Scott Walker’s radical snub of routine

Another man gone. Scott Walker’s voice has been with me since that first childhood inkling that those huge, emotionally wrought Walker Brothers singles had a quality which elevated them above standard fare. One phrase from that seductive voice and I was hooked, all the way through the first solo albums, and in more recent times with his extraordinary avant-garde explorations into sound, voice and modernist poetry.

‘Have you heard the new Scott Walker?’ friends would say when one of the last tranche would emerge. ‘I bought it. Of course. I mean, it’s Scott. Awful though. I wish he’d do stuff like Scott 3 or Scott 4 again.’

Modern artist: Scott Walker was noted for his music’s progressive style

I didn’t agree, but I knew what they meant. I still listen to those late ’60s albums and love them, but Walker (1943-2019) wasn’t about nostalgia. He was out on his own – the bleak quartet of songs he penned on Nite Flights, then Climate of Hunter, before the sonic explorations of Tilt, The Drift, Bish Bosch and Soused. Each took his vision further out, exploring areas into which no other musician from his background had dared to venture.

Now, looking at Scott Walker’s corpus, the trajectory becomes clear – seeds sown lyrically and musically as far back as Walker Brothers B-side albums. In retrospect you can see how, in his subject matter, his timbre, the arrangements, he was steadily subverting the mainstream before heading off into parts unknown. If you went along with him, fine; if you didn’t, he would still keep on going. He was never going to come back.

As he wrote in the sleeve notes of Scott 2: ‘It’s the work of a lazy, self-indulgent man. Now the nonsense must stop, and the serious business must begin.’

It’s in the passing of artists like him that you start to wonder why we insist on preserving our heroes at the point when we fall in love with them; keeping them in a permanent state of perfect youth, singing the hits on a loop until the end of time.

What right have we to thwart their ambitions? In all honesty, would you really have bought an endless stream of Scott albums, or would you have given up long before Scott 50 came out? ‘Not as good as he used to be,’ we’d say. ‘The old boy’s trying too hard. Wish he’d just play the hits.’

Pop icon: Walker first achieved musical fame with the Walker Brothers

By rejecting this, he became one of the few musicians who refused to look back, keeping company with the likes of Bowie, Beefheart, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Radiohead… you get the drift. All artists who challenge convention, refusing to conform to our demands that they stay still just for our enjoyment and act as the aural wallpaper for our middle-aged dinner parties. Rejecters of nostalgia. Slippery visionaries.

I know what you’re thinking, reader. ‘Here he is, banging on again about dead musicians rather than writing about whisky,’ but I can see parallels here, especially if you consider whisky-making as a creative rather than a purely commercial act.

The artists who see their work as part of a continuum know that each song or recording is just one step further down the road. What’s next is more interesting than what has just been created. Is there a Scott Walker of whisky? ‘Scotch Walker’… now that would have been a collaboration, but would anyone have dared to make that call?

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll happily enjoy my beautifully made, mature, complex, balanced Scotch in the same way that I will still sink into Scott 4, or be transported by the melancholy baroque of The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine…, but even in that moment of real pleasure, at the back of my mind there’s a voice, nagging away, whispering: ‘Sure it’s amazing… but is that all there is?’

I get that it would be difficult for an established whisky to embark on a Walker-esque strategy, but surely even within the constraints of brand there should be space for evolution. We need people out there taking risks, staying true to their vision (and having one in the first place), influencing, prodding and challenging the status quo. For that to happen there first must be honesty, faith and vision, and bravery (in terms of liquid quality), and communication.

Scott 2: Walker’s hit single Jackie brought him fame early in his solo career

The Scott albums almost invisibly refashioned the ballad; his lush, romantic baritone singing words of alienation and loss. The late works pushed this into a new sonic and linguistic landscape. It showed how the experimental helps to define the middle of the road, how adventurers can be influencers.

You need both, the familiar and pleasing, the challenging and extreme. The latter feeds the former. Without establishing an alternative, if there isn’t someone out there with an uncompromising vision, you will end up with a bland, beige soup.

‘Don’t upset the fans, stick to the formula.’ If you only do that, you’ll be on the nostalgia circuit before you know it; like Scotch was in the 1980s. Half-empty clubs, dust gathering in the corners, the audience growing old with you. Fat Elvis sweats on a Las Vegas stage as the audience chat among themselves.

It would be naive to think that any finance department would permit someone to commit commercial suicide on an established whisky brand, yet once you see the similarities with music you start to realise that rather than creating new work, whisky is in danger of doing little more than remixing the old hits, or pushing a deluxe box set of rarities to the rich and besotted (or gullible).

Who is taking the risks and saying: ‘This is my vision?’ Who dares to upset existing drinkers? What’s exciting and really different? Is Scotch scared? Scott wasn’t.