normal topic of popular music, so it sort of eludes a big audience. But it is the normal topic of a lot of fine art actually, and fine writing if you like. But because it comes in a container, it’s on a record, they don’t spot it.”
“What I really like about his songwriting is the way that he can paint a picture with what he says,” says David Bowie, Eno’s former collaborator – who has acclaimed Tilt as one of the greatest records he’s ever heard. “I have no idea what he’s singing about, I’ve no idea. I never bothered to find out and I’m not really interested, I’m quite happy to take the songs that he sings and make something of them myself. I read my own reasoning into the images and all that.”
Q8: … but the lyrics on Tilt are really hard to understand.
Well, let me just try another way around this. James Joyce13 is a good example, he sort of changed the rules for all of us, I’m not doing anything that’s more radical than that. Then you can go through lyrics today and I always give this example [laughs], Michael Stipe’s of R.E.M. Nobody seems to give him much of a problem about his words – of course he doesn’t write them down like I do. But I think I’m lucidity itself in comparison. So I don’t understand what the problem is, because even if you listen to U2 or whoever it is, there’s a puzzlement about all of the things that are going on now. And of course I’ve been going on for quite a long time, I know that, but I don’t think I’m more of a problem than they are. As I said, the lyric led all of this. If it tells me to change the time or whatever, I will obey the lyric because that’s where all of this stuff came from. So I’ll be listening very carefully to what that’s saying to me. So if I feel the time should change, or if it’s just a dropout or whatever, I’ll do it.
“They’re agony,” Brian Gascoigne argues of the sessions for Tilt and, to a lesser degree, Climate Of Hunter. “He believes, and I take issue with him on this, that in order to convey very strong emotion in the music you have to be feeling it while you’re making it. Well that couldn’t be true, because otherwise the people who are playing Bruckner and Mahler every night would be basket cases by the time they’re 30. And after three or four hours in the studio he is a basket case, because he lives the thing with such intensity of emotion. I always find writing the strings for Scott very irritating, because they’re mostly holding one note for 16 bars. And yet he will make them go on and on and on, doing it again and again and again, until he gets the emotion. But in fact in the case of the string players, when he hears the difference it’s irritation. I know one of them has described his session as like having your teeth drawn slowly, and he does put musicians through the wringer because he really wants that intensity.”
Q9: Why are there so many percussion instruments and sounds on the album, in particular on a track like ‘The Cockfighter‘?
Well, the example of something like ‘The Cockfighter’, for instance: once again, the lyric made it appropriate to have this metallic sound, this sort of racket going on and there are several instances on the record where that happened. I thought it’d be interesting to use it too because you don’t hear a lot of records with percussion. It’s about an internal struggle, attack-and-defence struggle within one man. It starts with a nightmare, a man having a nightmare. And there are a lot of erotic images as well and banal sounds in the background. Finally, at the end of it, there’s an idea that transpires – this is a time when everyone’s talking about the Holocaust, I know I wrote this in ‘91 but it seems appropriate now.14 And so again I wanted to talk about something that really can’t be talked about, without a kneejerk reaction, without riffing ‘dirty Nazi Germany’ or something like that. It’s a very touchy subject, you have to approach it very carefully, it can go very wrong on you. So I came across this thought: I wanted to attack ‘the ludicrous of the law’, and I also wanted to play with time. So I picked two trials that were in the public consciousness in a big way at those times: one was this trial of Queen Caroline in 1820, the other is the Eichmann trial in our time. So by using questions from one trial and answers from another, I managed to suggest this without really talking about it, without anything really specific, to say, “This can’t be talked about, this is unsayable – this is a way we can find through this.” And then it comes through at the end of it, although they’re both public things, because of using them this way they both turn into the private again. Into the internal where, uniquely, these things really start, this kind of horror starts. So that’s what I was getting at.
‘The Cockfighter’ begins with sounds of murmuring and movement; the suggestion of physical noise in the room alongside you places it among the soundscapes heard on Radio 3’s experimental music programme, Mixing It – for whom, naturally, Tilt was a major event.15 The percussive attack, which comes suddenly out of nowhere, is when heard for the first time hard and fast and shocking.
“IT’S A BEAUTIFUL NIGHT
FROM HERE TO THOSE STARS,” howls Scott, pushing his voice through the mix, and all traces of the old crooner are gone (for now at least). Physical and cosmological imagery collide with the cover imagery (“feathers on the side of my fingers”) and the predicament of the two trial defendants – Duchess Caroline of Brunswick, who briefly became Queen Caroline on her adulterous husband George IV’s accession to the throne in 1820, whose unhappy marriage was brought to an end by her husband’s accusations of her own infidelities, despite her popularity with her subjects: “Do you swear the breastbone was bare… Do you have any doubt that he slept in that bed“16 – and the epitome of the ‘Banality Of Evil’, as Hannah Arendt subtitled her book [Adolf] Eichmann In Jerusalem, the Nazi bureaucrat who came to embody that tragicomic phrase ‘Ve vere only obeying ze orders’: “I have a greenlight for fifty thousand… You were responsible for rolling stock… Do you know what happened to most of the children…” The organ borrowed from London’s Central Methodist Hall underpins the darkness.
“I would hesitate before saying there’s a sadism that runs through the theme of the music,” says David Bates, “because I don’t think it is something quite as simple as that. But there do seem to be these abstract observations on people being put into positions of great discomfort.” Perpetually including the composer himself, one could add.
Q10: The listener needs great concentration, just like the musicians did. In the end, is it all about lack of hope and despair?
It’s hard work but there’s a lot of people doing it, trying and keeping that memory there. Like I said, it has to be approached very carefully but it’s no good getting kneejerky about this kind of thing, that’s too simple and stupid. I knew that I’d have to have space for it, so that the words had the appropriate amount of space between them: “Spared… I’ve been spared…” So it took that amount of time to get to the centre section, which suddenly changes, it becomes like a sunny field, you know, woodwind, and then it goes back into what is really three instruments: electronic bass drum, and then there’s the organ and guitar. And then we use some effects we took from the hurdy-gurdy. That’s the one thing, there is always hope – but is a very hard course, all of this. When I look at some of these songs, it was daunting for me because singing is a terrifying thing to me anyway. When I think I’m going to have to cross these landscapes, it’s a daunting proposition.
‘Bouncer See Bouncer’, with its truly obscure title, seems both a continuation of the previous narrative and the exemplar of the album’s aural aesthetic:
“Spared
i’ve been
spared
all the nickling
all the dimeing”
It could be Engel’s celebration of being spared the hustle and grind of everyday existence, of going back to being an artist. But it sure doesn’t sound that way.17 The “halo of locust” that the lyric refers to is heard buzzing malevolently around the opening and closing of the track; a single drum pounds monotonously in the background, like a downgraded version of the menace of eighties industrial music. Engel’s never sounded sadder, not crooning but apparently on the verge of tears: “The sobbing that just might choke us…” Then he intones, “I love this season without its cleft,” and the London Sinfonia briefly takes flight – just as the string section did in the more literally sinister ‘The Electrician’.
The album met with mixed reviews; some were left scratching their heads but it made the lower reaches of the album chart. “Majestic metal machine music,” acclaimed The Times, evoking when Lou Reed briefly went way off the critical scale in 1976 with four sides of guitar feedback weighing in at 20 minutes one second each. What Engel was doing obviously wasn’t as discordant as that.
Was it?
“What he’s after is the boundary between chords and discords,” Gascoigne explained after the event. “I mean anybody can play a chord or discord,” he demonstrated by slamming his arm on the piano keyboard, “he will take a chord and hold it for 16 bars. It’s halfway between a chord and a discord, I mean it contains four actual chords… and when you fill in the only remaining note it’s very different. So he’s operating in the area where that makes a difference. The strategy is to get this great seesaw going back and forth, and the pivot for it is to get the musicians into the no man’s land between melody and harmony conventionally and the squeaks and grunts of the avant-garde.”
Q11: Singing as hard work! Surely not for Scott Walker?
Believe me, it is an effort. Not because it’s a physical thing. I like to get the vocal down as quickly as possible – in my mind, when I go in to do the vocal I’ve only got one shot at it, that’s the way I look at it. And that one shot across a landscape like ‘The Cockfighter’ or ‘Bouncer’ or whatever is a terrifying prospect to me, because I want to get everything, uh, ‘there’ as much as possible within this limited time. And I want to get even the terror of the voice on the record, so that is has an intensity. There are some tunes where some people are saying, “God, that’s very high, you’re singing very high,” but again it’s the lyric that drove that. If I’d have sung the centre section of ‘The Cockfighter’ it’d have been too bland, or there’s are a couple of other instances there too in songs. If I take it to a certain height – where I’m not screaming, I don’t want to scream because that’s an overload of emotion – then I’m just about hopefully right. But of course there are parts of this album which are lower than this thing as well. So once again the lyric is dictating everything. If I know there’s a certain timbre I’m not getting all the way through I will patch it, but very reluctantly. The idea though was that I try to get it as quickly as possible. So that is daunting for me. That’s why when I come to the studio, you can ask my partner, Pete Walsh, the guy that I work with – I walk right into the studio, he has it set up so that I walk right up to the mike, he’s got the tracks and I start. And that’s it. I don’t want to have cups of tea, I don’t want to have polite conversation with anybody, I just want to do it. Or if I’m doing it live with the band I’ll do it with that then! [clicks fingers] But I don’t want any of that stuff going on. I want to catch this terrifying moment as much as possible; the impact of this feeling as much as possible. So that’s just the way I work. I haven’t always worked that way – in the old days sometimes we had to do four tunes in a session and I had to do it quickly, so I learn quickly anyway. But later on there was a mid-period where I didn’t care much, so I floated vocals in mid-tune or whatever. But my last three records, that’s the way I work.
“He hasn’t gone classical and he hasn’t gone jazz,” opines David Bates. “It isn’t really abstract, it’s still songs and there’s still a voice singing the songs, and there’s still lyrics he writes out on the inner bag. It just doesn’t make things clearer, it makes things a lot more confusing.”
‘Manhattan’ being a case in question. It erupts into being with the church organ sound – “Here you / Are boy / Here you are,” – being the earliest written track on the album.18 In its switches of mood and suddenly shifting allusions, it might be seen as the template for Tilt, but of course, of the lyric’s various international landmarks none are actually in New York City. Instead there’s Bengal, Somalia, Burma, Kenya – all former seats of colonial empires. The track is subtitled ‘Flerdele‘, derived from fleur de lys – the French heraldic symbol with which, according to a 17th century code instituted by Louis XIV, slaves were branded on the shoulder.19 One of the dramatically shifting verses combines nightmarish police state imagery with the negro spiritual ‘Ezekiel In The Valley Of The Dry Bones’:
“chief of police
a la collar –
bones connected…
and hear the
word of the
lord…”
‘Face On Breast’ is the strangest of beasts in this context – a pretty straight grunge-rock song with nicely distorted guitar, albeit still carrying the album’s dark undertones. Opening to an image of a gliding swan, it incorporates erotically tantalising dialogue from Scott’s favourite era of Hollywood, the forties: “Ya know how to whistle / Put ya lips together and blow.”20
‘Bolivia ‘95’ is a rock song too, but multilayered and sinister. “Doctorie / Give me a C / For this babaloo,” pleads the narrator, the latter being a paternal spirit in the voodoo-like Caribbean tradition of santeria. As for the ‘C’, well, we all know what Bolivia’s national export is. The song is haunted by the necessity of impoverished communities growing botanical drugs for survival in the face of military intervention: “Save the crops / And the bodies / From illness / From pestilence / Hunger and war.” (The plea for Doctorie to “opiate me” makes the lyric universal, not just pertaining to cocaine-producing Central America.) But Scott Walker doesn’t do conventional protest songs; in fact he doesn’t do conventional songs at all any more. The strangely eerie refrain, set to a menacingly low-key guitar riff in the style of Knopfler or Bregovic and a beaten snare, is “Lemon Bloody Cola”; it irritates the hell out of some but this writer finds it weirdly effective, suggesting a few things all at once: the Coke/cocaine euphemism; the symbol of US capitalism; even perhaps the emptiness of consumerism – as when the main character of George Orwell’s Coming Up For Air samples a fish sausage: “It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of… Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else.”
‘Patriot (a single)’21 is almost a return to the orchestrated dramas of Scott 1-4. Citing January 19, 1991, it’s another oblique sideways look at international carnage – in this case Operation Desert Storm, the first Gulf War (the title refers to the Patriot missile). Touching upon the sensitive croon of yesteryear, Engel poetically describes the chaos as “Cripple fingers / Hit the muezzin22 yells.” Then, in an extraordinary Brecht & Weillian section, the aural drama slows to a crawl as a piccolo whistles and Scott sings a kind of drunken Teutonic refrain:
“the
Luzerner
Zeitung
Never
sold out…” – this being an apparent tribute to how the New Lucerne Times didn’t follow the Western party line on the war.
‘Tilt’, the title track, might have been called ‘Rawhide’, if that title wasn’t already used for the opener of Climate Of Hunter. It certainly plays like a parody of a fifties Western movie or TV show theme: “He was so strong / he was so bold / When they made him / they broke the mold.” But Engel’s anxious timbre, what’s left unsaid and only alluded to bring the song into the uniform dark tenor of the album; the recurring phrase “they’ll turn / the buffalo” seems to have some ominous meaning beyond its obvious prairie imagery.
In his reflections on his ex-partner’s new music, John Maus said of Tilt, “There is no way to discredit what he does because there is nothing to compare it with.” He made his own attempt, however, by comparing it with the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer; but whereas Schaeffer’s mid-20th century experiments in sound adopted an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach which, if the kitchen sink was actually present in the room, might include the sound of its running tap water, the millennial Scott Walker was striving for a definite effect: “I want it to be like a heavy dose of flu.”
It might not be the best selling point for a record album. But in terms of creating an aural environment that blocks out all else, its ambition (and its often startling effect) can’t be denied.
Q12: Will you ever perform live in front of an audience again?
I think the real problem for me is having to do so much big singing in one go. See, I don’t have a guitar player playing guitar solos forever, there’s nowhere to take a rest, there’s nowhere to hide. Once I start I’ll be out there singing for a certain amount of time. A record like this, it probably would be possible to go in and do this in the Queen Elizabeth Hall with this nucleus band – even the big organ we’ve recorded live, we’ve sampled it so we could take it in there. My only concern would be people coming along for the wrong reasons. This would take about 45 minutes to perform – but if they were coming along expecting things from the past, and I had to do that stuff as well, I don’t think I’d want to do that. Because it’s just too much singing, it’s a different kind of thing. But there’s a lot of my material from the past that might be interesting to check out again in another context, but very hard to bring off. But then these days it all gets harder because… you want more, so it all gets tougher. Uh… we all want a sort of fulfilment, which is always out there and it never stays, that’s the problem. You get glimpses of it. You just want to try and capture it some way in art. So you’re listening for [it], singing in neutrality and all kinds of things that come into that way. It’s something we can’t – once again what this album’s about, it’s an unsayable thing, we can’t really talk about it. So it’s a desire, and a longing.
Despite the sui generis nature of Tilt, Engel was still searching for those images to which he could open his heart, as described by the Camus quote on the cover of Scott 4.
And there was, in fact, one live performance delivered of material from the album. At the time of its release, he made one solitary appearance on Jools Holland‘s Later, singing the closing track. ‘Rosary’ is solo Scott, accompanying himself on electric guitar. As elliptical as anything that preceded it, it is also a song of desperate yearning, of emotional striving and frustrated desire. Some have made a drug song out of its imagery: “i’ll string along… With all of the trembling vein / that you can bare,” and its closing refrain of “And I gotta quit.”
But that’s an oversimplification.23 ‘Rosary’ plays like anxiety raw and bare, in its purest form; the implied religious image of the Catholic faithful caressing their rosary beads for reassurance is obviously no accident. On Later, Scott’s infamous stage fright translated into an intense performance: stroking nervously angular electric guitar chords somewhat redolent of Marc Ribot,24 making the imploring non-verbal refrain, “oo whaoo whaoo whaoo.”25 It was also the last live performance of Scott Walker to date.
When Tilt was given a preview by selective invitation only at London’s Royal College of Art, one of the attendees was Marc Almond.
“I hate Tilt, absolutely hate it!” he’d later report. “I went to a playing of it, a play-through of it, and I thought, ‘Is this just me?’ Everyone was sitting there silent and reverent and I just thought, ‘This is terrible! This is absolutely awful!’” he laughs.
“For all these people who used to brag about being ambitious and being adventurous,” retorted J.D Beauvallet in 30 Century Man, “now there was a record for all the things they were standing for and all the things they were telling they were. It made people move fast, and now people who boasted of being avant-garde were old bag – or old hat,” he corrects himself.26
“A number of people just walked away,” Stephen Kijak recalls of Tilt‘s tonal explorations of darkness. “Some people are just so attached and so invested in his melodic era that they just kind of want him to get back into it. And, of course, in a way, wouldn’t it be great? But then again, I don’t know. I’m quite fond of Tilt, so…
“And then when you listen to it up against The Drift, it becomes an even more melodic and pleasant record!” he laughs. “They age very well and they reveal themselves slowly. But it’s fascinating when it’s set in relief against the new work: what seemed impenetrable and abrasive is actually not at all, really. I turn to it now and yes, it’s dark and foreboding. I like this kind of music – I love the sixties work, I love the current work. I guess it just depends on your musical tastes and what you’re willing to take on. It’s thrilling to me, even after having worked with him so intently for those years, I still turn to it and am thrilled by it and find new dimensions in it all the time. It’s a very rewarding album.”
And then Scott Engel disappeared again.
The following years would not be breeding grounds for rumour or myth, as he could be occasionally detected in an outline or a whisper. In 1996, the ghost of his old crooner self could be heard on the soundtrack of To Have And To Hold, an Australian film about an obsessive love by writer/director John Hillcoat. The song was ‘I Threw It All Away’, a plaintive love song by Bob Dylan from his stripped-down country period album Nashville Skyline.
“Nick Cave27 asked me to,” Scott later told Kijak by way of explanation. “He said, ‘Look, I want you to do two songs, one or the other’ – one was ‘My Way’,” he smiles, “and the other was the Dylan song. I mean I’m not particularly a Dylan fan, but I was like, ‘I’ll take the Dylan song because I don’t want to sing “My Way” whatever, man!’ It was kind of the atmosphere he needed, because he needed a kind of drunken version of ‘My Way’ as well, which I could have done, you know.”
These days, the old crooner version of Scott Walker was reserved for drunken movie soundtracks – although not for weddings, funerals or bar mitzvahs.
1 A quote from ‘Big Louise’.
2 Inexplicably, the album that was effectively Scott 5 would stay in print for only a brief amount of time before being deleted again.
3 The film buff is referring to The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s elliptically paranoid 1974 thriller about a surveillance expert who believes he’s overheard a murder.
4 Bregovic is perhaps most familiar in the West for performing ‘Ederlezi’, the ethnic East European theme to Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 comedy Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan – which really doesn’t do the eclecticism of his work justice.
5 Or the third if you count the first half of Nite Flights.
6 Unlike David Bowie’s expressionistic portraits of Iggy Pop and Yukio Mishima in the seventies, none of Engel’s works seem to have found their way into the public domain.
7 Presumably from Charles Negus-Fancey and his wife Cathy.
8 Actually in 1987, predating Fontana’s signing of Scott by at least two and a half years.
9 Scott is referring to his lessons with vocal coach Freddie Winrose.
10 Performance artist Laurie Anderson had entered the world of popular music in 1982 with ‘O Superman’, a strangely compelling Top 10 hit mostly sung through a vocoder or spoken. Her subsequent works up to this point had combined electronics with installation art and a stage collaboration with cult author Robert Anton Wilson. Here she’s obviously being used as a gauge by Fontana to indicate a market. Today she’s also known as Mrs Lou Reed.
11 The guitarist on Tilt.
12 Previously the keyboardist and orchestrator of Climate Of Hunter.
13 It’s arguable that the creative arc of Joyce as a writer follows a similar pattern to that of Engel: the conventional serious literature of A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and Dubliners; the psychological prose and mythic archetypal lives of the characters in Ulysses; the stream of consciousness and wilful wordplay of Finnegans Wake – at its best echoed in the wordplay of Engel’s own recent compositions; at its worst in the gibberish spoken by former US President George W. Bush.
14 The mid-nineties obviously saw the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, as well as the establishment of a ‘Holocaust Day’ in various European countries.
15 Scott was also interviewed for the broadsheet press by one of Mixing It‘s co-presenters, the late Robert Sandall; the programme has since relocated to Resonance FM under the title Where‘s The Skill In That?
16 This particular askew title is more likely derived from Rabelaisian wordplay on the adulterous element of the lyric than, say, any kind of reference to Charles Willeford’s roman noir of the same title.
17 In The Rhymes Of Goodbye, Lewis Williams suggests the opening lines may be a continuation of the Holocaust strand of ‘The Cockfighter’. Skewed may have been an appropriate (if less poetic) substitute title for Tilt.
18 In 1987 – as opposed to the bulk of the album being composed in 1991–2, and the closing track, ‘Rosary’, in ‘93.
19 Once again, the author salutes Lewis Williams for this piece of historical detective work.
20 Lauren Bacall to Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks’ 1944 film of Hemingway’s To Have And Have Not.
21 Of course it was never released as a single.
22 Islamic prayer caller.
23 As well as a potential libel.
24 Both in his own solo music and his work for Tom Waits.
25 It puts this writer in mind of T.S. Eliot’s strange Thames river barge refrain – “Wallala leialala” – in The Waste Land, a poem that Tilt, in its clash of historical periods and imagery, and its underlying anxiety, has been compared to. (Strangely, the only popular music performer to have tackled The Waste Land seems to be Engel’s contemporary P.J. Proby, in a splendidly Southern rendition recorded for Savoy Books; it was never issued, as it seems unlikely that Eliot’s publishers, Faber & Faber, would grant permission.)
26 In fairness to Almond, he’s never boasted of being ‘avant-garde’ – despite noise elements on the odd track like ‘Your Love Is A Lesion’ on The Mambas’ Torment & Toreros LP. As a performer, he’s more of a one-man archive of traditional pop music.
27 Nick Cave, one of the most literary – and still occasionally the most incendiary – of rock performers, had co-written and acted in his friend Hillcoat’s harrowing 1988 prison drama, Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead; he’d also go on to write the original screenplay for The Proposition and the adaptation Lawless for the same filmmaker. Cave is known to be a big Walker Brothers fan.