Scott Walker (singer)
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Scott Walker (born 1943) is an American singer, born Noel Scott Engel in Hamilton, Ohio. He has long been resident in England.
Walker was discovered by Eddie Fisher in the late 1950s and appeared several times on Fisher's TV series as a teen idol type in the vein of Fabian or Frankie Avalon, under his real name.
In the early 1960s, he formed the Walker Brothers in Los Angeles. Relocating to London in 1965, the band attained worldwide popularity with pop ballads, many of them written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. As the lead singer, Scott attained pop star status.
Mental health problems led to the breakup of the Walker Brothers in 1967, although they reunited briefly for a tour of Japan the following year. Scott soon began a solo career in a different style than he had been known for in the past, turning to a downbeat mixture of pop, folk, and European cabaret, with a concentration on the songs of Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel. His earlier original songs were very much in the vein of Brel, but sung in a voice reminiscent of Frank Sinatra.
Walker's solo career was initially extremely successful; his first three albums, imaginatively titled Scott, Scott 2 and Scott 3 all sold in large numbers, Scott 2 topping the British charts. During this time, Walker was able to combine his earlier teen appeal with a darker, more idiosyncratic approach to music both in his original compositions and his lyrically-risqué choice of cover versions. At the peak of his fame, he had his own British TV series, Scott, in 1969, mainly featuring solo Walker performances of ballads and big band standards. At the same time, Walker released his fourth solo LP, Scott 4, his first album made up entirely of his own material. The songs on Scott 4 marked a further step away from the MOR stylings of the Walker Brothers era, with lyrical references to topics like Ingmar Bergman and Joseph Stalin; the public was confused by the lack of similarity between the Scott TV shows and the more radical approach of Scott 4, and the album failed to chart. A 1970 follow-up, Til The Band Comes In, also flopped and after a brief early-70s flirtation with the country and western scene, Scott's time at the top was over.
Known for being somewhat private and reclusive, Walker's activity has been sporadic since the late 1970s. The Walker Brothers reunited for a one-off album, Nite Flights, in 1978, to which Scott contributed four original numbers. He has released two albums since 1980 (1984's Climate of Hunter and the darker, more experimental Tilt in 1995), and also produced the Britpop band Pulp's 2001 album We Love Life. In 2000, he curated the London South Bank Centre's annual summer live music festival, Summer Meltdown, which has a tradition of celebrity curators. Walker is a strong continuing influence on other artists, in particular Marc Almond, the Divine Comedy/Neil Hannon, and cult performer Glyn Styler.
Having written and produced several songs for Ute Lemper, Walker signed to British independent label 4AD in early 2004.
External links
1995 interview with Richard Cook, from The Independent (http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Concert/2698/art5.html)
"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."