Scott Walker, Pop Singer Who Turned Experimental, Dies at 76

 

Scott Walker with the Scottish pop singer Lulu during an awards ceremony in the late 1960s. Evoking the blue-eyed soul of the Righteous Brothers, his group, the Walker Brothers, had several hits, two of which rose to No. 1 on the British charts.CreditCreditBallard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

• March 26, 2019
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Scott Walker, who with his American pop group, the Walker Brothers, became a teenage idol in Britain in the 1960s, but who later immersed himself in experimental music that influenced artists like David Bowie and Radiohead, died on Friday in London. He was 76.

His record label, 4AD, said the cause was cancer. He had been living in England since the 1960s.

The Walker Brothers arrived in England in early 1965, reversing the earlier British invasion of America. There, the group — made up of Mr. Walker (his real name was Noel Scott Engel), a dramatic baritone who played bass; John Maus, a guitarist and vocalist; and Gary Leeds, the drummer, all of whom used the surname Walker — found the success that had eluded them in the United States.

Though their popularity never reached Beatlemania levels, their fans, like those of the Beatles, would scream during their performances — and, in one harrowing incident, turned over a van taking them from a concert in Dublin.

Evoking the blue-eyed soul of the Righteous Brothers, the Walker Brothers had several hits, two of which rose to No. 1 on the British charts: 

 a ballad by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and  which had first been recorded by Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons. Both songs also rose to the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States.

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Mr. Walker left the group in 1967 to start a solo career that became a rejection of his rock-star phase. In one iteration he recorded songs by the Belgian singer and songwriter Jacques Brel. But his most critical period was a retreat into the studio to create avant-garde music that was hard to categorize: ominous and clangorous, existential and electronic, with big blocks of sound, his baritone voice now used to almost operatic effect. For many years, he did not appear in concert.

Reviewing a recording on which Mr. Walker collaborated with the metal band Sunn O))) in 2014, Ben Ratliff of The New York Times described his music as “intricate puzzles of shock, indiscretion, non-resolution, theatrical uses of text and extended technique, often with a 40-piece orchestra.” He added that Mr. Walker was always looking for a “whoops factor”— “a moment of incomprehension from the listener.”

In a message on Twitter, Thom Yorke, the lead singer and main songwriter of Radiohead, wrote that Mr. Walker had shown him “how I could use my voice and words.”

“Met him once at Meltdown,” he added, referring to the annual music and art festival in England, “such a kind gentle outsider.”

Noel Scott Engel was born on Jan 9, 1943, in Hamilton, Ohio, about 30 miles north of Cincinnati, the only child of Noel and Elizabeth Marie (Fortier) Engel. His father was an oil company geologist whose job took the family to various cities. When Scott was about 6 his parents divorced, and he went to live in Denver with his mother.

They subsequently moved to New York, where in the mid-1950s Scott, still a schoolboy, began his entertainment career. He had small roles in the Broadway musicals “Plain and Fancy” and “Pipe Dream” and recorded singles, including “When Is a Boy a Man?” (1957), as Scotty Engel — hoping, without success, to break through as a teenage idol. Many of those songs were later released in the compilation album “Looking Back With Scott Walker” (1968).

 

Mr. Walker performing on television in an undated photo. After leaving the Walker Brothers in 1967, he began a solo career that became a rejection of his rock-star phase, eventually retreating into the studio to create avant-garde music that was hard to categorize.CreditDavid Redfern/Redferns

Around 1960 he and his mother moved to Los Angeles, where he attended high school and the Chouinard Art Institute. He also played in various music groups, worked as a session bassist and, in 1964, formed the Walker Brothers with Mr. Maus (who had already been using John Walker as a pseudonym). They played at the Whisky a Go Go and other clubs along the Sunset Strip.

Although the best-known songs of his Walker Brothers period did not portend how radical his music would become, Mr. Walker began to demonstrate a willingness to free himself from the conventions of pop and rock as early as 1967, when he began releasing a series of solo albums — “Scott,” “Scott 2,” Scott 3” and “Scott 4.” He did so again on “Nite Flights” (1978), an album made during a brief reunion of the Walker Brothers.

Along the way, he found an admirer in David Bowie. Mr. Bowie, a transcendent musical experimenter, was in a relationship with a woman who had dated Mr. Walker and kept his albums. Mr. Bowie listened to the music and became so enamored that he later took the role of executive producer of “Scott Walker: 30 Century Man” (2007), a documentary directed by Stephen Kijak.

“I like the way he can paint a picture with what he says,” Mr. Bowie said in the film. “I had no idea what he was singing about. And I didn’t care.”

Mr. Walker, who worked on his albums slowly and meticulously, continued his musical evolution with “Climate of Hunter” (1984). With “Tilt” (1995) and “The Drift” (2006), he drew closer to matching his ambition to his creative visions — and to those that crept into his mind while he slept.

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“I have a very nightmarish imagination,” he said in the documentary, which focuses on the recording of “The Drift.” He added: “I’ve had bad dreams all my life. Everything in my life is big, it’s out of proportion.”

“Clara,” a song on “The Drift,” reimagines the executions of Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, at the hands of Italian partisans in 1945. (It was inspired by newsreels Mr. Walker had seen as a child.) Another song, “Jesse,” imagines a conversation between Elvis Presley andJesse, his stillborn twin brother, as a vehicle to write about the destruction of the World Trade Center.

In a plaintive, eerie vocal reminiscent of Mr. Bowie, Mr. Walker sings:

Fame is a tall, tall tower

A building left in the night

Jesse, are you listening?

It casts ruins in shadows

Under Memphis moonlight

Jesse, are you listening?

Howard Kaylan, a founding member of the Turtles, said in a 2013 interview that he had been listening to Mr. Walker since the 1960s. He was a fan of the Walker Brothers, he said, but thought of Mr. Walker’s solo music as the work of genius.

“My jaw hit the ground when I heard ‘Tilt,’ ” Mr. Kaylan told the newspaper Record Collector News. “And by the time he got to ‘Drift,’ I understood what he was doing: He is doing the most conventional pop music I ever heard. He is just doing it as if he was observing it from outer space and then trying to tell you what he saw as an alien.”

Mr. Walker’s survivors include his partner, Beverly; his daughter, Lee; and a granddaughter. Mr. Maus died in 2011.

Some of Mr. Walker’s lyrics were published last year in the book “Sundog,” with an introduction by the Irish novelist Eimear McBride, who compared Mr. Walker to James Joyce.

“Walker’s work, as Joyce’s before it, is a complex synesthesia of thought, feeling, the doings of the physical world and the weight of foreign objects slowly ground together down into diamond,” Ms. McBride wrote. “This is not art for the passive. It does not impart comfort or ease. Tempests will not be reconciled by the final bars, and no one is going home any more.”

 

 

 

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