To the death of the musician Scott Walker: In the rabbit hole of insanity

The vulnerability of man and the godless darkness that surrounds him. This, in essence, was what drove Noel Scott Engel as an artist. Always. This can already be heard on the first smaller hit he had as Scott Walker with the Walker Brothers. For "Love Her" he had to step in as lead singer, because his voice had the necessary depth for this lovesick ballad. "Love her like I should have done," he crooned like a wonderfull Sinatra.

In 1965 this was the traditionally overproduced string cream, while over in the UK the Beatles used "Help!" no longer came out of the grin. There, in England, the Walker Brothers were supposed to set the right fire - never in the US, where they came from and where their musical roots lay.

One of these traditions was that the Walker Brothers seldom wrote their own hits, but "only" interpreted them like the great old school singers. This was true of Barry Mann's "Love Her" as well as Frankie Valli's "The Sun Is not Gonna Shine" (Anymore), which became a world hit only in the version of the Walker Brothers. Other songs, such as Make It Easy on Yourself, were added by Burt Bacharach.

For a short while, the Walker Brothers, in their fortress of adolescent sensibility, surrounded by a numbingly reveling Wall of Sound , enjoyed a similarly hysterical popularity as the Beatles. Whereby it was always this melancholy baritone, which effortlessly countered all production-technical expenditure with humanity.

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Scott Walker on "Top of the Pops"

With his role as an idol of youth, however, Scott Walker already quarreled, with one hand in his pocket and his lips bored to the playback moving.

He was an only child, he remained a loner

Presumably Scott Walker was too schematic in 1967, when he turned his back on the group. He was an only child, he remained a loner. Had other interests. Las Sartre, Kafka, saw Bergman and Kurosawa, heard Miles Davis and the Flemish poet and songwriter Jacques Brel. His chansons he will interpret again and again on his following solo albums.

This work, after the insincerity of youthful vulnerability, led more and more into the darkness. His art has always been out of time. After the commercial failure of "Scott IV" and a depressive phase, he seemed to have decided to set up in this offside. The 70's were not good to him. It followed album after album with softpop and country nonsense, none of them successful.

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The Walker Brothers, 1976. Fltr: Scott Walker, John Walker, Gary Walker

That changed just with the 1975 reunited Walker Brothers. For the first time since the sixties he appeared on "Nite Flights" from 1978 as a songwriter again. "The Electrician" not only sonically anticipated "Lodger" by David Bowie. It was also, depending on the interpretation of sadomasochism or the torturers of the Argentine junta. No light fare.

Always deeper

"Climate Of The Hunter", his next solo album from 1983, is considered the biggest bankruptcy in the history of his former record label Virgin. From there on, nothing went to Scott Walker, for twelve years, about whom he joked: "I've become the musical industry's Orson Welles, they want to have lunch with me, but nobody wants to fund the movie."

Only in 1995 were crazy people who wanted to finance his vision. The label 4AD appeared "Tilt", and he was finally arrived in the godless darkness. It is considered the first album of the 21st century and is light years away from the early work, located in a very cold corner of the universe. The nineties were again good to an outsider like Scott Walker. Now he could bring in the harvest of his weirdness. Radiohead's Thom Yorke honored him, in 2000 he produced "We Love Life" by Pulp, showing that he was still "different".

But he did not want. In fact, there is nothing in contemporary popular music that sounds nearly as outlandish as Walker's "Final Trilogy" from "Tilt," "Drift" (2006) and "Bish Bosch" (2012). Here he disappears deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of a madness that seeks its equal and does not find. He himself described his approach as "large blocks of noise and no attempt to make it more glamorous through arrangements".

If humor is at work here, then that of Dada

In 2000 he wrote two songs for Ute Lemper, which still gave them an inkling that their author wanted to combine classical opera gestures with the atonality of New Music. His last three albums, however, are tons of debris of fragmented clusters of sound reminiscent of paintings by Francis Bacon in their oppressive atmosphere. He compared them to the nightmarish illustrations of an HR Giger.

The texts that deal with epidemics and genocide, Mussolini or a monkey in Galway, conversations between Elvis Presley and his dead twin brother, and never any comprehension, are just as grim and cryptic: "Oh, the Luzerner Zeitung / The Lucerne Newspaper / Never sold out / Never sold out ". If humor is at work here, then the grim of Dada.

Not even the voice was left. She flitted through the catastrophic scenes of his last records like a ghost of himself, long transcended by the baritone to the tormented tenor. He was in a personal conversation and friendly. Only his work, he could not explain, sorry: "I did it, as I did it".

Perhaps there is no key that fits both the existential early and late experimental phases. Maybe it does exist, and Walker had it printed on the cover of "Scott IV" in 1969. It is a quote from Albert Camus: "The work of a man is nothing but the slow way to rediscover in the detours of art the two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart was first opened".

In the night from Sunday to Monday, Scott Walker succumbed to cancer in Los Angeles. He was 76 years old.