Scott Walker

Since 1964 · United States

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Scott 4 (1969)

Scott 4 was the first album Walker wrote entirely himself, a set of short, widescreen songs where the strings press against a close, almost whispered baritone. "The Seventh Seal", taken from Bergman's film, and "The Old Man's Back Again", about Stalinist Czechoslovakia, show how far he had drifted from pop. It sold so badly that he turned back to cover versions for years. It endures because later artists heard in it permission to write grand, difficult songs.

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Scott Walker

Scott 4 · 1969

Scott Walker was born Noel Scott Engel in Ohio in 1943 and moved to Britain in the mid-1960s, where the Walker Brothers (no relation) became teen idols with huge orchestral hits such as "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore". Going solo in 1967, he made four albums, known as Scott 1 to 4, mixing his own songs with translations of Jacques Brel and filling them with strings, existential literature and a deep baritone that sounded nothing like the pop of the time.

When the records stopped selling he drifted through cabaret and cover versions, then returned in 1984 with Climate of Hunter and, from Tilt (1995) onward, made some of the most unsettling and original music of his century: sparse, slow and built from silence. Bish Bosch (2012) is the furthest he went. He died in 2019. Bowie, Radiohead, Pulp and Destroyer have all named him as one of their great influences.