Singer-songwriter who turned his back on pop

Born: January 9 1943;

Died: March 25, 2019

SCOTT Walker, who has died aged 76, was a handsome and moody pop star in the mid-1960s who had a string of hits with the Walker Brothers, including the chart-toppers The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore and Make It Easy on Yourself, and a fan club that at one time reportedly had more members than that of the Beatles.

After going solo he became a cult figure, impressed critics and influenced later artists including David Bowie and Radiohead, painting dramatic pictures with existential songs that did not fit easily into any genre. Eventually he became a mysterious, reclusive figure – the Jack Kerouac of contemporary music, recording avant-garde albums primarily for himself.

The Guardian compared the transition to “Andy Williams reinventing himself as Stockhausen”. But that is not quite right because even in his pop idol days there was something very dark about his voice and the songs, whether written by him or by other writers.

On Make It Easy on Yourself, he sings “Don’t try to spare my feelings, Just tell me that we’re through”. And while the words of My Ship is Coming In promise a bright future, Walker’s rich, slightly desperate baritone delivery and the admission that “all my dreams never came true – somehow” suggest otherwise.

Women’s names provide several of his songs with their titles, from the 1968 solo hit Joanna – “Now she’s always just a tear away” – to the disturbing 13-minute musical theatre that is Clara from 2006. A long way from his early ballads, it is about Mussolini’s mistress, her body strung up from a lamppost and abused.

Walker admitted he went “crazy” for a while, he suffered from depression and tried to kill himself and he spent time in a monastery, searching for meaning in life and studying Gregorian chant – not the most likely avenue to renewed commercial success.

Melodramatic, strange, many would say weird, but some would insist Scott Walker was a genius. He was certainly a fascinating figure, an existentialist who embraced lush orchestral arrangements, as well as electronics. He used the punching of a slab of pork to replicate the abuse of Clara’s corpse and he also recorded Broadway show tunes and country music.

David Bowie, an executive producer on the acclaimed cinema documentary Scott Walker - 30 Century Man (2006), said he was his idol. Despite working with him on the film, he also said: “Who knows anything about Scott Walker?”

We do know that he began life as Noel Scott Engel in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1943. His father worked in the oil industry and he had a peripatetic childhood, ending up in his mid-teens in California. His talents were spotted early and he was taken under the wing of the singer Eddie Fisher, who was famously married to both Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor, and Walker appeared on his television show.

He was initially marketed as a teen idol, but he was already showing much greater depth, with a passion for jazz, Beat poetry and European cinema and culture. He went to art school and worked as a session musician, playing bass guitar.

In the early 1960s he joined up with John Maus and his sister Judy in a band called Judy and the Gents. John Maus was still too young to perform in clubs and so he obtained a false ID card in the name John Walker, which is how Engel and Maus ended up in a subsequent line-up with the name the Walker Brothers when none of them was called Walker.

Drummer Gary Leeds, who had recently toured the UK, persuaded them that England was the happening place, and the trio headed across the Atlantic. Within weeks they had appeared on Ready Steady Go! and were in the UK Top 20 with a revival of the old Everly Brothers ballad Love Her. Their second record was the Bacharach and David composition Make It Easy on Yourself, which reached No1 in August 1965.

There was always something slightly different, something slightly mysterious about the Walker Brothers and their songs, which sound as fresh, as edgy, as poignant today as the day they were cut. Scott and John laid down some great harmonies.

It was not just that this was good pop music - these guys were young, darkly handsome (no Ringo in this group), and with a real sense of drama both in the music, which combined melody and a pounding beat, and in the presentation. It went beyond drama to tragedy. This was Heathcliff and Byron reincarnated as pop.

They sold tens of millions of records worldwide and sparked hysteria at concerts, which made Scott Walker deeply uneasy. Their time in the charts was brief, basically 1965-67, before Scott turned his back on commercial pop in order to record his own original compositions and translations of the theatrical songs of the Belgian singer Jacques Brel, including one in which he talks of beating his lover Mathilde “black and blue” and another that directly compares women with dogs.

He was a sufficiently big star at this point to have his own BBC television show. His second solo album, entitled Scott 2, topped the charts in 1968. But Scott 4, which came out the following year and consisted entirely of his own compositions, did not even make the bottom of the charts.

The Walker Brothers got back together briefly in the mid-1970s, just as punk was about the grab pop by the throat, and went straight back into the Top Ten with No Regrets, before Scott Walker went off down his own road once more, recording five albums in 30 years.

By the time of his last album Soused (2014), a collaboration with the drone metal and noise rock duo Sunn O))), he had lost most of his audience. But Walker regarded it as “pretty perfect”. Finally he seemed a happy man.

He is survived by his partner Beverly and a daughter from an earlier relationship.

BRIAN PENDREIGH