I found the DVD ’30 Century Man’ at the library, and was interested to learn a bit more about the mysterious cult doom-crooner Scott Walker. I knew he’d been in the Walker Brothers, but not much more. This documentary is pretty good – a few too many celebrity cameos of people reacting to Scott Walker songs – and a solid review of his career. Born Scott Engel in Ohio, he was busy recording as a teenager (there’s a pretty funny segment with a Walker Brothers memorabilia collector showing off all his very rare items, including very early acetates by Scott Engel). Around 1964 he joined two other guys in the Walker Brothers (none brothers, none named Walker), and they were big in Hollywood in the day. Then they moved over to London in late 1965.
There is quite a bit of interview footage with Scott filmed in 2004 as he was making his album ‘Drift’, and he talks about liking the dreary quality of most of England when they arrived, and finding that the people there seemed to be just what he expected from the black and white English films he had seen. They were big pop sensations for another year or two, then Scott started his solo work, inspired at least in part by Jacques Brel. He made 4 solo records in the period 1967-1970, and the first three charted well, then the fourth sort of dropped without a trace for no clear reason. But it seemed to push him into a career of obscurity. He refuses to allow re-release of albums he made in the early seventies, which did not feature any of his own songs apparently.
In 1975 the Walker Bros. reunited and made three albums. Perhaps the most interesting was 1978’s “Nite Flights” which started laying down the sounds that Walker’s been exploring ever since. He works very slowly, allowing the ‘songs’ to take their time percolating, thus he’s done about one album per decade since. In the interview he says that he has long had frequent nightmares, and the music seems to be the soundtrack.
Mediated 