My talented brother Brendan O’Malley is an amazing writer and actor. He’s wonderful in the recent You & Me, directed by Alexander Baack. (I interviewed Baack about the film here.) His most recent gig was story editor/writer on the hit series Survivor’s Remorse. Brendan hasn’t blogged in years, but the “content” (dreaded word) is so good I asked if I could import some of it to my blog. I just wrapped up posting his 50 Best Albums. But I figured I’d keep “Music Monday” going with more of the stuff Bren wrote about music.
This is part of Brendan’s lengthy series of essays on Scott Walker, which I’ll be posting for the foreseeable future, one every Monday.
Scott Walker Scares An Empty Studio: “Rosary”
After 1984’s Climate Of Hunter, Scott Walker seemingly disappeared again. Climate Of Hunter was a challenging work laced with a strange funkiness. The advent of English New Wave seemed to put Walker’s style in a position to possibly connect with a wider audience again.
But again, this didn’t happen. He did a few awkward TV and radio interviews in support of Climate but the slick shallow newly-formed MTV aesthetic was a terrible fit for him.
Eleven years pass. 1995’s Tilt makes Climate Of Hunter sound like Lionel Richie in comparison.
Walker clearly had decided that any kind of clinging to traditional song structure or attempt at pop melody was no longer part of his palette. He’d been there, done that.
Tilt is, in a word, intense. Dense jarring drum noises, gorgeous string orchestral sections laid over horribly violent imagery, a vocal approach that dispenses with verse/chorus/verse/bridge predictability and a headlong rush into a new kind of song where comforting structure simply no longer exists. I don’t make distinctions between the “Old Scott Walker” and the “New Scott Walker”. It all seems consistent to me. The staggering thing about it is the wide disparity between works of art that come from the same mind. It is as if Samuel Beckett spent years writing popular television, backslid to empty formulaic made-for-TV movies and spent the last third of his life writing his avant-garde plays.
The commercial landscape had changed so drastically between 1984 and 1995 that Tilt actually performed quite well, reaching #27 on the UK Album Chart. Noisy music was finally in the mainstream. Somehow Scott Walker had finally arrived at what he probably should have been all along. An idiosyncratic avant-garde boundary dissolver with a cult following. The massive success of “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” had finally settled to an appropriate level.
This “arrival” wasn’t heralded by any kind of shift in how Walker did things, however. He didn’t embark on a world tour performing all his old hits in a tux and an orchestra while performing his new material with a crack punk band. He merely began the process of waiting for his next album to come to him. Which wouldn’t happen until 2006.
He did, however, agree to one momentous occasion. He agreed to perform live on a television program called “Later…with Jools Holland”. Jools Holland was a founding member of Squeeze, has a very successful post-Squeeze solo career, and has been hosting a music show for almost twenty years featuring interviews, live performances and impromptu collaboration.
Walker agreed but only if they allowed him to tape his performance without an audience. The clip shows how “Later” handled this, making it appear as if Walker was in a packed studio.
Tilt is filled with noise as I said before. The one exception is the song that closes the album, “Rosary”. It is also the only track on the album where Walker plays an instrument as well as sings. It is this stark confrontational difficult song that Walker chose to perform. He COULD have chosen anything from the album, brought an impressive bizarre orchestra to showcase the ambitious sonic scope of the album.
Instead Walker chose a song that is so bare, so stripped of recognizable traditional song structure that the result is almost embarrassing, like watching someone in a private moment that they would never want you to see.
I almost never read comment threads but I perused these just to see what people thought. Old fans were dismayed that he was abandoning melody and beauty, those unfamiliar with him wondered how a man who couldn’t sing or play guitar got on a TV show and even new fans wondered why he would choose THIS song to sing.
But again, Walker wasn’t interested in presenting some IDEA of himself. He’d lost the ability to do that years ago. He was only capable of the performance that was as close to authenticity as he could possibly muster. It is a very disorienting performance. The music seems to be barely written, as if some kind of savant had discovered an electric guitar sitting next to him at a moment of great crisis.
I am not sure of the origin of the following quote but I recently became aware of it through Ricky Gervais’ Twitter account, which I highly recommend. The quote I refer to is, “If you want to lead the orchestra, you must turn your back on the audience.”
Scott Walker took it a step further. He made them leave the room.
— Brendan O’Malley
As Walker’s only live performance between 1978 and his death, it is tantalising and haunting.
I agree. Thanks so much for commenting!