Nite Flights

[kalowski]

Even more than Tilt or The Drift or Soused, the four opening tracks of Nite Flights really are remarkable. Scott at his very, very best. I can't get over just how singular it is, how peerless his voice is and how influencial it is. The latter part of Bowie's career is based in these songs (he covered Nite Flights).
Did Scott Walker do anything better?

[poodlefaker]

Well these songs were influenced by Bowie, weren't they? I'm sure I've read somewhere about Bowie and Eno listening to Nite Flights in the studio together, totally gobsmacked that their hero was aware of what they had been doing.

[Twed]

Jesus Christ, 1978?

[kalowski]

Well these songs were influenced by Bowie, weren't they? I'm sure I've read somewhere about Bowie and Eno listening to Nite Flights in the studio together, totally gobsmacked that their hero was aware of what they had been doing.

To an extent, yes. This is an interesting read:
https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/?s=Nite+flights

So far, this has been a one-way tale: Bowie watching, interpreting, coveting, acquiring Walker. Now Walker, at last, was listening to Bowie, sifting through Station to Station, Low and especially the just-released "Heroes," which Walker brought to the studio, playing it for his partners and the studio musicians (he also wanted everyone to subscribe to Gramophone magazine). The engineer Steve Parker told Anthony Reynolds that "Heroes" was "the reference album when we were making Nite Flights...we could have been more adventurous, maybe. If we'd had an Eno character in there, it would have been even more stunning, I think."

What did Walker get out of Bowie's "Berlin" albums? They were records of a man, pushed to his limits, who broke himself up and tried to piece himself together again, one who seemed intent on killing his former personae; Walker, after years of acquiescent mediocrity, of self-imposed artistic silence, was trying to write again, trying to make the step he felt he should have made after Scott 4. The Bowie records are also an exile's albums, their creator roaming from Los Angeles to France to Berlin, which a fellow expatriate like Walker could appreciate. And more cynically, as Walker's quote above suggests, he saw in Bowie someone to whom it had seemingly come easily, a man who dabbled in art rock but still got hits, one who seemed to have stolen the freedom to go where he willed. Remember that Walker wasn't the mysterious avant-garde figure in 1978 that he's since become. He was a pro singer who'd put out a lousy record for nearly every year of the Seventies, and whose vaunted Sixties LPs had more than their fair share of songs that could have been a Blood, Sweat and Tears album. He could still think in commercial terms, and he likely did here.

Nite Flights was front-loaded with Scott's songs (though his fingerprints are everywhere on the record—as Reynolds wrote, the phased tubular bells and harmonized snare on Gary Leeds' "Den Haague" are very Bowie/Eno/Visconti-inspired), which are sequenced perfectly. The opener "Shutout" is a first shot at Bowie, a reconsidering of "Blackout" with a taste of sharp violence, while "Fat Mama Kick" seems to be Walker taking Eno's measure, writing a song that Eno could've fit on Taking Tiger Mountain or Here Come the Warm Jets. It's a dark, extravagant goof, with Walker again, as with "Archangel," busting the budget to record a colossal pipe organ (in this case, the Royal Albert Hall's). "Nite Flights" (see below) is a maneuver where Walker met Bowie head-on.

He closed the quartet with "The Electrician," where he pushed beyond Bowie and Eno, opening an avenue they had never considered. It begins with Walker's favored dissonant string chords, with Walker, when he appears, groaning and bellowing as if he'd heard Bowie's incarnation of him on "Sweet Thing" and thought, "oh, you think you can do this?". Then, with the chorus, Walker strangles his professional voice. Considering his moneymaker baritone suspect, that it lulled the listener to sleep, he altered his phrasing and timbre, now singing lines in a straining, desperate tone that, like his love of consonant/dissonant strings, hung between being sharp and on the note. It suited the lyric, a love song about American complicity in Central American torture regimes.

There was nothing of its like in 1978. Brilliantly released as a single, "The Electrician" proffered a future that no one dared to take (Eno, decades later, groused about the cowardice of young bands who never went beyond "The Electrician," but were just content to imitate him or Roxy Music or Bowie.)

[popcorn]

WE WILL BE CUNTS
ON NITE FLIGHTS

[Dusty Substance]

Agreed - Those opening four tracks are utterly magnificent and you can hear the influence of Night Flights on so many artists from around the same era (Japan in particular).

Did Scott Walker do anything better?

The first side of Tilt is still better in my opinion but The Electrician is truly something special.

[grassbath]

'Nite Flights' has, I think, my favourite drumming on any song. Propulsive is the word. Loose and tight at the same time. The bashy open hi-hat like chuffs of vapour being released. Those perfect spartan fills, 8 in the bar, thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump. The high synth pulsing like arcs of electric along the line.

Comedy moment this eve with 'The Electrician' beginning just as my train window pulled slowly up alongside a sign for Dewsbury.

[kalowski]

Comedy moment this eve with 'The Electrician' beginning just as my train window pulled slowly up alongside a sign for Dewsbury.

Babby tha's slow
Whi' lights
Goes low
Tha's nay help
Nay
Babby tha's slow

[BRen]

Agreed - Those opening four tracks are utterly magnificent and you can hear the influence of Night Flights on so many artists from around the same era (Japan in particular).

The first side of Tilt is still better in my opinion but The Electrician is truly something special.

That's a good shout actually, you could see them progressively move toward that experimental sound as the LP's went along, then Ghosts and Tin Drum came along, and then Sylvian went solo and basically tried his hardest to become Scott Walker (and I'm saying this as a big fan of Japan/Sylvian).