Within a Sky Full of Earth

YOU CAN LISTEN TO:
Scott Walker

I've become the Orson Welles of the record industry. People want to take me to lunch, but nobody wants to finance the picture... I keep hoping that when I make a record, I'll be asked to make another one. I keep hoping that if I can make a series of three records, then I can progress and do different things each time. But when I have to get it up once every 10 years... it's a tough way to work.
[Scott Walker in an interview for THE INDEPENDENT]

There are a lot of ‘classic’ (i.e. ageing) rock groups where all is ego and restriction. The bass player only plays what he plays and hasn’t listened to anything new in two decades; the drummer is really only interested in salmon farming and collecting china pigs; the singer thinks he’s Stooges era Iggy reborn but he’s nearer Danny La Rue. Such bands continue to tour the world, but the worlds they encompass narrow to the size of a major chord or two, and the most pedestrian of lyrics (rock-and-roll-must-never-die).
There are a lot of ways Scott Walker might have gone and this is one of them: into showbiz purgatory, yet another bogus man trolling the world like a pale Xerox ghost of himself, before an ensemble of the best session musicians money can buy, maybe even a ‘triumphant return’ at Glastonbury. There are a lot of things people forget about Scott Walker; journalists use words like mysterious and reclusive but is this really so? Draw up an honest profile of Scott Walker and you might find yourself looking at somebody very much like… yourself. How strange is that?
There are a lot of ways you might introduce the stunning, the towering singularity of Scott Walker works, specially The Drift, from 2006. As the critic Cynthia Ozick once said of novelist William Gaddis (three novels in thirty years): he may not have been “prolific”, but “instead he has been prodigious, gargantuan, exhaustive, subsuming fates and conditions under a hungry logic.”
There are a lot of self-proclaimedly ‘experimental’ artists clamouring for our attention, but who else gives us so much space in song, yet still a recognisable song, one marked by sex and pity and perplexity and rage, all the while keeping his ego to a bare minimum. Who else allows so many other voices - unlikely, unmoored, unmourned voices - into his song? Who else gives us language back as such a shock and surprise, as here, in the incredible risk and wager and CRISIS of The Drift, hear how sweeps and heaps of gory or holy or horrific confusion and reflection and fall are rendered with so precise and unfaltering and unique an ear eye and throat, by this man alone, out of time, our first and last and best recording angel, the last Modernist left standing, the only one left alive, Scott Walker.

[FOLLOWING THE QUESTION: Is he, for example, being recognised in public again?]
No, not that often. I had a guy sit down next to me in the tube not so long ago and he said, 'I have to tell you, I'm a big fan of yours. I bought your last two records and - he pauses for dramatic effect - I'm never going to buy one again!' And he got up and walked out. He was really pissed off.
[Scott Walker at THE GUARDIAN]

MORE HERE:
• 4AD RECORDS
• WIKIPEDIA
• ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN
• OFFICIAL WEBSITE FOR 'THE DRIFT' | CHECK THE TIMELINE
• SCOTT WALKER ON YOUTUBE

It's just because, from old times til now, Scott Walker sounds marvelous, special and unique. Something you cannot find in life very easily. He's the only survivor of Brel's plane crash heritage, who managed to kept renewing himself. Come by and feel the power of his songs crawling up through your bones and reaching your soul. I guess he will be playing here all week. Expect him at one of BLOOM RADIO's channels very soon.