Albums Of A Lifetime # 1: Tilt by Scott Walker

I was brought up to the sound of Scott Walker. When I was a small child my parents lived in a tower-block; I don't remember much of that time save for the view from the window and a vague recollection of fire-engines racing down the road when a fire began in one of the floors below. What I do recall is being rocked back to sleep by my dad to the sound of one of Scott Walker's four solo albums from the late sixties. I didn't sleep well as a child and nowadays I sleep even less. Similarly I was as beguiled then as I am now by the sound of Walker's deep baritone and his singular idiosyncratic approach to words and music.
I vividly remember being drawn to the words from Plastic Palace People on Scott 3:

Plastic palace people

Through fields of clay and granite grey

They play without a sound

Plastic palace Alice

Blows gaping holes to store her fears

Inside her lovers head

I had no idea as a child that Walker's vision was virtually unique. Not everything I heard subsequently would be quite this strange and beautiful.

It wasn't until I was a little older that I 'rediscovered' Walker's work and claimed it for my own. It seemed like a well-kept secret, which is how I usually like my music: A little out of step, a little hard to like immediately, the sense of depth and of hidden currents that only repeated plays and investigation would reward with something rich and for all time.

By that time of course, Walker was already an enigma. Beyond the four solo albums (Scott 1-4) in the sixties, a few aimless recordings and what he refers to as 'bad faith' on his own part, Walker had withdrawn. Only The Electrician on a re-united Walker Brothers album in the mid-seventies hinted at a future. And it was a dark future. I recall the writer Joel Lane describing it to me in his flat, years ago as something that sounded utterly terrifying; a love song between a torturer and his victim:

He's drilling thru the spiritus sanctus tonight

Thru the dark hip falls

Screaming oh you mambos

Kill me and kill me and kill me

When I finally did hear it, I was back in Walker's pocket again. The Electrician is both dark and angular and thrillingly lush with its swelling orchestra and Spanish guitar at its crescendo. Every time I play it, it sounds like the first time. The same goes for Plastic Palace People.

Climate of Hunter followed in the eighties, then Tilt in the nineties and The Drift in 2006. Despite becoming more obscure, more arcane with his allusions, and more abrasive with his composition, Scott Walker isn't so obsure anymore. The brilliant 30 Century Man documentary film to accompany the release of The Drift celebrated his work with contributions from fans and collaborators including David Bowie, Radiohead, Brian Eno and Jarvis Cocker (among others).

But Tilt. I could have picked any of Walker's albums, because there's plenty to say about all of them, but Tilt fascinates me. I've returned to it often since it's release in 1995. It's funereal and elliptical and sounds like nothing else in the world. The words are obtuse, like riddles to tease apart and understand. The music is overtly percussive, punctuated by slabs of noise or orchestra. Sometimes the clouds clear and it sounds like the sun coming out for a few breatless seconds. I come back to it again and again, seeing new angles to approach it from, hearing new things to appreciate. How many records make you want to do that, fourteen years on?

Farmer in the City, the first track is dedicated to the Italian filmmaker, Pier Paulo Pasolini, a man whose murder by a seventeen year old hustler while out cruising has subsequently been speculated upon as political, mob-related or extortion, depending on who you talk to. Farmer in the City is like an ember of the Walker of old; it swells with strings and pained emotion:

Paulo take me with you,

It was the journey of a life...

Certain themes and metaphorical imagery in Farmer in the City crop up time and time again in the rest of Tilt (and indeed in much of Walker's post-sixties work). Animals feature heavily: harness on the left nail... I knew nothing of the horses. And further into Tilt, imagery of horses, swans, cockfighting, butterflies and buffalo prevail. The aforementioned harness suggests another theme in Walker's work: an almost sadomasochistic fetish that vascillates between torture and sex, or sometimes both. There's a similar obsession with the body that permeates vitually everything Walker writes; the suggestion of the fragility of the meat that is us, the torture of it, the death of it, the horror of its failings. Often there's two sides to everything presented in Tilt; something tender can all too easily slide into violence, torture can lead to something like love, however twisted. Tilt is like a jigsaw puzzle: all the pieces are there in front of you, but how do they all fit together?

The Cockfighter, a song about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the 'architect of the Holocaust' is atonal, a frightening counterpoint to Farmer's lush sound. The Holocaust and the industrialisation of mass death is very Tilt. The lines... All the calcium planets/growing in the darkness/all over the body/the flapping body.. seem to suggest the loss of control when the body fails, and then... That ribbon cracks like this one can be read as the gentle ribbons in her hair, or the more sinister cut her to ribbons.

Papa danced four feet away, in the rubbing and fusing, the sealing and pivoting...in Bouncer See Bouncer tie the act of sex with dancing while a bare but insistent drum pounds away in the background. Later in that same song, the percussion gives way to a moment like the sun coming out, only for the darkness to reprise again moments later. It's a song laden with religious and sexual imagery.

In Manhattan and Bolivia '95 Walker returns to themes of torture and prsioners in their last moments. In Manhattan, Scalper in the lampglow and ...stickwiped shirt and his arm somewhere suggest interrogation and worse. While in Bolivia '95 (possibly referring to Che Guevara's death in Bolivia)... I journey each night like a saint to stand on this straw floor and ...The tiles speckling darker and darker around my feet both summon images of the schoolhouse where Guevara was executed. It returns to The Electrician's ambiguity of the relationship between executioner and executed.

Walker has subsequently offered some explanation to Patriot (a Single), saying, "It's simply about a character, perhaps a spy, wandering the desert outskirts of Iraq," and that it "ends as it begins, with the bombing of Iraq." It's a typical Walker song with its fractured words where beautiful transforms suddenly into something altogther more dangerous.

The title track returns to the metamorphosis between animal and man that Walker had previously considered on Climate of Hunter. Aside from dual references to a jacket and a skin as the same thing, Tilt the song is strangely impenetrable, but features guitarist David Rhodes playing minor and major keys at the same time, which sounds slightly unsettling.

The final song, Rosary is stripped of all adornments, and the only recent song in the last thirty or so years that Walker has performed live (and this on Later with Jools Holland, alone before any of the studio audience had arrived - find it on YouTube). It again suggests more body horror: With all the trembling vein that you can bare... Its spare arrangement and raw vocal bring Tilt to a desolate close.

Tilt is an initially infuriating and claustrophobic album that grows into something else upon repeated listens. It's place in the geography of music is unmatched (save for the even darker and more obtuse follow-up The Drift) but it's worth the investment. Only a handful of albums will repay your investment with something so rich and rewarding.