SS: When you read the lyrics (contrasted with the way Scott Walker presents them: as if they‘re Las Vegas show tunes) they‘re really staggering. There‘s one called ‘Next!’ about a soldier in the French army who loses his virginity in a mobile whorehouse –
BK: With a gay lieutenant slapping his ass –
SS: – as if they were all fags. Every time he makes love he thinks of all the gonorrhoea that he‘s had.
BK: The original Jacques Brel song is French accordion fluff – if you heard it, you‘d go, “Take this shit off!”
Amok Books founders Stuart Swezey and Brian King, interviewed for Incredibly Strange Music Volume I (Re-Search #14, 1993)
After the Walkers first split, as the individual band members were casting round to make their next move, Gary Leeds was looking at forming his own band. Surprisingly, perhaps, he claims that Scott Engel, in one of his crises of confidence, asked if he could be the bass player.
“That was all he wanted to do,” Gary would later say, “but the management and record company had other plans for him. I would talk to him on the phone now and then as we were both struggling and a little cash would have helped. We had trouble getting our money because the management controlled it.”
Gary and Scott would still meet for drinks at night at the Playboy Club in Mayfair. Today it may seem like a cigar-smoking misogynist’s playground, too ‘naff’ for politically correct sensibilities. Back then, when it was recently opened, it was the promise of a whole new world of hedonism (for those who could afford it) – Hefner’s dream come to shabby little England.
“It’s a strange story, but I’ll tell it,” Scott recounts to the Kijak documentary team. “We went to the opening evening of the London Playboy Club – why I don’t know. I was there with Gary just drinking, we did a lot of drinking in those days. It opened on Park Lane and everyone was just invited. So we got involved with the girls, we took up with the bunnies. I met this German girl who was a Playboy bunny, and we went home, back to her place, and she was a really big drinker – I think it was Pernod, she was really into Pernod I seem to remember, and Jacques Brel.
“She translated him for me, a lot of things, that night. And I thought, ‘This is fantastic!’ It was a fantastic coincidence, about a week later I went up to see Andrew Oldham, I just used to go up to chat and drink Black Russians and things like that in the afternoons.1 And I said, ‘I heard this incredible guy the other night,’ and he said, ‘It’s funny you should mention him, because I’ve got this demo by this man Eric Blau, and he’s recorded this demo of translations of some of his songs.’ And he played from it and it was an awful, crunchy old guy with a piano. I said, ‘I’ll have it!’ I took it and ran with it. That changed me, changed everything for me.”
***
Jacques Romain Brel was of an older generation (and indeed an older culture) to Scott Engel, born in Brussels on April 8, 1929. He was 11 years old when the Nazis took Belgium in May 1940. Sometimes latterly known as ‘the French Sinatra’ (wrong not only geographically but aesthetically), the Flemish French speaker is perhaps more accurately assessed as part of the ‘can you name five famous Belgians?’ game.2
The son of the owner of a cardboard manufacturing business, he rejected his bourgeois origins to follow his fortune in Paris as a chansonnier. At first his haunts were the low-rent hotels of Montmartre – the neighbourhood where Sartre and his lover Simone De Beauvoir held court.
The lyrics of Brel have an existential attitude toward much of life, as well as a Genet-like impulse not to flinch from all that’s scabrous.3 “I’m obsessed by those things that are ugly or sordid, that people don’t want to talk about,” he explained in his only English music press interview. “I like to take blows in the face too,” he boasted in that Gallic style of treating metaphor as a reality.
Modern Liverpool quartet Dead Belgian – who play versions of Brel songs in a style pitched between raucous folk and barroom jazz4 – have offered up their thoughts to this writer on Brel and his Anglo interpreters, particularly Engel.
“There was some guy who loaded stuff online,” says band founder and percussionist Andy Delamere. “‘Lightning something’ was his user name. He wrote brilliant essays on it, so it was a great resource to see Brel perform. We’ve all done acting or written or performed stuff for theatre, so it was great. When you watch him it’s all the spit, and then you listen to what he’s actually singing, to the translation, and you’re going, ‘Fucking hell, you can actually sing that and get away with it?’ ‘Les bourgeois’: ‘The bourgeoisie are like pigs / The older they get the stupider they become’ – the fact that he’s obviously singing that to a bourgeois audience and he’s got a suit and tie on. He was singing ‘Les bourgeois’ but he was as bourgeois as they come.”
But Brel’s songs are also imbued with a lyrical romanticism, an instinct to sniff out what makes life worth enduring (or even celebrating, at times). He shared a residency in Club Genevieve with French-Armenian Engel favourite Charles Aznavour, and strummed a guitar on his earliest hit, 1953’s ‘Quand on n‘a que l‘amour’ (‘If We Only Have Love’). It could have been a more literate template for The Beatles’ silly ‘All You Need Is Love’ – with love as a defence against humanity’s own worst instincts (“Jerusalem will stand”) rather than some lazy hippie slogan.
Brel’s exclusively Francophone records (he never wrote or sang – or one assumes thought – in English) became known, perhaps ironically, to the English-speaking bourgeoisie via compilation releases such as American Debut. A demonstrative and dramatic vocalist, his performances were backed by orchestral arranger François Rauber and co-composer/pianist Gérard Jouannest, a member of the Communist Party who Brel jokingly called ‘Nikita’.5
Brel’s rare appearance at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1965 was witnessed by jobbing 20-something tunesmith Mort Shuman. As a former writing partner of the slightly older ‘Doc’ Pomus,6 they’d created a roster of hits for a wide range of US artists – most notably Elvis, including ‘Suspicion’ and ‘Viva Las Vegas’. Since splitting from the partnership, Shuman had washed up in London (where he’d written the odd chart hit like The Small Faces’ ‘Sha-La-La-Lee’).
On his home visit to the US, however, he indulged a growing interest in the French chansonnier tradition by going to see Brel. “The only time I’d heard such virility in a voice was in black singers,” praised Shuman. “I just had to find out what he was singing about. Then I had to translate it. Brel wrote about things that you don’t normally hear people singing. He sang of things that you normally only found in philosophy or in novels.”
Shuman’s collaborator on the adaptations was playwright Eric Blau. But they hadn’t quite got there first.
Brel’s mockingly sardonic early sixties ballad ‘Le moribond’ has the dying man of the title asserting, “I want them to laugh and dance when they put me in that hole,” and chiding the wife and friend he knows have been cuckolding him behind his back. In the hands of singing poet Rod McKuen, who first co-wrote songs sung by little Scotty Engel in the fifties, the black humour of the chorus was blanded out into “We had joy, we had fun / We had seasons in the sun.”7 This was for the 1964 US pop ballad version by The Kingston Trio, whose previous hit with traditional murder ballad ‘Tom Dooley’ made a sex killing seem like a bit of hi-jinks by a clean-cut young man.
‘Ne me quitte pas’ (‘Don’t Leave Me’) was Brel’s biggest hit of the sixties – an anguished (and allegedly autobiographical) plea for a lover not to turn away. The increasingly desperate deserted lover’s promises include calling rain from the skies and raising dormant volcanoes.
In the hands of McKuen, this second early Brel translation became ‘If You Go Away’ – a more conventionally romantic but very affecting love song. Its myriad versions include those of Dusty Springfield, who sang verses both from McKuen and the French original, John Walker8 and, in the wake of both, Scott Walker. (Scott’s beautifully melancholic version appears on his third album, despite reputedly being recorded 18 months earlier with his first batch of Brel titles.) His version, as with most translations, commits the purist’s sin of lamenting, “I’d have been the shadow of your shadow [rather than ‘chien’ – dog] / If it might have kept me be your side.” (“Only Frank Sinatra and I have ever sung that song right,” McKuen later claimed of the translations.)
“Someone shouted out for ‘If You Go Away’ at a gig in Manchester – there’s not a song called ‘If You Go Away’,” dismisses Dead Belgian’s Andy Delamere. “‘Ne me quitte pas’ is a great tune. Sometimes I’ve talked about that just to say it’s not a great love song – the character he’s playing is just a stalker, pathetic, just the lowest, he’ll do anything, it’s desperate,” he laughs. “But people don’t get that. Brel’s a literary figure, those words are incredible. I think everyone gets a little bit embarrassed about how emotional it is. I didn’t want to make it precious, but I didn’t want to make it camp – it is quite camp but there’s that high emotion, the French aren’t embarrassed by that.”
“The literal translation really stands out,” acclaims vocalist Fionnuala Dorrity, “and it’s a very French way of saying and doing things. I think when it’s switched around to make it suitable for an English audience, it does lose quite a lot actually. [Jazz singer] Barb Jungr did a new translation of ‘Ne me quitte pas’ which is really, really close to the original, except she’s obviously made it rhyme and scan. But the words are just as it’s sung in the song. And it’s amazing because it’s not taking anything away.”
Scott Engel was initially disappointed when Brel’s only performance at the Royal Albert Hall clashed with the start of The Walker Brothers’ Far East tour in December 1966. (Brel himself made his final live appearances before retiring from the stage in 1967 – just before Scott began to record his songs.) But it would be an adaptation by Shuman and Blau which opened Scott, his eponymous first solo album. “In a song, I now look for what I consider to be the truth,” he earnestly explained at the time. “The people following me don’t want sugar-coated rubbish.” His route away from saccharine Tin Pan Alley would be via a diversion down the Rue de St Jacques.
‘Mathilde’ is a stampeding rush toward a poisoned boudoir. When performing to a backing track on Dusty, Ms Springfield’s TV show, at the time of the LP’s release, Scott’s slender frame and spindly legs threw themselves into the jittery St Vitus Dance of Wally Stott’s arrangement, before releasing his nervous tension at the end like a puppet with his strings cut.9 “Mama, can you hear me yell? / Your baby boy’s gone back to hell / Mathilde’s come back to me!”
Engel would refer to the song’s subject as “a sad old masochistic love affair”, but in fact its bruises are more emotional. ‘Mathilde’ of the title is an all-devouring femme fatale; she’s made our narrator miserable and still he can’t wait for her return.
(“There are some songs by Brel that I find really hard to do, like ‘Mathilde’,” says Fionnuala Dorrity. Given its sentiments from another age – “You want to beat her black and blue, but don’t do it I beg of you” – it’s perhaps unsurprising. “He couldn’t act, he’s a shit actor,” Delamere disparages Scott’s performance. “Watch him doing ‘Mathilde’ on the old footage.” “He holds back quite a bit in the performance,” notes Ms Dorrity of Engel’s nervous tension. “It’s just really camp,” her bandmate concludes, “he’s doing all these hand gestures.”)
‘La mort’ is a sombre but tuneful existentialist statement by Brel, reflecting on how our finite mortality gives our lives meaning. “When you say to a Catholic that X or Y is no longer a Catholic,” Brel himself said of his national faith, “they are always surprised. As far as they’re concerned, only Sartre escaped the net.” Despite his disparaging of religion, however, his translated lyric (‘My Death’) spoke of “whatever is behind the door” – the mystery of death that follows the uncertainties of life.
“Death waits for me in the lilacs that a gravedigger will toss over me to make the future,” sings Brel; “My death waits among the falling leaves / in magician’s mysterious sleeves” sings Engel in the Shuman/Blau translation. The Guest arrangement of Scott’s version is heralded by ominous chords of doom from the medieval te deum ‘Dies Irae’,10 which he may first have heard as a Gregorian chant, but both the original and the translation revolve around the draining sands of “the passing time”.
“I realised all the phenomena of existence very young, and it was a hard thing for me,” a middle-aged Engel would later recollect. ‘My Death’ is part of his coming to terms with that – with its skeletal orchestral arrangement and bass-guitar undertow, it’s a romanticising of the fate that awaits us all. Almost incredibly, the artist would make his post-Walker Brothers return to The Billy Cotton Band Show to perform the song, coaxing the BBC variety audience’s gaze down the poetic path to their own extinction.
“I just got into it via Scott Walker – Scott Walker Sings Jacques Brel,“11 confirms Andy Delamere. “I bought it on tape and I got into all that. But I think I knew David Bowie’s version of ‘My Death’,12 which I loved. I just remember how dark it was and how rich.”
As to their own visceral approach to the songs, including ‘My Death’: “We didn’t want to be all precious, all kind of [whispering], ‘This one is…’ I didn’t want it to be chin-stroking, but also I didn’t want to camp it up. The way that Scott Walker sounds now, I find it a bit hard to stomach, and also Marc Almond – it’s all kind of irony and we wanted to do it straight. Scott Walker’s how I got into it. But I can’t listen to it now, it’s like listening to a big cream cake. It’s camp.”
“I love Scott Walker,” clarifies Ms Dorrity, “I listen to him in The Walker Brothers and I listen to his solo stuff, but when I hear him doing Brel, and after listening to Brel’s stuff… You can enjoy it for its theatricality, but whenever you start getting down to actual versions of Brel’s work, you look at it and go, ‘No, that’s not really what he meant.’”
Scott climaxes with Brel’s boozy, bawdy ‘Amsterdam’. Matching the Belgian’s quickening pace on his more manic chansons – which would be accompanied by huge hand gestures and the flashing of his buck teeth – Engel closes on the vignette of a drunken sailor who “drinks to the health of the whores of Amsterdam” and “pisses like I cry over an unfaithful love”. It might not have played well at the London Palladium, but this was music as living, breathing, human drama.
After hearing Scott, Jacques Brel passed instructions to Mort Shuman to make all his translated material available to the young American. It began a series of semi-regular meetings in Hyde Park with Kenny Lynch, black London pop singer and Shuman’s occasional co-writer, whereupon Lynch would pass Engel the latest Anglicised versions of Brel.
The intoxication with Brel would permeate Engel’s first three solo albums – the plainly (yet perfectly) titled Scott 1-3, each containing three translations. In between the first two, the Engel team translated Brel’s tragicomic, semiautobiographical ‘Le chanson de Jacky’ into the thundering ‘Jackie’ – about a decadent figure who daydreams of being “a procurer of young girls”, a saviour of mankind or returning to the innocence of childhood – but winds up “locked up inside some opium den / surrounded by my Chinamen”. It made for the unlikeliest of single releases – at least as far as BBC radio was concerned.
“And if by chance I should become / A singer with a Spanish bum” began the Engel version, referring to the tight trousers of flamenco dancers, and it’s this mild anal fixation that irritates Brel purists.
(“When we did ‘Jackie’, we couldn’t do ‘cute-cute in a stupid-ass way’, we couldn’t stomach that,” comments Dead Belgian’s Delamere. “It’s ‘Beautiful, beautiful and an idiot simultaneously’ – at the same time. Basically the words are just that. I love Scott Walker’s version of ‘Jackie’ but it’s like the music in Thunderbirds13 – you can imagine the guys on Tracy Island putting it on in their ‘pad’, it’s not ‘dirty’, it’s not got any kind of dirt involved.”)
The BBC presumably found ‘Jackie’ too ‘dirty’ for public consumption. It made it as far as number 22 in the charts in December 1967, with limited (night-time only) airplay. A bemused Engel found himself defending the lyric to sympathetic TV host Simon Dee on Dee Time, describing it as “beautiful” and Brel himself as “an art form” all of his own.
In early 1968, Shuman and Blau’s dramatised revue Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well And Living In Paris14 began a three-year run on Broadway. Shuman himself, a paunchy, moustachioed figure played one of the acting chansonniers – comical in ‘Jacky’, brooding in ‘Amsterdam’.
(“Brel’s very funny,” reflects Dead Belgian’s Fionnuala, “they’re clearly very funny songs. But I think Shuman’s songs are a little bit saccharine, too sweet.” “They’re not European, are they?” says drummer Andy. “They’re Americanised.”)
But Scott Walker had got there first, recording four of the show’s songs before they ever made the stage. His version of Brel’s ‘Au suivant’ (‘Next’) on 1968’s Scott 2 has been alternately criticised as both overly theatrical and not dramatic enough. In its time, however, it was as darkly Rabelaisian a performance as could be heard in the English language.
Set in a mobile army whorehouse, probably in the dying days of French Indochina,15 it tells of a young man losing his virginity amid the stink “of corpses, of whisky and of mud”. Given a dramatic buildup in its original French version,16 its clinical line “I swear on the wet head of my first case of gonorrhoea” is a near-literal translation of the line referring to ‘veroles’.17 In France, such scabrous imagery was tolerated as art; in England, it couldn’t be played on the radio.
(“He’s not a great actor,” demurs Delamere of Scott Walker’s ‘Next’. “Alex Harvey18 acts – you get the meaning, you get the sense of it.” “That’s the difference,” agrees Ms Dorrity. “Scott didn’t put any aggression into it. He didn’t put any of that same passion into it. He sang them very well but he sang them theatrically and he didn’t put any real anger and hurt into it. I think what’s missing from those is the performance – it’s not the translation, it’s not the orchestration or anything else to do with it, it’s the sound of the man performing the song. He’s quite cool with it, cool, theatrical and laid-back. Brel was fucking sweat and blood and anger!”)
On the semi-classical Scott 3, in 1969, Brel would make his final appearance on a Scott Walker record with the final three tracks, ending with the languid ‘If You Go Away’. Engel matches the Belgian’s manic accelerando on ‘Sons Of’ (‘Fils de‘), a lullaby eulogy to lost childhood and children (“The same sweet smiles, the same sad tears / The cries at night, the nightmare fears”), opening on composer Jouannest’s toy piano-like sound.
‘Funeral Tango’ is the black comic skit of a man watching the insincere mourners at his own funeral. Shuman played it for pathos in the show, but Engel has morbid fun with lines like, “Oh I can see me now / So cold and so alone / As the flowers slowly die / In my field of little bones.”
“Did you ever have the desire to watch your own funeral?” he’d ask the audience of his 1969 TV show. “Listen to this.”
(“I think a lot of the translations are fine,” concedes Delamere. “Some of them are a bit American. ‘Funeral Tango’ fits in fine, because we try to do all the death songs.”)
“Brel was a reflection of the times I was going through,” Scott explained in retrospect and in defiance of the purists, “all sorts of dark images, which I associated with Brel. His own interpretations of songs, in many ways, were very different from mine… My intention was to take the material and try and do something else with it.”
By the end of the sixties, however, Scott Engel would move beyond and away from Brel. The last song he covered by the Belgian iconoclast was ‘Alone’ (‘Seul’), a lyric about disintegrating relationships that, unusually for a translated work, seems to adopt a more universally philosophical perspective in its English version (“And we find we’re alone”). But it was recorded only on (long since wiped) videotape for his 1969 TV series Scott, and never committed to vinyl.
“I heard through Brel’s wife that he really liked the versions I’d done,” said Engel. “I had a chance to meet him when I was in Paris one evening. He was doing [Man Of] La Mancha19 – a show there. I was too nervous to meet him. I thought, ‘I can’t possibly… this is one of my big idols.’ And I didn’t do it.”
Citing Brel’s very basic melodies and comparing him to Bob Dylan,20 Scott was distancing himself from the tradition in both folk and rock whereby the vocal was more a narrative performance than an organic component of a piece of music.
“It is grimy,” says Matthew Wood of his own motley crew’s contemporary approach to the music of Brel.
“And hopefully a little bit uncomfortable,” seconds bandmate Delamere. “We did a gig on Matthew Street in Liverpool, there were 21 year olds and A-level students there. They were going: ‘People don’t know Jacques Brel – there should be a street like this,’ because of Matthew Street and John Lennon.21 I want to do things where you can hear the influence, like Leonard Cohen, or even The Divine Comedy,” he strikes a percussionist’s bell for emphasis. “Definitely Scott Walker, but it’s just trying to choose which song. I love his songs that are influenced by Jacques Brel, better than his Brel versions. We could do ‘The Girls From The Streets’, or ‘Big Louise’, ‘Rosemary’, I’d love to do ‘Angels Of Ashes’, it’s a fantastic song, or ‘Boy Child’ – just for the flavour of it, I think it’d fit right in.”
“We’ve been talking about doing stuff by other artists that have been clearly influenced by Jacques Brel,” seconds Ms Dorrity. “I think he’s been clearly influenced in terms of how he structures the songs, that orchestral feel to it.”
“And also lyrically,” confirms her bandmate. “‘Such A Small Love’ is a great song.”
***
Scott, the first Engel solo album, debuted on September 16, 1967. It contained sleeve notes by original Walkers champion Keith Altham, which reflect both his enthusiasm and the earnestness of those times:
“This is the album which Scott called ‘my obsession’, and it is an LP for which you must open not only your ears but also your heart and your mind…
“If it were necessary to find any further proof that ‘loneliness is not just a cloak he wears’22 but a state of mind, it is here in his own compositions – ‘Montague Terrace (In Blue)’, ‘Always Coming Back To You’, and the cold ethereal beauty of ‘Such A Small Love’.
“These three songs are almost an intrusion of privacy, and the points are barbed – but so superbly made that you must realise that like ‘The bullfight’ this is no idle ‘sport’ but a matter of life and death…23”
After several paragraphs of effusiveness, Altham continues:
“And while we applaud the result of this musical journey through Scott’s mind we must not forget those sensitive arrangements by Wally Stott, Reg Guest and Peter Knight who have conjured ‘musical spirits from the vastly deep’ for these inspired orchestral settings.
“When Scott Engel (I use the surname because it is his real name and I know few more real people) sang with The Walker Brothers, he had a little-boy-lost image, but this album is a man’s work, and the portent of greater things to come. Should some of the truth on this album offend, should the light be too bright for some, we might be permitted the device of using the words of another young man who wrote with the fire of burning youth:
“‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all.
“‘That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
– John Keats.”
Produced by John Franz and Peter Olliff, Scott made number three and remained on the album chart for more than four months. One of many positive reviews praised it as a melancholy “distillation of madness” – which seems a little strong now, given that the review goes on to observe how, “The songs sung by Scott are for the most part emotional ballads.”
The track listing makes it essentially a covers album, every bit as much as those of The Walker Brothers. Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann’s ‘Angelica’ is a sublime piece of romantic angst, outstripping even the intensity of Gene Pitney’s version; “And then the cold winds came / And when I spoke her name… She couldn’t hear me,” the vocalist intones of the lover who may be absent or may be dead, to the insistent punctuation of Reg Guest’s arrangement.
‘The Lady Came From Baltimore’ is a country-tinged ballad, anticipating the detour that Scott’s career would later take. Telling the tale of a thief who “just came to steal her money, take her rings and run,” but instead fell in love and “got away with none”, it’s a suitably downbeat romantic lyric by Tim Hardin – a tragic figure whose work Engel admired, “but not the man”.24
‘When Joanna Loved Me’ is high-class schmaltz of the first order (“Every town was Paris… every month was May / but when Joanna left me / May became December”); it was also the first of many occasions that Scott would cover the repertoire of Tony Bennett, a romantic crooner second only to Sinatra himself.
‘The Big Hurt’ faithfully covers the beautifully brassy 1959 hit by Miss Toni Fisher, making high drama out of a simple break-up (“Now it begins, now that you’ve gone / Needles and pins, twilight till dawn”).25 André and Dory Previn’s ‘You’re Gonna Hear From Me’ is from the 1966 musical Inside Daisy Clover with Natalie Wood – a ‘watch out, world, here I come!’ number rather at odds with the album’s intensity. ‘Through A Long And Sleepless Night’ is another soundtrack cover, from the 1949 movie Come To The Stable; more recently covered by Bobby Darin,26 it benefited from a classically influenced arrangement by new man Peter Knight.
And then, of course, there are three Engel originals which, like the Brel songs in their own manner, are infused with an aesthetic truth.
“Everyone goes on about the Jacques Brel stuff,” said Scott’s eighties manager, Ed Bicknell, in the bio-doc, “but to me the most interesting thing on those Phillips records is Scott’s own writing. Because he was kind of emerging as a songwriter and there were some fantastic songs.”
“I’d heard of Scott and I’d heard of The Walker Brothers, but I’d never heard them,” chimed in Angela Morley – the elderly lady formerly known as Wallace Stott.27 “I had a call from a man saying he was Johnny Franz… and he said, ‘Scott Walker is going to do some things on his own and I’d like you to come and work with him.’ So I’d go into Johnny’s office, I’d expected to see Johnny sitting at the piano and Scott holding his music. But no! I walked in to see this young man sitting on the floor with his arms out like that [extends arms], with a guitar and sheets of paper with words on all over the carpet, you know. And as he’d sing and strum his way all through these things, from time to time he would stop and he would say, ‘I really hear Sibelius here,’ you see, or, ‘Here I hear Delius,’ or, ‘Here I hear…,’ and all these classical composers that he was fond of, and somehow he just wanted that sound in the arrangements. We just thought that he was different, we didn’t realise that he was… you know, a scout for like the avant-garde, what was to come.”
The classic solo Engel track that first marked out his space in late sixties pop history, ‘Montague Terrace (In Blue)’ flows and weaves its way through a hypnotic string arrangement by Stott. When Scott later sang it on his TV show, he’d announce it as being about “two very dear friends of mine – a married couple who live in a small room about the size of a shoebox… who can still dream and this deals with their illusions of living in Montague Terrace.”28
The focus of the lyric is less on the couple’s dream home than the physical claustrophobia of their environment, described in biological metaphor: the man upstairs’ “bloated, belching figure stomps / He may crash through the ceiling soon”; the girl across the hall’s “thighs are full of tales to tell / Of all the nights she’s known”.
“The lyrics, the imagery was so strong and graphic,” reflected Ms Morley (née Stott), “now and then I was a little shocked by it: ‘Woo, is that allowed?’, you know.”
‘Such A Small Love’ is a funereal farewell to a friend, a close young male contemporary of the narrator. Gently mournful organ emerges from a quiet cacophony of strings: “Someone should have stopped the birds from singing today / Hammers from striking nails into clay.” But there is as much wistful good humour here as there is melancholy. The dead man’s girlfriend is present. “She is crying, but he knows that the girl cannot really have known his friend’s worth over the years,” described the songwriter at the time. She never shared their drunken “midnight mornings drenched in dago red”.
‘Always Coming Back To You’, the final Engel original, is the most realistic of love songs, the universal tale of two lovers whose passion has passed but who keep returning to each other. “What was it like when we were young? / Sleeping in each other’s arms, living in each other’s dreams?” our narrator asks over a jangling harpsichord. But now he must search his lover’s eyes, “just to see that they are dead” to him. It may sound bleak, but this is a love that most of us know; its repeated title line is an affirmation that love still exists beyond its early peaks.29
The weeks following the release of Scott saw its namesake playing cabaret dates and making his next recordings. In the sixties, the man who would come to be regarded as an irregularly productive recluse was possibly one of the hardest working artists in popular music.
Even a break spent in Moscow during the last week in September was for the purpose of studying the art of the Soviet Union. He was scheduled to meet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the poet and ‘people’s artist’ whose controversial poem ‘Babi Yar’ dared to speak of Soviet complicity in the massacre of Kiev’s Jewish population during World War Two; Yevtushenko’s contemporary Andrei Voznesensky was also due to attend, another feted poet in the Krushchev era who would have been crushed under the regime of Stalin, Krushchev’s mentor.
Characteristically for the time, perhaps, the meeting never went ahead, with Engel crying off due to a crushing hangover. The writings of Yevtushenko,30 however, would continue to influence the political thinking of the young American.
Back in London during the winter, Scott was found unconscious at home in Regent’s Park the week before Christmas. It looked like it might be a rerun of the dramas of the Walkers era, before he was diagnosed with appendicitis at the London Clinic – and promptly discharged himself without being operated on. He was apparently well enough to perform the new single ‘Jackie’ on camp comedian Frankie Howerd’s TV show, and to indulge in a peculiar skit based on the play Cyrano De Bergerac.
Engel would spend the festive season itself back in his girlfriend’s home city of (wonderful, wonderful) Copenhagen. A photo of them taken at Heathrow shows Scott looking uncharacteristically relaxed in a blazer-style jacket and jeans, with the statuesque Mette, packed tight into a diamond-patterned dress, smiling at the photographer.
“There’s a very childlike quality about this girl that changes my outlook and personality,” he romantically appraised. What was unremarked upon was that the well brought up, middle-class girl had been persuaded by her man to return home to face a shoplifting charge. The press apparently knew but, with a sensitivity now lost in time, decided not to mention it.
Midwestern-born, cowpoke-statured Noel Scott Engel was going to spend time in his favourite city. He was truly becoming a European.
1 Andrew Loog Oldham, the acerbic motormouth manager behind The Rolling Stones in the early-to-mid-sixties, was then one of London’s pop-cultural arbiters. In his memoir of the period, Stoned, he’s very dismissive of Scott Engel, calling him “one sigh away from being a wanker”. In The Impossible Dream, Anthony Reynolds’ definitive history of The Walker Brothers as a band, his former Immediate Records partner, Tony Calder, contradicts him, claiming they were trying to sign the solo Scott: “I mean, what a fucking star, but I couldn’t deal with him. Even Andrew couldn’t cope with him. Scott Walker was the only artist Andrew shut up for.”
2 Along with Hergé, Magritte, Georges Simenon and, of course…
3 Not that he shared Genet’s sexual predilections. As his ‘Au suivant’ (‘Next’) indicates, he found ‘les fags’ perverse.
4 “We work on a theatre ship,” says band founder Andy Delamere. “I always wanted to do the songs, because we’ve got experience in theatre and just because of the drama in it. We did a cabaret night and there was a band doing a kind of Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well And Living In Paris – but really, really bad. Then it gestated for a while. I said I’d love to play with [lead vocalist] Nula [Dorrity], but she said, ‘Let’s not just play songs – let’s do something. What do you wanna do?’ I said, ‘I’d love to do Jacques Brel songs,’ and she’d never heard of Brel!” For a Brel novice, Ms Dorrity has learned to carry off the songs with a gutsy drama; most remarkably perhaps, for a non-French speaker, she combines the original Francophone lyrics with the English translations on ‘Jacky’, ‘Amsterdam’ and ‘Au suivant‘. “To mix them up is really good, because otherwise we usually go into a bit more detail of what they’re about,” says Delamere. The Dead Belgian line-up is completed by accordion player Matthew Wood, who speaks French and makes his own translations of some of the lesser known songs like ‘Jaures’, about the murder of a French socialist politician. “We talked about doing ‘Ces gens la’ [‘Those People There’ – Brel’s misanthropic portrait of a night-time crowd], but doing it as a translation with almost like prose over the top.” “Matthew has tried to do a very, very specifically literal translation, he hasn’t tried to rewrite or discard anything,” acclaims singer Dorrity. Dead Belgian’s 2012 album, Love And Death: The Songs Of Jacques Brel, is highly recommended.
5 As in Krushchev.
6 Lou Reed was a close friend of Pomus in his twilight years, commemorating his death from cancer in the Magic And Loss album.
7 When US pop singer Terry Jacks covered ‘Seasons In The Sun’ in the seventies, he removed all Brel’s allusions to adultery from McKuen’s final verse. The song still had a morbidly saccharine charm and became the biggest-selling Brel translation worldwide; Jacks followed with a similar emasculation of ‘If You Go Away’.
8 It was the title track of John’s sadly unsuccessful 1967 debut album.
9 In 30 Century Man, Gavin Friday, Irish former vocalist of proto-goths The Virgin Prunes and latter-day Brel interpreter, expresses the following opinion: “A lot of people cite Brel as an influence – but really I think, subliminally, what they’re really citing is Scott. You know, Brel was. Flemish, he sort of dribbled when he sang, he was sweaty; whereas Scott Walker took his songs and sang them like – a Greek god.” His ex-compatriate Fionnuala Dorrity is less complimentary of Friday’s own performances: “I listened to two songs recently because he was doing Brel cover versions. One of them I just found very cheesy and not very passionate, not very fucking full of the vitriol and bitterness they should be.”
10 ‘Day Of Wrath’, as orchestrated by Berlioz.
11 A 1981 compilation of the Brel tracks from Scott 1-3 – plus the odd addition of Engel/Semel’s ‘Little Things That Keep Us Together’ (from ‘Til The Band Comes In). It sleeve replicated the classic cover of Scott – Engel with full head of hair bowed, swathed in shades and scarf – which was by then deleted.
12 Bowie, a long-term Walker fan, incorporated the Shuman version of ‘My Death’ into his 1973 farewell performances as glam-rock icon Ziggy Stardust. Strumming on an acoustic guitar, Bowie subverted the line, “My death waits like a swinging door / A patient girl who knows the score” to suit his voguish sexual ambiguity of the time: “My death waits like an old roué / Who knows that I will go his way.” At the closing lines of the song, where Scott sings, “For in front of that door, there is you,” Ziggy sang, “For in front of that door, there is…” “Me! Me! Me!” screamed dozens of little teenage voices at the Hammersmith Odeon. On the final track of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide’, artistic thieving magpie Bowie takes elements of Brel’s ‘Les vieux’ (‘Old Folks’ – Brel/Shuman: “The clock on the wall that waits for us all”/Bowie: “The clock waits so patiently on your song”) and ‘Jef’, whose translated refrain is the same as that of Bowie: “You’re not alone.”
13 Indeed, the Stott arrangement has the brass-driven fury of the big TV themes of the time, particularly for ITC’s shows. “That was The Goon Show, orchestra conducted by Wally Stott,” the plummy-voiced announcer stated on BBC Home Service radio in the fifties; his days in broadcasting sometimes seemed to have run on into Scott Walker’s records.
14 A parody of tabloid headlines such as ‘Adolf Hitler Is Alive And Well And Living In Buenos Aires’.
15 As Scott was acutely aware, the withdrawal of the French during a communist insurgency had led the Americans to supplant them in the country now called Vietnam.
16 Driven along by a nerve-jangling xylophone – not an accordion, as suggested by Swezey and King in this chapter’s epigram.
17 “Syphilis sores” in the more literal translation by Paul Buck for Marc Almond’s 1990 album Jacques.
18 Alex Harvey (1935-1982), veteran Brit R&B singer and leader in the seventies of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, put plenty of his native Glaswegian aggression into his 1973 cover of ‘Next’: “Ah schwear on the wet head ae mah first case ae gonorrhoea!” The title of the SAHB’s 1974 album, The Impossible Dream, suggests he was probably as influenced by Scott Walker as he was by Brel.
19 Brel took the lead role in the French version of Man Of La Mancha, a musical adaptation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, from late 1968 to summer 1969.
20 Brel’s ‘J’Arrive’ is a classic case in question: one of the more uptempo ballads in which he accepts and almost celebrates death, the refrain consists of the shouted title echoed by two loud notes.
21 Matthew Street is the site of the Cavern Club and of Liverpool City Council’s statue of Lennon.
22 A slightly cringe-making allusion to ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ – a song Engel would come to regard as a shroud rather than a cloak.
23 Scott Engel would spend a summer holiday in the late sixties in Spain to witness the bullfights, apparently enthralled by the Hemingwayesque spectacle of death in the afternoon. Jacques Brel’s attitude to this cruel tradition can be heard in his song ‘Les toros’ (‘The Bulls’).
24 The Hardin songbook provided romantic tracks as disparate as The Four Tops’ ‘If I Were A Carpenter’ and Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s ‘Hold On To A Dream’. Tim Hardin himself was a long-term heroin addict, who reputedly picked up the habit as a Special Forces ‘adviser’ in Vietnam; he died of an overdose at Christmas 1980, aged 39, over six years after cutting his last record.
25 Nick Cave would give the song a similar oomph as the theme to Mojo, the 1996 film set in fifties Soho, backed by the band Gallon Drunk.
26 According to original Walker Brothers drummer Al ‘Tiny’ Schneider, “He was quite affected when Bobby Darin came out. I think, secretly, that’s what Scott really wanted to do. He wanted to be that type of cabaret entertainer.” Seen from this distance, the brief Darin infatuation may have been the dying embers of teenage Scotty Engel’s original ambition.
27 In the early seventies, Wally Stott decamped to Scandinavia to undergo a similar operation to Christine Jorgenson, who in the late fifties had been the first male-to-female sex change. Stott’s operation briefly predated that of electronic composer Walter Carlos – who created the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in 1971, and before the end of that decade had become Wendy Carlos.
28 This particular west London terrace was apparently demolished in the seventies – although former Record Collector editor Mark Paytress signs off his highly informative sleeve notes to The Walker Brothers’ Everything Under The Sun box set, “Montague Terrace Gardens, London”.
29 Throughout the late eighties and early nineties, when Scott’s Philips albums were not available, ‘Always Coming Back To You’ was preserved as a single B-side on the basement jukebox of Bradley’s Spanish Bar, in Fitzrovia’s Hanway Street. This writer played it regularly.
30 A controversial figure both in the Soviet Union and the West; regarded as a force for openness and freedom by many, as an apologist for the communist regime by his detractors.