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Scott Walker

Started by kalowski, February 15, 2021, 07:02:41 PM

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kalowski

Madly in love with Scott's music, even if Julian Cope fell out with the stuff. Love the dramatic narrative of the late 60s, especially the incredible Scott 3. Can survive his jobbing mid 70s AOR because his voice is so good and there's something on each record. (Well, maybe not on We Had It All).
Nite Flights contains some of his most incredible work and then he rarely puts a foot wrong after that. I struggle a bit with Bisch Bosch, but utterly love Tilt, The Drift and Soused.
I just find his stuff so much more interesting than most music. And I'm just amazed he took that beautiful, powerful, delightful voice into such strange places.

And, sorry Cope, I like his pretension!

Famous Mortimer

Tilt is the one I listen to most often, but you're not going to go wrong with pretty much anything of his.

Dirty Boy


Pink Gregory

Scott 4 is the first album me and Ms. Gregory bonded over.


Nowhere Man

There's a great YouTube comment on his song 'The Old Man's Back Again' which someone says the bass sounds like someone rummaging through a backpack. Absolutely love Scott 3 and 4.

Massive shout out to 'The Amarous Humprey Plugg' from Scott 2, what a monster of a track that is

famethrowa

Quote from: Nowhere Man on February 16, 2021, 09:44:09 PM
Massive shout out to 'The Amarous Humprey Plugg' from Scott 2, what a monster of a track that is

It is amazing. Plastic Palace People is generally my number 1 but Humphrey is close to the top spot often. In fact, my top 3 Scott songs are right there in the middle of the album, PPP, Mr Plugg, and The Girls From The Streets. Absolute genius, they're not rock, not ballads, something else entirely. Using the brilliant songwriter's technique of making rather mundane things fantastical and otherwordly.

Shoutout to Boy Child as well, a fragile alien of a song, and No Regrets, which sounds like Roger Whittaker in rehab. Still trying to get into Scott 4, The Seventh Seal is a stumbling block for me lyrically, it's just reading out the synopsis of a movie you like?

Can't be doing with the later stuff, I'm no stranger to the avant garde, but it all just sounds like Scott moaning into a reverb box with not much relation to the sounds underneath.

Phil_A

Angel Of Ashes is is a lovely one on 4. Rosemarie from Scott 3 is an absolute belter as well.

No-one ever mentions the title track from Til The Band Comes In, possibly because that album was out of print for ages and not as well known as Scotts 1-4. It's quite patchy and obviously compromised with the throwaway covers in the second half, but the pairing of that song and "The War Is Over" really does feel like a somewhat poignant farewell to that era of Scott.

Brundle-Fly

And a big up to Angela Morley neé Wally Stott for her exquisite string arrangements on those four Scott albums.

chveik

Quote from: famethrowa on February 16, 2021, 10:19:31 PM
Can't be doing with the later stuff, I'm no stranger to the avant garde, but it all just sounds like Scott moaning into a reverb box with not much relation to the sounds underneath.

this is madness

Goldentony

why cant any of you cunts get your heads round that his mother called him Ivan, then she died

kalowski

Quote from: Phil_A on February 16, 2021, 10:51:21 PM
Angel Of Ashes is is a lovely one on 4. Rosemarie from Scott 3 is an absolute belter as well.

No-one ever mentions the title track from Til The Band Comes In, possibly because that album was out of print for ages and not as well known as Scotts 1-4. It's quite patchy and obviously compromised with the throwaway covers in the second half, but the pairing of that song and "The War Is Over" really does feel like a somewhat poignant farewell to that era of Scott.
The first ten or so tracks from Til the Band Comes In are as good as anything from the late 60s. I know the covers really bring that record down, but I do like his Reuben James.

Gregory Torso

The Drift is an absolute and literal beast of a record: a uniquely terrifying, cinematic, harrowing, beautiful experience. I've seen it described as being more like a horror film than a record, and that's a good basis. Meticulously structured (it took a decade for Scott to write it), it's one of those records I have to listen to in full from start to finish, and afterwards I don't tend to listen to anything else for a while.
Scott's lyrics are wild - literary, political, bizarre and creepy and they mesh with the music perfectly. It's got movements. It flows like a nightmare. It doesn't let up. Elvis Presley crawling around blind in the desert as the World Trade Centre falls in bloody flames. Satanic Donald Duck voices and donkeys braying and noseholes caked with black blood and cocaine.
It's peerless, I can't think of any former 60s/70s pop stars of that stature (my mum had Scott Walker posters on her wall when she was a teenager) who have gone on to make music in their later years that is anywhere near the calibre of The Drift. It's his magnum opus. It's like swimming in an abandoned quarry at night: deep, murky, frightening and exhilirating. Fucking hell. It's a top ten record of mine.


sardines

The collaboration with Sunn O))) was so perfectly realised that the first time I dropped the needle I had a big fat fuck off grin on my face for the full album.

Walker's death was one of the tougher ones to take. He may have had nothing left in his head but he also could have been sitting on all sorts of fucked up genius that we'll never hear.

Tikwid

#13
Quote from: sardines on February 17, 2021, 11:44:35 AMHe may have had nothing left in his head but he also could have been sitting on all sorts of fucked up genius that we'll never hear.
Scott's Sundog lyrics book from 2018 had a section at the end featuring six or so new songs written from 2016-2017, and while we probably won't ever get to hear how Scott envisioned them (perhaps their inclusion in the book was done in the face of that possibility), the lyrical content alone indicates that the style of Bish Bosch/Soused would've progressed to a somehow even more bonkers level of creativity. A few choice highlights:


  • Lines such as "nubbin knob knuckled to brain nock", "the dildo-smacked cheek of l'après-midi d'un faune ", "now come, dump on me for money", etc
  • A rap song where a strange refrain about Rhône wine (delivered by a rapper, as directed in parenthises) would have been intercut with Scott saying "Brah!" "Bro!" "Broseph!" "Bruv!" and half a dozen other comparable slang terms from a good four generations or so ahead of his
  • A song that I'm almost certain was written about the Wisconsin governor also named Scott Walker - "he's midnight's Gov./I can hear his nails clicking on the floor above/Ain't my good dog"
  • A Zercon-esque character song about a real-world ancient Egyptian head bust, reinterpreted as a sort of Austin Powers figure - "a genome eternity without even a shag/and now I'm back/unearthed/brought up for more" - whose journey from Memphis to a museum in Boston, robbing him of his eternal afterlife, is presented as a decadent street parade sponsored by "Hate-Fuck Free Radio"

Gregory Torso

Quote from: Tikwid on February 17, 2021, 04:33:09 PM

  • Lines such as "nubbin knob knuckled to brain nock", "the dildo-smacked cheek of l'après-midi d'un faune ", "now come, dump on me for money", etc
  • A rap song where a strange refrain about Rhône wine (delivered by a rapper, as directed in parenthises) would have been intercut with Scott saying "Brah!" "Bro!" "Broseph!" "Bruv!" and half a dozen other comparable slang terms from a good four generations or so ahead of his
  • A song that I'm almost certain was written about the Wisconsin governor also named Scott Walker - "he's midnight's Gov./I can hear his nails clicking on the floor above/Ain't my good dog"
  • A Zercon-esque character song about a real-world ancient Egyptian head bust, reinterpreted as a sort of Austin Powers figure - "a genome eternity without even a shag/and now I'm back/unearthed/brought up for more" - whose journey from Memphis to a museum in Boston, robbing him of his eternal afterlife, is presented as a decadent street parade sponsored by "Hate-Fuck Free Radio")

These are absolutely amazing and it's a tragedy we'll never get to hear them.

Dusty Substance


Literally the greatest music artist who ever lived.

Phil_A

I don't think Bish Bosch gets nearly enough recognition for how funny it is, it's like the Drift but with fart jokes. I remember probably laughing out the loud several times the first time I listened through it.

Egyptian Feast

I haven't listened to Bish Bosch yet, but bleak as it is, I laughed out loud a few times during my first listen of The Drift, admittedly out of surprise more than amusement. I really wasn't expecting the donkey.

I still get a chuckle from remembering this:

Quote from: Egyptian Feast on August 10, 2020, 11:25:12 AM
My favourite recent reaction was my partner's youngest son walking in at the end of Scott Walker's 'Hand Me Ups', playing at terrifying volume. The song ends with Scott singing "I felt the nail driving into my foot, while I felt the nail driving into my hand". After a perfect pause he cheerfully said "Haven't heard this one before!" which cracked me up for some reason.

Oz Oz Alice

Quote from: Phil_A on February 17, 2021, 08:50:58 PM
I don't think Bish Bosch gets nearly enough recognition for how funny it is, it's like the Drift but with fart jokes. I remember probably laughing out the loud several times the first time I listened through it.

Very much so, until I heard Epizootics! I thought I'd go the rest of my life without hearing Scott quote Derek and Clive but lo and behold he mutters "Take that in the bollocks for a start" towards the end. SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter) features the phrase "I've severed my reeking gonads and stapled to your shrunken face" amidst a barrage of working men's club insult comedy of the ilk of "Does your face hurt? Because it's killing me" that shows his ears were open when he was playing darts in pubs in London through the 80's. Most of it is still pitch-black but it's more obviously intentionally funny than the terrifying Donald Duck impression ending The Escape on The Drift.

Pink Gregory

Quote from: Phil_A on February 17, 2021, 08:50:58 PM
I don't think Bish Bosch gets nearly enough recognition for how funny it is, it's like the Drift but with fart jokes. I remember probably laughing out the loud several times the first time I listened through it.

IF SHIT WERE MUSIC
OH YEEEEEAH
YOU'D BE A BRASS BAND