Trivia / Scott Walker

• Bury Your Art: Walker permanently withdrew The Moviegoer, Any Day Now, Stretch, and We Had It All from print after The Walker Brothers reunited in the mid-70s, thanks to the poor critical, fan, and personal reception of them. The four albums marked a severe Audience-Alienating Era for Walker, nicknamed "the Wilderness Years," where, thanks to a Creator Breakdown, he exclusively performed Easy Listening covers far-removed from the moodier and more experimental original material that marked his earlier and later output. Stretch and We Had It All were subsequently acquired by another label and are still available on CD: the other two have never been released on CD or streaming.
• Creator Breakdown: Happened after the commercial failure of Scott 4, which was partially brought about by his increasing experimentation. He responded with the largely accessible 'Til the Band Comes In, which didn't do well either, leading him to resort to Easy Listening Cover Albums for several years. He wouldn't write original material again until 1978. He was engagingly honest about the fact that nobody forced him to record albums full of cover versions: he considered that he just had 'bad faith', for which he blamed nobody but himself.
• Doing It for the Art:
  • Having had some serious Wilderness Years by anyone's standards, he was determined to keep moving on and not become a Jaded Wash Out. When he finished Tilt, Fontana Records' A&R man came to the studio to listen to it. It was blasting out of massive speakers in the control room and after a couple of songs the A&R man asked if he could listen to it on smaller speakers. Walker said "Actually, do you mind if we don't? Now that it's finished I'm never gonna listen to it again, so I kind of want to remember it like this."
  • The 2014 Sunn O))) collaboration was first proposed in 2008 by Sunn O))) to him, but they didn't hear back for so long they feared he ignored their message. Years later they received an acceptance from his manager. It turned out he spent the next five years studying their music and prepared much of the compositions himself and the record was released in 2014. While Sunn O))) intended to perform as his backing band, Scott insisted they both be credited on the front cover.
• Executive Meddling: Despite Scott's admission that his "wilderness years" are his own fault, he was nudged back towards a friendlier image for 'Til the Band Comes In by his management. He conceded by appending five covers to the end of the album, and by letting his then-manager Ady Semel censor his lyrics, so as not to "harm old ladies." The rest of it was up to Scott.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Most, if not all, of his albums from the "Wilderness Years" are out of print and very rare.
  • And Who Shall Go to the Ball? was physically released on only 2500 copies. It's still available on iTunes though.
• Missing Episode: His short-lived BBC series, simply titled Scott, has no existing episodes or footage as a result of the BBC’s tape wiping practice. The only traces of the show left are audio of two episodes and a soundtrack album, the latter of which is long out of print and consigned to the dustbin of his "wilderness years" era.
• Promoted Fanboy: Jarvis Cocker. Scott produced Pulp's final album, We Love Life, and Jarvis sang some of Scott's songs for the live show "Drifting and Tilting: The Songs of Scott Walker". The two were good friends for the rest of Scott's life.
• Write What You Know: According to an interview in the 30th Century Man documentary, "Clara", a song about Benito Mussolini's mistress Clara Petacci and their executions, was inspired by a childhood memory of Scott watching a newsreel depicting Mussolini and Petacci's corpses publicly displayed and paraded.

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