Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 179

Record label: Philips

Produced: John Franz

Recorded: Olympic Studios, London; summer 1969

Released: Autumn 1969

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Scott Walker (g, v)

Track listing: The Seventh Seal; On Your Own Again; The World’s Strongest Man; Angels Of Ashes; Boy Child; Hero Of The War; The Old Man’s Back Again; Duchess; Get Behind Me; Rhymes of Goodbye

Running time: 32.36

Current CD: Fontana 5108822

Further listening: Scott 3 (1969);’ Til The Band Comes In (1970)

Further reading: Scott Walker – A Deeper Shade of Blue (Matt Watkinson & Pete Anderson, 1994); Scott Walker: The Rhymes Of Goodbye (Lewis Williams, 2006); www.scottwalker.com

Download: iTunes; HMV Digital

No career trajectory in pop matches Scott Walker’s. As leader of the unrelated Walker Brothers, he was a teen idol with an audience even more hysterical than The Beatles’, but by 1967 he’d grown heartily sick of performing for frenzied girls and recording for a largely unadventurous audience. Upon completing a mismatched and increasingly fraught tour with Jimi Hendrix and Engelbert Humperdinck in April 1967, the reclusive Walker went it alone.

His first solo albums, Scott and Scott 2, combined heavily orchestrated cover versions with a handful of originals that hinted at the complex, cryptic persona that would reach its fullest expression on Scott 4. Songs like Montague Terrace (In Blue) and The Amorous Humphrey Plugg indicated a writer drawn to the darker sides of human nature, more intrigued by psychological detail than was common in chart music. With Scott 2 lodged at Number 1 in the spring of 1968, Walker was free to pursue his own inclinations further on Scott 3, which appeared in early 1968. Alongside his own increasingly wistful and elliptical material, on this classic Walker covered several songs by his hero Jacques Brel, the wry Belgian chronicler of continental low life.

Scott 3 sold less well, but Walker had no intention of surrendering any of his newfound artistic freedom in order to regain chart supremacy. The sessions for Scott 4 took place in Philips’s Stanhope Place studios in mid-1969, produced (like its predecessors) by industry veteran Johnny Franz. The first track, The Seventh Seal, immediately establishes not only the record’s mysterious, enigmatic mood, but also just how far Walker had come since his teen idol days. Over an insistent beat, ominous bells, jaunty castanets, prominent classical guitar, a ghostly choir and spaghetti Western strings, his voice is more resonant than ever as he asks: ‘Anyone seen a knight pass this way? / I saw him playing chess with death yesterday …’

Throughout the album his lyrics tread a fine line between abstruseness and romance, with one notable foray into politics, The Old Man’s Back Again, a funky number which the sleeve tells us is ‘dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist regime’. The arrangements are immaculate throughout, encompassing flourishes from various traditions – morose balalaika on Boy Child, pedal steel on the aching closer Rhymes Of Goodbye or the Hispanic swing of The Seventh Seal – without being as overblown as before.

Walker’s refusal to tour or give interviews to promote the record, and his insistence on its being released under his real name, Scott Engel, combined to ensure that it was barely promoted. Its failure to chart, though, still represented a shocking fall from grace. Walker had embarked on a path of his own, one that continues to baffle and confound to this day.