UNDERRATED ALBUMS # 18

‘You need the Scott ‘quartet’ in its entirety…and, if you do acquire these exceptional records, then my guess is that Scott 2 may be the one you keep going
back to.’

Scott 2 (1968) by Scott Walker
 

Few people nowadays recall an early solo single from 1965 in the US by Frankie Valli, moonlighting from his day job in the highly successful Four Seasons vocal harmony group. Composed  by the Seasons’ writing team of Bobs Crewe and Gaudio, the song began with the couplet: ‘Loneliness is a coat you wear / A deep shade of blue is always there.’

The record wasn’t a hit, but the following year the song was covered by a new group on the crest of a wave in the UK. They were called The Walker Brothers and ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ gave them their second # 1, as well as becoming their biggest hit in their native America, reaching # 13. Apart from its sweeping Spectorian orchestration and the remarkably rich baritone lead vocal, it also differed from the Four seasons version in one other slight, but significant detail. The lyric opened thus:

                         ‘Loneliness is a cloak you wear,

                         A deep shade of blue is always there.’

*  * * * *

I doubt - in all of the photographs I’ve seen of Scott Walker from the 1960s, with his thick mop of fair hair, open-necked shirts, sharp jackets, narrow slacks and Cuban heels, looking the epitome of casual elegance – that I’ve ever spotted him wearing a cloak. And yet I’m sure this brooding Hamlet of Pop could have carried off such a look with style (more so than David Crosby of The Byrds, at any rate). I’ve always assumed that Walker was responsible for that change – from the prosaic ‘coat’ to the poetic ‘cloak’. And that omnipresent ‘deep shade of blue’*1 has a presciently eloquent quality about it too when you look back over his unique recording career.

The blue clouds of melancholia which shroud the legend of Scott Walker begin to gather around The Walker Brothers’ first hit, a brooding take on the Mann/Weill song ‘Love Her’, arranged by Jack Nitzsche and first recorded by The Everly Brothers. Appropriately, it is this record that featured Scott’s first lead vocal with the group.

A few words about The Walker Brothers are necessary before we move on. First, unlike the Everlys, but like The Righteous Brothers, whom their sound resembled, the Walkers were not related. Second and more importantly, they were not a manufactured ‘boy band’ as so many lazy modern journalists routinely describe them. Whilst their image capitalised on their good looks, the three Walkers were actually accomplished musicians who’d been playing live and recording in various outfits since as early as 1962. Unlike the latterday species of ‘boy band’ who barely need to be able to sing, let alone play instruments, drummer Gary Leeds had played with The Standells and P. J. Proby; guitarist John Maus had been in a duo with his sister and several bands, including a touring version of The Surfaris, with bassist Scott, who’d  also made solo singles and played on sessions (including, rumour has it, on at least one for Spector)*2.

The Walker Brothers back catalogue from 1965-67 and their comeback (1975-78) is well worth exploring. If you’re only aware of their hits then you may be surprised at the depth, quality and variety of their records.

* * * * *

Beginning in 1967, Scott Walker’s solo career proper overlaps with the group’s final releases, although John had already had a UK Top 30 solo hit; Gary had two - and it’s sobering to consider that Scott himself only ever managed that feat three times (with no American hit singles – or albums - to add to the total).

A concern with commercial success was, however, slipping down Scott’s list of priorities and although the first three albums went Top 3 in Britain and the collection accompanying his TV series also reached the Top 10, it was a case of diminishing returns in terms of sales. Scott 4 (confusingly, his fifth solo outing) was originally credited to ‘Noel Scott Engel’ in an attempt to distance himself from his more famous persona. It did the trick all too well:  the record failed to chart at all and was deleted with indecent haste. Another five albums were issued between 1970-74, featuring a generally ineffectual mixture of Country material, film numbers and ballads. The last three of these failed to include any original Scott Walker songs and it was widely assumed that his songwrting mojo had stopped working.

The Walker Brothers reunion though, saw him offering new, darker pieces - but no-one could have foreseen the increasingly attritional avant garde direction he would follow over the last thirty years during which to date, he has released just four solo albums, each less     listenable than the last.

Now though, it is time to focus on the brief period when the best of his work was as  boldly original, dazzlingly poetic and intoxicatingly melodic as any from that golden decade in which his deep blue voice had first rang out so distinctly from the crowd.
 

* *  * *

Given that Scott 2 proved to be the artist’s only # 1 album, it might be asked why I am suggesting it to be underrated. Well, the critics tend to love all four of the Scott quartet, whilst pretty much ignoring the more MOR Sings Songs From His TV Series (which, with the third and fourth Scott records, was one of three albums he issued in 1969). I feel, however that it is Scott 4 that takes the gold medal for the critics, probably because it was his first entirely self-composed collection.

Walker placed his own songs incrementally on the quartet: three on Scott; four on Scott 2; ten on Scott 3; all ten on Scott 4. We should also remember that he was, at the time, on an energetic crusade to popularise the songs of the Belgian singer-songwriter, Jacques Brel, who had three songs on each of the first three albums (all of them co-written with various other composers).

Scott 2 opens with one of them, ‘Jackie’, which comes galloping in on Wally Stott’s dramatically arranged strings, brass and kettledrums. As Walker’s debut UK single it reached # 22 despite being banned by the BBC due its lascivious lyric (a sharp translation by Mort Shuman of the Brel / Jouannest original). Sung with great authority, the song, ironically is a fantasy of sex, drugs and rock & roll, about taking on the very role from which Walker was trying to shake himself free, that of a pop idol:-

                    ‘If I could be for just one little hour

                    A cute-cute in a stupid-ass way.’

The idea of escape, sometimes into a hedonistic future, sometimes back to a nostalgic past, are the key preoccupations of the Walker originals here and elsewhere. In ‘The Amorous Humphrey Plugg’, for instance, the narrator dreams of transcending the quotidian domesticity of the family hearth:-

                     ‘I’ve become a giant,

                      I fill every street,

                      I dwarf the rooftops,

                      I hunchback the moon,

                      Stars dance at my feet.

                      Leave it all behind me –

                      Screaming kids on my knee,

                      And the telly swallowing me…’ 

Amidst ‘buildings blazing with moolight’ and ‘pavements of poets’ he yearns to ‘die of kisses, ecstasies’. The imagery is as ravishing as the music - strings, horns, bells, Spanish guitar and harmonica all underpinned by a steady rhythm section - the mid-tempo melody sweeps along with the singer’s voice towering above it all.

I’d assumed that this delirious fantasy nightlife was happening in Swinging London, having always heard the phrase ‘in Channing Way’ repeated in the song, but the CD lyric booklet*3 has it as ‘enchanting way’. I still tend to hear it as I’ve always done and Walker's immaculate diction convinces me that the CD booklet has it wrong, but I’ve yet to discover a Channing Way in London, although it does appear to be a sort of generic real estate name for luxury apartments in Ohio, California and New York – all places Walker lived during his rather nomadic early years in America…Go figure.
 

It’s worth considering at this point the general sound of Walker’s original songs from this time. The albums were all nominally produced by Johnny Franz who had also been at the desk during The Walker Brothers' career, along with arranger Ivor Raymond. They had conjured up their own somewhat less cluttered and blurry version of Phil Spector’s ‘Wall Of Sound’ for the Walkers, as well as building dramatic sonic backdrops for Frankie Vaughn, Shirley Bassey and Dusty Springfield. On the Scott quartet, Franz also brought in other stalwart British arrangers such as Wally Stott, Reg Guest and Peter Knight. 
 

Increasingly, however, Scott Walker who, by this time, had already studied classical music as well as studio techniques*4, was taking more and more of an active part in the arrangement and production of his own songs, many of which eschewed the conventional musical framework and lyrical tropes of contemporary pop music.

The Tin Pan Alley material scattered amidst the first three albums usually sounds relatively uninspired alongside the Walker originals. One imagines that much of this  would have been foisted upon Walker by his management and record company to counterbalance all that weird stuff by Brel and Walker himself.

The two tracks that come between ‘Jackie’ and ‘Humphrey’ are, however, superior examples of this non-original material. ‘Best Of Both Worlds’, a song by film soundtrack writers Mark London and Don Black*5 about a stubbornly unfaithful partner is handled in magisterial style by Walker and features jagged showers of strings which effectively evoke the narrator’s anguish. Tim Hardin’s Country/Folk tune, ‘Black Sheep Boy’ - almost certainly chosen by Walker - meanwhile is given an appropriately acoustic rendering with a subtle background of strings.

‘Next’ (Brel/Blau/Shuman) announces itself with a portentous fanfare of horns before launching into a lurid confession of sexual insecurity arising from the narrator’s callow experiences long before in ‘a mobile army whorehouse’, when he was chivvied through the queue of waiting soldiers by a ‘queer lieutenant who slapped our asses as if we were fags’. It is a brilliant and daring lyric, though it is easy to see why it would never have been a candidate for the Songs from His TV Series:-

                             ‘I swear on the wet head

                             Of my first case of gonorrhea,

                             It is his ugly voice that I forever hear:

                             Next! Next!’

Walker handles the song with a soulful command but, over the years, I’ve come to prefer the more psychotic version which provided the title-track for a 1973 album by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band *6

We now arrive at the fabulous core of Scott 2: two more originals, ‘The Girls From The Streets’ and, at 6.04, easily the longest track on the quartet, ‘Plastic Palace People’. The former, an even more rapturous continuation of the theme in ‘The Amorous Humphrey Plugg’, never fails to play the most pleasurable havoc with my endorphins*7.

I really don’t think I know of a richer, more sensual coming together of words and music than ‘The Girls From The Streets’. Peter Knight’s sumptuous arrangement begins with thunderous drums and strings tolling around Walker’s mighty voice, which seems to emanate from some cavernous vacuum in the middle of the sound. Picked up by a supernaturally tempting stranger in a bar, the narrator is charmed out of his workaday torpor ‘into the famished night’:-

                             ‘Come with me, I hold the key.

                             The city’s ours tonight.’

At this point, about half-way through, drums roll, a choir appears and a calliope whirls the song into a glorious waltz of alliteration and close rhyming which is all utterly at one with the giddy movement of the music. Microcosm and macrocosm urgently coalesce: ‘waiters animate, luxuriate like planets whirling around the sun’; ‘the sawdust ground’ earthquakes; they ‘ride upon this giant storm’ to where ‘the world is up for auction sales’. On through the night they carouse, autumn leaves blazing, lights cascading, women’s gold teeth flashing, ‘[they] can’t stop now, not now, until [they] reach the dawn’.   
 

I’m fairly sure that Scott Walker would have been dubious about having his music described as psychedelic and it’s not normally a word used to in this context, but given that the quartet came out of the heyday of psychedelia, it’s a term I don’t hesitate to use. Why shouldn’t orchestrated songs fronted by a broadly conventional baritone voice have the scope of psychedelia? It’s not just that so many of these songs are about escape of one sort or another; the lyrics often create a drugged or drunken atmosphere underlined by exotic musical ingredients. And the formality of some of the arrangements and instrumentation - instead of militating against the freedom of the melodies and words – enhances their effect by providing a strong framework to contain the ideas.
 

‘Plastic Palace People’ is even more psychedelic. Two strange songs in one, neither of which yield easily to explanation. It begins all a-twinkle with piano, harp and wuthering strings accompanying a tale about a small boy called Billy attached to a balloon by a string tied to his ‘polka-dot underwear’. On a mission to ascertain that the night sky is ‘not lit up in tears’, he floats high above the town square, his fretful mother and another child below. ‘A harvest of stars’ surround him and ‘the night clings to his happy eyes’. Mission accomplished it would seem, but as morning rises, Billy ‘bursts’ over the rooftops and falls into ‘the trees in the morning square’ and the song ends with him ‘just hanging there’.
 

Alternately, and less literally, Billy is actually the balloon itself, dreamt by the child asleep in the square ‘beneath the fountain’; or perhaps the balloon is a metaphor for the imagination of childhood which may prove too elusive to hang on to. The string which ‘descends sadly…down through blue submarine air’ as the waltzing music distorts and fades certainly evokes an air of quiet tragedy.

Interwoven with this story, another scenario plays out with a character called ‘Plastic Palace Alice’ in the grip of an existential crisis, despairing that ‘the whole world’s out of line’. Featuring a different tune with electric guitar, bass, shaking tambourine, bicycle bell and brass, each of these sections end with an eerily double-tracked Walker sounding increasingly  distressed. This is clearly a very different flight of fancy to 'Up, Up And Away', the great Jimmy Webb's easy listening classic from the previous year, of which Webb cheerfully remarked that it wasn't even to do with drugs and getting high, but merely a song about happiness and well, balloons...
 

'Plastic Palace People' was probably triggered by a short story titled ‘The Balloon’ by American surrealist writer, Donald Barthelme. The story was published in 1968 - the same year, of course, that Scott 2 appeared – and like much of Barthelme’s work, it defies conventional analysis. Such elusiveness would have appealed to the increasingly abstract Walker. In 1994, incidentally, fellow masters of arty vagueness, R. E. M. had a hit single with‘What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?', also inspired by Barthelme’s work.

The film song, ‘Wait Until Dark’ (Mancini/Livingston/Evans) arrives as an anticlimax after the great middle section. Henry Mancini did a good job scoring the tense 1967 thriller of the same title, which starred the Oscar-nominated Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman in jeopardy, but his theme song frankly sounds dull and old-fashioned on Scott 2. It would have sat well on a 1950s Frank Sinatra album (not at all a bad thing), but here it simply seems out of place.

Fortunately, it is followed by ‘The Girls & The Dogs’(Brel/Shuman/Jouhannest/Blau) which comes jinking in playfully, tail wagging with its extended comparison in favour of ‘man’s best friend’. Walker, somewhat soporific on the previous track, is on livelier form here and the twist is delivered with the mutts being ‘kicked out’ at the end of the day due to the fact that man just can’t live with or without those pesky girls.

Walker’s version of the Bacharach/David song, ‘Windows Of The World’, a 1967 hit for Dionne Warwick, comes next. A quality ballad and, as a Protest song against the Vietnam war, an unusual departure for its writers, its melancholy violas and gentle marimba create a suitably Asiatic atmosphere. Walker handles the economical lyric eloquently, so well, in fact, that we barely notice the tweeness of ‘whenever the rain appears / It’s really angel tears’. Instead, we are more touched by the subtlety of ‘Everybody knows when boys grow into men / They start to wonder when their country will call’.

‘The Bridge’ is the final Walker original on the record. An elegiac meditation on a madam called Madelaine whose girls from the streets used to entertain clients on the bridge in question, the beauty of the music and singing is counterpointed by its subject matter and lines like ‘Her sailors stained her cobblestones with wine and piss / And deft desire and sometimes blood for Madelaine.’ The tenderness of Walker’s performance accentuates the poetry of his lyric and in the soaring waltz of the middle eight (there is no chorus) the whores are transfigured in the narrator’s memory:-

                  ‘Her girls would lift their dresses high

                  And breathe the stars and kiss the sky.

                  She’d smother them with whispers

                  Then embrace them with her sighs.’

Despite the references to blood and ‘Fat Marie whose thunder laugh / Was just a thread from crying’, it is the romanticism of the verse above that stays with you.

I don’t know who was responsible for the sequencing of the album – Johnny Franz presumably – but ‘Come Next Spring’ (Adelson/Steiner) is a puzzlingly weak choice to close the album. Originally sang by Tony Bennett for a 1956 film about a man returning to the wife he’d earlier deserted, it’s a dreary affair despite its positive message and it belongs on an album by Jack Jones, Matt Monro or Andy Williams rather than on Scott 2.
 

I’ve often thought that had Scott Walker been more willing and able to embrace fame, he might have been another, even more talented, Sinatra. After all, he could write his own songs as well as effortlessly take on standards and, stunningly handsome, he was much better looking than Old Blue Eyes and would probably have looked great on celluloid. Sinatra, of course, didn’t so much embrace the world of showbiz, as grab it by the scruff of its neck and put it in his pocket where he kept it from the early 1950s onwards. The soulful and increasingly uncompromising Walker would never have mustered that sort of vigour and commitment. His genius was more fleeting than that of Sinatra whose gift, apart from the golden voice, was for being Frank Sinatra. Walker was never so much at home in his own skin as was The Voice Of The 20^th Century.

The four albums he has released since 1984 with their blackly challenging, largely atonal songs and ferocious slabs of orchestration, do nevertheless demonstrate that the remarkable instrument of the Walker voice is still intact, recognisable and powerful. It does, however, convey an almost unbearable sense of sadness and disillusionment. Uneasy listening, indeed.

Whilst writing this, I began to think that Scott Walker may well have been better served artistically had the Scott quartet been distilled into three rather than four albums, comprising the twenty-seven originals and nine Brel songs with the other ten covers omitted. A trilogy of albums with twelve tracks apiece, nine Walker to three Brel, might have made for a more solid body of work. But, putting such speculation aside, you need the Scott ‘quartet’ in its entirety anyway and if you get Scott - The Collection 1967-70 boxset, you'll have all four plus When The Band Comes In (1970), half of which is also good. If you do acquire these exceptional records, then my guess is that Scott 2 may be the one you keep going back to.

 

                      

N. B.

*1- Indeed, Mike Watkinson’s 1996 biography, is titled Scott Walker: A Deep Shade Of Blue.  

*2 – On some of his very early solo singles in the US, the lavishly bequiffed young Scott would be credited as ‘Scotty Engel’. Just a few short years later, The Walker Brothers would be headlining bills in the UK such as the one shown above. In what was the fag-end of the ‘package tour’ show, bizarre line-ups such as this one were still assembled. That same year – 1967 – The Jimi Hendrix Experience also toured with The Move, The Pink Floyd, The Nice and The Amen Corner (the definite article was still just about holding the fort back then), and Hendrix also opened for The Monkees in the US.

The package tour was a continuation of the age of the Music Hall and the Variety Show during a period when, despite ’67 being the year of ‘The Summer Of Love’, the distinctions between what constituted Pop and the new Rock music were still being formulated. The package tour would morph into the festival bill as pioneered by Monterey – which would also include Hendrix, again in ’67 – and make a comeback from the 1980s onwards when the nostalgia circuit started to get under way. Not many years ago, we saw John Walker perform very creditably on one such show at The De Montfort Hall, Leicester. I don’t recall the exact line-up (we’ve been to quite a few of these Solid Silver Sixties type extravaganzas), but P. J. Proby (sans Gary Walker but still in fine voice) may well have been in there…     

*3 – Interestingly, Scott 2 featured a sleeve-note written by ‘His Friend, Jonathan King’ (yes, that Jonathan King). Sleeve-notes were quite common during the period and King’s is a generic example; the publicist Keith Altham, a specialist in the genre, provides the testimonials on both Scott and Scott 3. In this one though, King quotes Walker describing the album as the ‘work of a lazy, self-indulgent man’ who now needs to get down to some ‘serious business’. It might have taken Walker another seventeen years to get round to Climate Of Hunter (1984), but no matter what you may think of his work since then, there is no denying its damned seriousness.
 

It’s difficult to take the disgraced media mover and shaker King seriously these days, but nearly half a century ago, he was – like Andrew Loog Oldham and Chris Stamp - an interesting character behind the headlines of the music business – and, as well as all of his dire pseudonymous novelty hits, he did make one very good record with his 1965 debut single, ‘Everyone’s Gone To The Moon’.  

*4 – During what one assumes to have been an anti-hedonistic escape in 1968, Walker retreated to a monastery on the Isle Of Wight to study Gregorian Chant.

*5 – London and Black also wrote Lulu’s ‘To Sir With Love’, The Billboard Single Of The Year 1967, no less. That same year, London also collaborated with Mike Leander on the interesting Peter Watkins film, Privilege, which starred Paul Jones. Black – famous for writing James Bond songs with John Barry - is one of the most prolific and successful lyricists ever.

*6 – Similarly, I think David Bowie’s 1970 version of ‘Amsterdam’ (Brel/Shuman) runs Walker’s earlier outing on Scott (1967) a very close second. Fascinatingly, in the same year as Bowie, none other than the toothsome Milky Bar Kid lookalike John Denver also recorded the song.

*7 – My wife, Lisa, who requested this review, also has her endorphins aroused to carousal by ‘The Girls From The Street’. Incidentally, did you know that endorphins are endogenous opioid peptides. Peptides! Who knew that scientific terms could be so groovy!?

 
C. IGR 2013