“The Sadness of Being Scott, the Handsomest Pop Star in the World,” reads the headline of a 1966 story in Teen Life Magazine. An accompanying photo of a young Scott Walker tells the same story. The 23-year-old frontman of the Walker Brothers is rendered in black and white. Gazing beyond the camera, he shows off a strong jawline and intense, expressive eyes that, later in life, he’d hide behind a pair of sunglasses. Heaven forbid they suggest the sad, boyish charm that suited him to magazine covers in the first place.
From a formative age, solitude defined Scott Walker, born Noel Scott Engel in Hamilton, Ohio. “Loneliness is the cloak you wear,” went the opening lyrics to one of his first hits, 1966’s “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” and those words forecast the art that followed. Whichever of his roles you’re most interested in—the ’60s British teen idol, the depressive crooner drifting toward the avant-garde, or the shadowy figure whose influence grew with each provocative release—the figure at the center is the same ghost, the same brilliant voice seeking an escape. “I’m not a recluse; I’m low key,” he told the BBC in 2006. The interviewer prods, so you’re not consciously avoiding people? “No,” he laughs. “Well, some people...”
The pivotal moments of Walker’s career all speak to this elusive tendency. Around the height of the Walker Brothers’ fame in 1966, Scott retreated from the public eye to study Gregorian chant in a monastery. At the end of the decade, he returned changed, his music smokier and stranger. This became his signature trick: a disappearance back into solitude, which would serve as the creative well for new, vivid material. In 2006, on his first album in more than a decade, he released a song called “Jesse,” which he identified as a response to 9/11. Invoking Elvis Presley’s stillborn twin as a symbol for the fallen towers, it culminated in a shaken, unaccompanied refrain: “I’m the only one left alive.” Walker’s music swallows you whole like that. It’s masterfully orchestrated to leave you alone, in the dark, without a guide.
Walker was always so masterful a singer that his voice often eclipsed his other gifts. He was attractive enough to exist simply as an object of affection; literary enough to warrant a collected lyrics book; and daring enough a composer to get consistent work scoring films. And yet, Walker’s voice seems to embody all of his talents. He could have spent his whole career earning comparisons to Sinatra or charming audiences with Jacques Brel covers, but he preferred treating his baritone like the romantic subplot in a gruesome horror film. Don’t get too comfortable here, he suggests. Something terrible is about to happen.
This ominous feeling connects the seemingly disparate corners of Walker’s work. He always gravitated toward string arrangements that hover in their upper registers, buzzing and vertiginous, only for his voice to swoop in like a heavy black sky under flickering stars. He loved using words and phrases you’re not supposed to sing beautifully: “jack the handle,” “stupid-ass.” On his later records, like 2006’s The Drift and 2012’s Bish Bosch, he took this fascination to extremes, wailing about severed gonads, pretzeled intestines, tumor balloons squeaking against windows. To accompany his visions, he became increasingly abstract with his arrangements. In the 1980s, this meant instructing bandmates to record their parts before even learning the chord progressions. In the 2000s, he was demonstrating to his percussionist how to pound a slab of meat, in step. On Bish Bosch, his final solo album, inevitably Walker conducted a symphony of farts. “A sphincter’s tooting our tune,” he sang. And so it did.
If his methods sound a little like a joke, it’s one that Walker was in on. His records seem to move suite-like through fits of overwhelming bleakness and acknowledgements of the humorous absurdity therein—a juxtaposition I’ve always heard as wisdom. “It’s a strange thing,” he told Melody Maker in 1966. “Things that make some people laugh, I don't laugh at at all. I go to a movie and everybody is howling away and I just sit there.” It’s not that he has no sense of humor, he insisted, but rather that his favorite jokes were the ones that no one else could see. If the world around us is pure darkness, it’s up to us to provide lightness.
For all his mysteries, though, Walker’s career tells a fairly straightforward story, one of burrowing further into his vision, uncompromised and uncharted. A part of me always wondered if he would ever return to song structures as simple and beautiful as those of 1969’s Scott 4, or play with contemporary aesthetics like he did on 1984’s brilliant pivot point Climate of Hunter. On that last album, Walker went through the major label motions of attempting a hit for the final time. He even made a music video, bemoaning at the time that if he were to do it down the line, he’d have to direct it himself. But he never went that route again. Like his public obligations and melodic sensibility, Walker sanded away everything he deemed unnecessary. This meant not looking back or repeating himself. And what would there be to say? In his own words, his last full-length album was “pretty perfect” anyway.
Still, over the years Walker seemed to grow more comfortable as a public figure. He produced Pulp’s 2001 album, We Love Life, and remained a friend to Jarvis Cocker. He participated in 30 Century Man, a 2006 documentary about his career that featured Radiohead, Brian Eno, and Sting. His final releases found him collaborating with the drone metal band Sunn O))) (on 2014’s Soused) and the pop singer Sia (on last year’s Vox Lux score). In 2009, he recorded a song with Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan about a drag queen’s final performance, a collaboration that took place entirely via email. “He went away for a few days and left us to wonder what would come back,” Khan told Pitchfork. “When I heard what he did I couldn’t believe the fragility and beauty in his voice.” For a notorious hermit, he answered a lot of fan mail later in life.
Walker’s legacy has thrived, in part, through these voices. During the long gaps between his releases, his influence only seemed to grow, reaching new corners and unexpected genres. Among his most notable disciples was David Bowie, who covered the Walker Brothers’ “Nite Flights” and took audible inspiration from Walker on his own final releases. In the late ’90s, BBC Radio 6 DJ Mary Anne Hobbs famously surprised Bowie with a taped message from Walker, wishing him a happy birthday. “By the way,” Walker concluded, “Mine’s the day after yours, so I'll have a drink to you on the other side of midnight.” It’s always moving to hear legends like Bowie reduced to stammering fans, but there’s a deeper poignance to the recording, indicative of the direction Walker spent his career moving. He started as an icon and only grew more human.
