Contents

Information Page

Introduction

Chapter 1 – WAR BABY BOOMER

Chapter 2 – WALKER See WALKER

Chapter 3 – ALL-AMERICAN ALIEN BOYS

Chapter 4 – PORTRAIT OF THE ARTISTS AS YOUNG MEN

Chapter 5 – ALONE/SOLO/SEUL

Chapter 6 – DANS LA RUE DE ST JACQUES

Chapter 7 – AN AMERICAN ARTIST IN EUROPE

Chapter 8 – EASY COME, EASY GO

Chapter 9 – NO EASY WAY DOWN/NO REGRETS

Chapter 10 – THE COLD WAVE

Chapter 11 – SEASON OF ASCETIC

Chapter 12 – DISLOCATION IS A PLACE

Chapter 13 – THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

Chapter 14 – EXIZSTENCHOOLISZT

Selective Discography

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

Introduction

They can’t be the same guy.

Can they?

The name ‘Scott Walker’ always denoted a rumour – an absence – even a spectral presence, as far back as I can remember. But then some of us were just about old enough to start taking notice in the seventies, a full decade after the reputation that cemented the ‘legend’ (that much debased term).

He was man who sang ‘Amsterdam’, that beer-stinking ballad of whores, piss and fish heads, even before Bowie did it. In fact a letter in Record Mirror said he did it years before, and spoke about another Jacques Brel song, ‘Jackie’, that was so familiar with subjects us kids liked to think we knew about (“authentic queers and phoney virgins”), although we didn’t, that they wouldn’t play it on Radio 1. And he did it all in the velvet tones of a real grown-up singer, a ‘crooner’, that put him almost a decade ahead of Bryan Ferry.

Some of us were seriously impressed, even though we only had a faint recollection of catching one or two of his tunes. So where was he now when we needed him, in this post-hippie pop world?

That was where our musical education began. He was in The Walker Brothers, some of our barely elders told us, they sang ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ and it was the best thing he ever did. We remembered it from when we were toddlers, and it was kinda cool: a sad ballad with a cowboy-ish guitar intro, more sulky than mournful, like it was enjoying a good mope but on the verge of leaping up and down.

It also gave you a vague sense, in that one phrase, of what it must be like to be Scott Walker: ‘the best thing he ever did’. Like they knew everything he’d ever done and ever would do, and their memories could keep him imprisoned in that one 45rpm groove.

He had a late-night programme on the telly – I think my mother might have told me that, as anything approaching pub closing time was deemed ‘late night’ in those black-and-white late sixties days. He sang some sophisticated barroom ballads, like the Tony Bennett records our dads and uncles had; in fact some of them were the same songs – songs for world-weary men who expressed their sentimentality by equating years and seasons with the names of girls they’d once known.

Except he didn’t look like them and he probably didn’t smell like an aftershave-drenched hangover in the morning either. He was still pop-star age, with a slender frame and pop-star looks.

(“I really do think… that I was too young recording them,” Scott would later tell the Irish rock journalist Joe Jackson, “maybe there is something there to listen to… more so for other people than myself.”)

And then, in the mid-to-late seventies, there was another Scott Walker: the MOR and country covers artist looking denim-clad, laid-back and distinctly Californian. When I found one of these albums in the salvage warehouse where I worked as a kid, I didn’t even bother to purloin it – that guy surely wasn’t the purveyor of overwrought Euro-ballads on solo records you couldn’t even buy any more?

***

English music fans have long held Noel Scott Engel, the artist known as Scott Walker, in high esteem for dignifying our pop music with a certain gravitas. Even some of the lesser moon-in-June ballads he sang with The Walker Brothers sounded like a matter of life and death when the young American applied that precocious baritone.

But then, it seems he didn’t want to be an American anyway. Portrait, the second Walkers album, included a cheesy sleeve note that claimed Scott was “the existentialist who knows what [existentialism] means and reads Jean-Paul Sartre”. Even then it must have made him seem like a leftover from the fifties bebop era, evoking not Albert Camus’ philosophical treatise The Rebel but Tony Hancock’s Brit comedy The Rebel. (“Why live for tomorrow when you can die today?” asks the confused beatnik chick in the Breton striped T-shirt.)

As an attitude for living rather than an intellectual fad, however, Engel has maintained the ethos through all his fluctuating fortunes. “A person who needs no other people – a world in himself,” is how he defined it for Keith Altham, an NME journalist and (later) music PR man who saw the depths in this lanky young drink of water from the get-go. “A belief in existence rather than essence.”

The religiosity that can be detected from the time of Engel’s earliest compositions, like the neo-gothic love song ‘Archangel’, with its swelling church organ tones, is no contradiction. Whether or not the lead Walker Brother (as Scott quickly, and inadvertently, became) had read The Outsider by Colin Wilson, the closest thing to existentialism we ever had in a nation that regards intellectual ideas as an embarrassment, he fitted that writer’s definition of a man who applies the same serious devotion to existence that the faithful devote to a pie-in-the-sky afterlife. Research by this author has detected a Zionist Lutheran (Old Testament-quoting Protestant) lineage in his family that Engel (‘angel’ in German) appeared to shrug off. But the seriousness remains.

“How can you relate to something unless you have felt it emotionally?” he asked near the release of his first solo album, 1967’s eponymous Scott, insisting that all song lyrics had to be extracted (and indeed earned) from personal experience.

It’s a strict literalism that he might shun today, when Engel considers internal images and ideas as valid a starting point as the autobiographical approach he seems to totally reject. But for a while – in the cinematically influenced ‘big pop’ of Scott 1-3 – it worked beautifully. Fragments of genuine emotion and experience among the orchestrated angst made it all seem so personal, as much for the listener as for the performer.

There was also a studied realism that gave an intentional one in the eye to “that phoney love and flower power scene”. When we look back at the commercial success of the first three solo albums, we can see how the popular music of the sixties was the broadest of churches, only partly in thrall to acid-addled smiley faces.

“Life is full of heartbreaks, rain and unsmiling people,” said Scott at the time. “I want people to face life not run away from it because some aspects are unpleasant. The first battle is to see things as they are. You can’t hide from reality through drugs.”

It might seem an unremarkable statement today, but that’s because it holds true as much for popular culture as it does for every other strand of existence. At the time, however, its iron-in-the-soul resolve must have been hugely unfashionable – though it’s not till we get to the post-hippie era of the late sixties/early seventies, when hair and flares and dope and coke were increasingly common aspects of many people’s lives (even, sometimes, of Scott’s), that we can see any real commercial damage being done.

This was also a performer who, in his words, “became addicted to classical music”, to ‘old squares’ like Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich, Delius and Sibelius, in a period before ‘progressive rock’ rehabilitated the classical pretensions of some rock or pop musicians in the public eye. Many of the songs, even Brel’s morbid Gallic bravado, were conventional verse-chorus-verse (apart from some of Scott’s early ‘miniatures’, which approached the minimalism of haikus-in-sound) but they still consciously descended from a tradition.

By the time that tradition bled into pop culture, however, it passed through the heightened emotion of written-to-order film and TV soundtracks, through Max Steiner and Elmer Bernstein; as former Wire editor Rob Young has noted, the soundtracks of Morricone (“It sounds like bloody spaghetti-western music!” my younger brother has whined) or the mellow eclecticism of Scott’s favourite pop album, Dion’s 1968 album Dion (which in 2007 was retitled Abraham, Martin And John), seemed to exert as much of an influence as the traditional classicists.

As producer Peter Walsh and filmmaker Stephen Kijak both note in this volume, Engel has never stopped searching out and assimilating influences, however laterally: fluid arrangements inspired by Gil Evans’ work for Miles Davis; obliquely haunting lyrics with the allusional restraint of Kafka; abandoning the folk-influenced songs of Brel for something closer to the ‘Schubertian ideal’, the symbiotic meshing of words and melody.

And then, after the more rock-influenced but equally searching Scott 4 and the less ambitious but cleverly catchy ‘Til The Band Comes In, it all seemed to end. Scott has written off the covers albums of his seventies solo period as “useless” – but search them out and you may find that, given the near-impossibility of him putting in a lacklustre performance, there are moments from the artist’s unhappiest years that can still soothe the soul.

By the mid-seventies, Noel Scott Engel seemed almost intimidated by the former ambition of the young performer called Scott Walker: “There was one point way back there when I turned back from what I believed in and I was never able to get back around again,” he fatalistically admitted in one 1976 interview. He complained that he felt “completely dwarfed” by his own musical interests: by the avant-garde atonality of Boulez, Schoenberg and Stockhausen; the Eastern folk-influenced symphonies of Bartok and the Twilight Zone musings of Scriabin; even quintessential seventies singer-songwriters Randy Newman and Joni Mitchell invited feelings of inadequacy.

And then, in an ironic quirk, desperation made it all turn around. The mid-seventies Walker Brothers reunion had yielded only one success (the hit single ‘No Regrets’) and was about to hit the rocks. Telling his pseudo-siblings they should all write whatever they wanted for their final shot, Engel propelled himself as an artist into the glacial temperature of the modern age. At the time it was a commercial non-event, but at least one resulting track, ‘The Electrician’, can be counted as an experiment with classical form, its lyrics attuned to the darkness of the human condition.

“‘Boy Child’ led to the later work,” Scott would reflect of the ambitious tone poem from Scott 4. “In fact I feel that the whole album… later evolved into albums like Climate Of Hunter.” It was what his former ‘brothers’, John and Gary, would refer to as “Scott’s dark page” – though the work centred less on morbidity than on obliquely drawn, finely honed images that resonated in the mind; the Lieder approach of Schubert, Mahler and their contemporaries, filtered through the decades of modern and popular culture that succeeded them.

For this writer’s money, it’s the densely atmospheric ‘Sleepwalkers Woman’, on 1984’s Climate Of Hunter, that best fulfils the promise of ‘Boy Child’. The rest of the album had a coldly modern urgency to the music and the fractured narratives that are suggestive, rather than didactic. In cinematic terms, the effective low-budget video for ‘Track Three’ has been compared to the Tarkovsky of Stalker – but its synchronicitous release at the same time as The Element Of Crime, the surreal Euro-noir debut of Lars Von Trier, seems to coincidentally mark a similar vision in a different artform.

By the end of the decade, however, the incongruous commercial failure of Climate (the most ‘eighties’ of albums in its sounds) had made Scott Walker just a rumour again. His marked absence (apart from a nostalgic cinema ad) meant that, even by the time of the re-release of his classic sixties albums on CD, few expected him to ever re-emerge.

When he actually did reappear, with 1995’s Tilt, his half-decade spent on fine arts courses seems to have reinforced his aversion to artistic compromise. “You are working with different elements of time and concepts of space,” he alluded to his minimally surreal lyrics and the elements of music and sound that sat in isolation, or sometimes in opposition. Citing the spare, physically naturalistic poetry of former ‘beat poet’ and Zen Buddhist Gary Snyder as an influence, Engel insisted, “All the honing down I’ve done in the lyric will lead me to just one sound that will tell me – and tell everyone – what that lyric is trying to say. Maybe two or three sounds.”

That he wasn’t concentrating on, say, the beauty of nature but on the absurdity and contrariness of human existence made Tilt a hard listen for some – including some former avid devotees. Tracks like ‘The Cockfighter’ – transposing elements of Adolf Eichmann’s 1962 Nazi war crimes trial and the 1820 trial for adultery of Queen Caroline – and ‘Farmer In The City’ – which explored the last night of filmic visionary Pier Paolo Pasolini before his murder – had an audio-cinematic quality in themselves that could make them unnerving, even after several listens.

Almost two decades on and Scott Walker is still honing his work down, “moving towards a silence”. It can be a particularly noisy silence though: 2006’s The Drift had an occasional brutalism even in its masterful standout tracks like ‘Clara’ and ‘Jesse’. At the tail end of an artistically productive decade for him, ‘Zercon: A Flagpole Sitter’ and ‘Epizootics’, to name but two tracks on Bish Bosch at the end of 2012, crank up the absurdist humour and post-humanist disgust to an infernal level.

***

So, all of the above just can’t be the same guy, right?

This writer would probably go along with that. Whoever ‘Scott Walker’ happens to be at a particular time depends on which aspect of his artistic muse Noel Scott Engel happens to be concentrating on, or honing to a shard-like point. But there’s no doubt that it’s the same personage wearing all those different hats: if you’ve exposed yourself to the energising inner visions of the Tilt/Drift/Bish Bosch axis, take a backwards listen to ‘The Gentle Rain’, the film theme from the 1966 Solo John, Solo Scott EP: the acapella opening may have you full of foreboding, wondering what aural intrusion comes next. What does actually come next is Johnny Franz’s tinkling piano and a gentle lounge bar ballad.

Same worker. Same basic set of tools. But a different artist.

In a sad but inevitable sense, it’s probably right that the artist himself has declined to contribute to this book. Forcing him to dig around in the minutiae of his past (some of his earliest family history has been dredged up here from the historical archives of his birthplace) might have been like a jailer trying to coax him back into prison with a wave of the key, expecting him to re-embrace what he’d already been at pains to escape.

But the author is grateful for the participation of those who have worked with the artist, and their insights into the perfection of his method. A method which now seems to have been pushed to the furthest point that it can – but I wouldn’t bet on that. There is an artistic war being fought in Engel’s head and it seems to have been raging since his own birth during World War Two.

Chapter 1

War Baby Boomer

On the same day that the above announcement was made in the Midwestern city of Hamilton, the local newspaper announced the following birth on the same page:

“Engel, Lieutenant Noel W. and Betty (Fortier), 122 Sherman Avenue, a boy, January 9, Fort Hamilton Hospital.”

To 32-year-old Noel Walter Engel and his wife, Elizabeth Marie (née Fortier, familiarly known as Betty and of the same age as her husband) was born a son, Noel Scott Engel. By his mother’s account, the boy weighed in at a healthy eight pounds and measured a strapping 24½ inches long. Born as the tide of World War Two had yet to definitively turn, the child would be a privileged offspring of the USA’s post-war economic boom and the explosion in popular culture that accompanied it.

His birthday fell one day after that of little Elvis Aaron Presley, then eight years old and living in poverty in Memphis, who would become a hero to the Engel boy in his teens. That same date, four years later, would also see the birth of one David Robert Haywood Stenton Jones in London, England – who would bear the distinction of being one of the few performing artists the adult Engel might regard as a peer.

In 1943, however, much darker spectacles were playing out on the world stage. While his naval lieutenant father faced up to the horrors of war in the Pacific, little Noel and Betty were housed in the grand-paternal family home at Sherman Avenue. For a while, mother and child would live with Noel Sr.’s parents and his big sister – little Noel’s Aunt LaNelle.

Grandpa Scott, from whom Noel Jr. took his middle name, ran a dry cleaning business from his home and had been an enthusiastic semi-pro musician, playing the fiddle on Cincinnati Radio. All paternal family members were descended from George Engel Sr., who first migrated to Cincinnati in the mid-19th century. Born in the German principality of Bavaria, George had been schooled in the strict Old Testament teaching of the Zion Lutheran Church – a faith still adhered to by some of his descendants 100 years on.

This was the family environment the little boy was briefly grounded in, before his mother took him off to live an often peripatetic existence. On February 23, 1945, the local Journal would read:

“Mrs. Grace Jarrett Engel… 122 Sherman Avenue, died at five o’clock Thursday afternoon in Fort Hamilton hospital. She had been ill one year…

“She leaves the widower, Scott Engel… one son, Lt. Noel W. Engel, serving with the navy in the South Pacific… a daughter-in-law, Betty Engel and grandson, Noel Scott Engel, both of California.”

By the time of her son’s second birthday, and before the US’s conflict with the Imperial Japanese Army was concluded, Betty would take the boy intermittently back to stay with her sister Celia (‘Aunt Seal’) on her native West Coast.

On Noel Sr.’s honourable discharge from the US Navy at the end of the war, adjustment to civilian life was compounded by difficulties in a marriage he’d hardly known. While Noel Jr. (or Scotty, as he increasingly came to be known) would be doted on by his mother, she could do little to stop him witnessing the trauma of a marital relationship in breakdown.

“I lived in a nice home – but things were always tense,” Scott would later tell one of the sixties Brit pop magazines that hung on his every word. “It was a very bad time for me. I held it against Dad – which I shouldn’t have… But it had been a violent situation between Mum and Dad.”

Added to this was the experience of watching his mother undergo an emotional and nervous breakdown. For the first time, young Scotty Engel would become aware of the fragile nature of human consciousness and the strange ways in which it responded to external pressure.

Noel Sr. and Betty capitulated to the emotional forces destroying their marriage in 1949, divorcing when Scotty was six years old. With Noel now working as a geologist for the Superior Oil Company, his career would take him to Midland, Texas. Betty and Scotty would stay for the time being at the previous family home, 2871 Krameria Avenue, Denver, Colorado, with the boy occasionally staying at Noel’s place on the wide open range. Beneath the benign shadow of the Rocky Mountains, Betty would pour all her hope and affection into Scotty, nurturing whatever talents she felt he might possess.

In her son’s twenties, as he gradually passed from burning star to cult artist, ‘Mrs Betty’ briefly became a cult figure herself to Scott’s Japanese fans. In an interview for Nipponese magazine Music Life, ‘Mimi’, as she was now known (an affectionate nom de plume bestowed by her son), was described as in her late fifties, elegant, “dressed in a beautiful blue velvet long skirt… the pearl dinner ring from Scott on her finger”.

In pedantically translated reminiscences of her son, she describes a “sensible” child who “often bit the nail of his thumb… Compared to others, he was quiet, but he was a vigorous and cheerful boy who moved around very much… He used to play with his friends in sand and being a cowboy and so on.”

Inspired by Roy Rogers and his faithful horse Trigger, at the Saturday movie matinees, seven-year-old Scotty was thrown from his steed the first time he tried horse riding when visiting his father’s Texas home. According to Scott, he was knocked spark out for a few moments. Such was Betty’s faith in her son’s physical robustness that she picked him up, dusted him off and put him straight back on the mount.

The Engels were by tradition a sporting family. Noel Sr. had been known as ‘Tubby’ or ‘Tub’ at Hamilton High School, but the school’s 1928 Weekly Review photo shows not a fat boy but a solid-looking kid with a pomaded hair parting and thick lips. He was a stalwart of the school’s football team and pitched in with baseball too, while Grandpa Scott served as commissioner of the Butler County Merchants Softball League up to the time of his death, in his mid-eighties.

As a schoolboy, young Scotty would engage in running, athletics, even boxing training – whatever the assumptions about his artistic, introspective nature, by all accounts the Engel boy learned how to land a punch. For all his good health and self-reliance, however, according to Betty, childhood was not without its hazards:

“When he was five years old, he played with matches with his friends in the neighbourhood. And then the fire began to burn the curtains of his bedroom. I took him out through the window at once! He almost got burnt!

“I remember he always came home having small hurts but he had no big hurts,” she was quaintly misquoted, evoking a cover version from Scott’s first solo album. Mrs Betty describes an active child who (at least then) “wasn’t nervous at all”:

“He was healthy as he didn’t catch a cold… He had only caught a scarlatina that children catch when he was seven years old. And he almost died because of having been very feverish.”

As scarlatina is the less serious manifestation of the illness, it’s possible that the Japanese translator meant a more dangerous scarlet fever. In any case, his mother describes a healthy childhood suddenly invaded by delirium and fever dream. This may have been the start of the “very bad dreams” that Scott acknowledges suffering from all of his life. Or perhaps the oneiric nightmare side of his existence had already begun, initiated by the unpredictable adult world with all of its conflicts and mood swings.

Modern classical/Broadway composer Leonard Bernstein characterised the post-WW2 era as ‘The Age Of Anxiety’. This was the cultural landscape in which Scott Engel spent his formative years; it would permeate his life and work throughout his adult career.

But not all dreams were the stuff of cold sweat. Scotty, far from friendless but too self-absorbed to need much human company, lived out some of his dreams on the screen, moving along from the corny ‘horse operas’ that were his introduction to cinema.

“I used to watch the movie The Rocking Horse Winner, an English film, and I was just fascinated,” he later recalled as an adult. “I must have been very young when I had seen this, and it had such a dream-like quality that the American things didn’t have for me.” An expressionistic 1950 adaptation of a D.H. Lawrence story about a clairvoyant little boy, its unsettling elements are subtly cloaked in shadow and a Mussorgsky-esque orchestral score.

In the Music Life interview, any momentary glimpse of fractured consciousness was passed over in favour of the aspects the interviewer had come to talk to Betty about:

In the early fifties, when Scott was a young boy, the baritone-voiced Bing, idol of the thirties/forties, was still the USA’s crooner laureate, its nabob of ba-ba-ba-ba-boom. Though some of the bobbysoxer idols he influenced were on the way up (particularly the more worldly Frank Sinatra, who would revive his stalled career with the Nelson Riddle-orchestrated In The Wee Small Hours in 1955), the almost catatonically laid-back Crosby remained America’s biggest seller with his perennial ‘White Christmas’.

According to ‘Mrs Betty’, a small-time neighbourhood impresario picked up on the boy’s nascent talent via his schoolmates, getting him to perform regularly in local charity shows. The young trouper took to it so naturally that he would frequently volunteer himself for performances, whether his mother accompanied him or not.

In 1951, The Denver Post paid tribute to this precocious talent with a three-column article on page one:

An eight year old with the volume of a light opera-singing tenor; with the charisma of a much-loved ragtime jazz singer – though memories of Al Jolson singing ‘Sonny Boy’ in blackface may today seem a strange anachronism. (Jolson, who died at the beginning of the fifties, would return to surrealistic effect in the lyric ‘Jolson And Jones’ – then a lifetime of nightmares away.)

No record exists of how the audition with Crosby went – or indeed, if it ever took place. By the middle of the fifties, Betty and Scotty would decamp to New York City, seemingly to pursue his talents further.

“I asked him about his year or two on Broadway, in a Rodgers and Hammerstein play when he was 13, and he basically just said, ‘I really don’t remember anything about that,’” laughs Stephen Kijak, the documentary filmmaker who created the nearest thing to a Walker autobiography in existence. “Okay, moving on…”

The story goes that Scott picked up his Broadway role at random, when attending an audition with a Puerto Rican friend. According to a 1957 article in American Fan Club Magazine, these two ‘lost years’ of the boy’s life did not occur quite so casually. Having already appeared in an amateur Texas production entitled Ten Men In A Barroom, the nascent trouper’s New York stage debut was in a production of Plain And Fancy – an almost forgotten 1955 show described as “the best Rodgers and Hammerstein musical not written by Rodgers and Hammerstein”.

This in turn led to a singing supporting role in the real deal, a musical entitled Pipe Dream, which ran from November 1955 to June 1956 at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway. A sanitised version of the sequel to John Steinbeck’s novella Cannery Row, it skirted around its female lead’s profession as a whore, much in the way that the 1962 film of Breakfast At Tiffany’s would with its Audrey Hepburn character. It was also Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s only commercial flop.

Although Betty seems to have received regular alimony from Noel Sr., their living expenses could still be stretched to the hilt. Scott’s stint on Broadway allowed him to become the family breadwinner for the first time in his young life. It also acted as a prelude to his participation in a TV talent contest held at Madison Square Garden, entitled Star Time, and his precocious debut as a recording artist.

Scotty Engel would cut his first single disc – ‘When Is A Boy A Man?’ / ‘Steady As A Rock’ – for the RKO Unique label in late 1956, issued the following year. The A-side is a show tunelike number which might have originated from any musical or TV variety show of its era. What is remarkable about it is the perfectly pitched bellow erupting from the chest of its 13-year-old vocalist (laying down a challenge to the world: “Take me if you can. I’m a man! I’m a man!”). It seemed you could take the boy off Broadway, but traces of the greasepaint and the roaring crowd would remain.

“That wasn’t anything serious,” a much older Scott protested from a 21st century viewpoint, decades down the line. “A lot of my friends sang at school and stuff. Someone would hear us singing and pick certain guys and say, ‘Oh, would you like to make a record?’ or whatever.”

His dismissive attitude extends to how much ‘Scotty Engel’ material would later see unauthorised release, including songs intended only as demonstration copies. But it also fails to acknowledge that, just for a brief period, young Scotty’s search for stardom would be pushed as far as it would go.

As ‘Mrs Betty’ would later tell Japanese fans, Scott had cut his first disc with surprising ease and a seemingly total lack of nerves. “As it was pointed out that his voice was good, I had confidence in his voice, a little. But I thought that being a professional singer depended on his luck and that he might face a lot of difficulties. I didn’t want him to be a professional singer…”

By the time of Scott’s 15th birthday, he and his mother would return permanently (at least in her case) to the West Coast to be close to her family again. For all their drifting around, their surroundings were not nothing short of salubrious.

“Scott lived with his mother, Betty, in a house that looked like a mock castle on Scenic Drive in Hollywood,” testifies Gary Leeds, the fellow Californian who would go on to play a major role in Engel’s life. “It was very big and contained about 12 apartments. The ‘chateau’ was painted a light grey and had a dark-grey roof, trimmed in white. Most of the flats had turrets, which is something you don’t normally see in LA, except in the movies, so the building had a bit of Hollywood magic. You could see the big white Hollywood sign up in the hills from Scott’s bedroom window…”

As a student at Hollywood High School, the boy’s musical interests and studies would expand far beyond Tin Pan Alley. For a while, however, he would perform demonstration discs – demos, which would earn him a few dollars for performing the untested new works of commercial songwriters, with an eye toward getting a chart act to perform them.

Scott Engel’s own second disc was released in 1958 – ‘The Livin’ End’, by the new (and short-lived) songwriting team of composer Henry Mancini, who would earn fame by creating movie/TV soundtrack music including the Pink Panther theme, and lyricist Rod McKuen – who would find fame in the sixties as the self-styled ‘most popular poet in the world’.¹ The song was premiered on the TV show hosted by mainstream pop crooner Eddie Fisher and notable solely for being its young singer’s first foray into rock’n’roll (“Do you wanna go boppin’? Do you wanna go rockin’?”) – albeit closer to Bill Haley than Little Richard. The B-side, ‘Good For Nothin’, exhibited similar vocal confidence as the young kid got his vocals around a tongue-tying bopper.

This was the era that passes for Scott’s rock’n’roll years – roll over Bing Crosby, and tell Sinatra the news. For a brief period, he would be intoxicated by the prowess and excitement of Elvis Presley, Johnny Ace and the doo-wop genre.²

“Particularly Elvis. Like a lot of kids in the fifties I was just blown away by those Sun recordings and the whole Elvis thing at the time.” That combination of operatic bellow, shit-kicker inflexions and southern bubba charisma would leave its mark.

In later years, Scott would remember his teenage debutant era as mainly a period of recording demo discs of songs later recorded by tame Middle American soft-rock crooners like Paul Anka. The surviving artefacts tell a wider story of a boy who, for a period at least, sought bona fide stardom, playing family-friendly engagements at Coney Island in New York and the Honolulu Civic Auditorium in Hawaii.

In late September 1958, a Honolulu newspaper ran the following story:

The article was accompanied by a photo of young Scotty with a brushed-back, James Dean-style DA hairdo, and an intense, unsmiling gaze. It seemed to have been reproduced from his Ohio family’s photo album, as it carried the handwritten dedication “To Grandpa, love Scott.”

Another surviving historical artefact is a fan club letter on headed paper, featuring a screen print of young Scotty posing with his eyes averted right, a lightly greased quiff and dogtooth box jacket.

“This is dated November ‘58, the very first Scott Engel fan club,” explains Arnie Potts, English arch-fan of The Walker Brothers and collector of Walker ephemera. “He would have been about 14 [sic – 15] at the time. This [membership card] was sent out signed by Scott, and by the look of the type I think it was actually typed by Scott. Sent out to one of his fan club members, Elaine [Igarashi] in Honolulu”:

In fact, Scott had recently issued two more songs on 78/45rpm discs: ‘Charley Bop’ demonstrated how quickly rock’n’roll rhythms could be adapted into Tin Pan Alley saccharine, while ‘All I Do Is Dream Of You’ is an old-fashioned show tune by lyricist Arthur Freed. Around the time of the week-long Honolulu residence, Scott also released ‘Paper Doll’ and ‘Blue Bell’. The latter was the type of would-be show tune that showed up on US variety shows or BBC Home Service radio’s Two-Way Family Favourites. (“On my way to Albuquerque / I’ll be feelin’ mighty perky!”)

The A-side is more interesting, if only because of its origins. An upbeat but self-pitying ballad about desiring a paper doll, instead of a real woman, so that those “flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty eyes will have to flirt with dollies that are real”,³ it sold up to six million copies in versions by the Mills Brothers and a young Sinatra from 1942-44. “What has turned it into a bonanza,” claimed Billboard, “is the affection and loyalty displayed for the song by boys in uniform during World War Two.” But in June 1936, composer Johnny Black left an estate valued at $100. A lifelong resident of Hamilton, Ohio, he died in its Mercy Hospital (not too far from Grandpa Scott’s place on Sherman Avenue) after a fight with customers in his club over 25 cents in change.

In the celebrated documentary film, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, Arnie Potts gives further details of his collection onscreen: “That’s a 10-inch acetate. Basically, [Scott] started doing demos when he was about 13 or 14 years old, I think he was pushed along by his mother.”

Titles on the ‘reference record’ by ‘Scott Engle’ (sic) include ‘Are These Really Mine?’, ‘Crazy In Love With You’, ‘Oh What It Seemed To Be’, ‘Your Eyes’ and ‘Misery’. Further unreleased acetates shown to this writer include ‘Paradise Cove’, ‘Everybody But Me’, ‘When I Kiss You Goodnite’, ‘Too Young To Know’, ‘Take This Love’, ‘Till You Return’ and ‘When You See Her’. By far the most impressive of a largely corny bunch is ‘Sing Boy Sing’ – Scott’s demo rendition of another rhythmic tune co-written by the up-and-coming Rod McKuen. The released hit version would be by its co-composer, young singer Tommy Sands, but it lacks the demonstrative howl of Scotty Engel at this age. Having employed his baritone like a falsetto in reverse, Scott’s vocal style seems to have acquired more depth after he hit puberty – his now broken voice has an almost femininely husky quality, not too far from his favourite jazz singer of the time, Peggy Lee (of ‘Fever’ fame).⁴

Despite the boy’s brooding blond good looks (inheriting his father’s Nordic tones and his mother’s statuesque but slender frame), he was reticent as to how he might actually respond to the love objects he sang about on his 78s and 45s. “He was very negative and was shy,” admitted Betty to the Japanese magazine. “The time that I felt Scott had found someone was very late and when he was 17 years old. She lived in Bakersville [CA] and was very charming with blonde hair. Since she married, we have not seen her at all, but I heard that she married someone about two years ago.”⁵

It seems that by the ages of 16/17, and the passing of the fifties into the early sixties, the teenage boy had wearied of the path to stardom – if not forsaken it altogether. In a subsequent mid-decade interview for England’s New Musical Express, he was keener to present himself as an alienated kid on the verge of juvenile delinquency. One might have thought Scott never harboured any showbiz brat aspirations at all.

“School bored me,” he complained, “they didn’t make it interesting and it wasn’t. Nothing they were talking about seemed important to me then and anyway I was into more important things like getting into trouble!”

This hardly sounds like the sensitive soul whose vocal cords would melt hearts in his newly adopted country. But the interviewee was warming to his theme – rebellion without a cause.

“I was expelled from about three or four schools because I was such a nuisance. I was the guy who’d get a group around him and looked for trouble. We’d get up to all sorts of things. I was a horrible son… I disliked school and the stupidity of having to sit in classes, and I suppose having a gang was a way of forgetting what a drag everything was. It was a form of rebellion, though I wasn’t rebelling against my home, just school.”

In case ‘having a gang’ carries any modern-day connotations of random violence and meaningless murder, we should let Scott mitigate in his own favour: “I did join in on most school activities. I always liked music and art and sometimes my drawings would be exhibited to others.”

While admitting to colour blindness, the intellectually curious but non-academic high school kid was a student of both classical and contemporary fine art, from the devotional painters of Renaissance Europe to Picasso’s cubist period and beyond.

Outside the classroom and the family home, however, life seemed to be a situationist prankster’s game of chicken.

“Somehow I found a bunch of guys who felt like me so we had something in common. We… got a car and used to go around at nights finding trouble.

“We didn’t want to hurt people – just the authorities. Anything that was owned by the authorities – lampposts, seats, anything – we’d damage. But you had to be quick. Part of being in a gang was having the knack of talking your way out of a tight spot if the police caught you…

“We got caught a couple of times and were prosecuted, but I always managed to avoid detention homes or being put on probation. In the States the police are different from [in the UK], and if they catch you, you can usually talk your way out. Also you’ve got to do something really bad before they send you to a detention home.⁶

“I must have been the worst son ever and my mother had real worries with me. I was horrible, I’d be out late and she wouldn’t know where I was, and it was terrible for her when I got into trouble.⁷

“One of our favourite tricks we got up to in the dead of night. In Beverly Hills the fashion then was to have your beautiful home built at the top of a hill cliff and at the bottom of the garden there would be an outhouse. (That’s what you call an outside toilet.)

“When everyone was asleep and the streets weren’t busy, we’d go up to Beverly Hills and push the outhouses over the edge of the cliffs. Some of them were heavy but… we pushed like mad and the thrill of seeing it going over was really great.”

As the sixties drew on and the violence endemic in American culture erupted, often irrationally and without warning, Scott and his LA buddies’ antics would fade into the memory of a more innocent era. By the end of that psychotic decade, ‘pranks’ could equate with slaughtering an entire houseful of people in the Hollywood Hills. In contrast, Scott’s own ‘creative destruction’ didn’t extend further than purportedly blowing up a telephone booth with cherry bombs smuggled over the Mexican border. Similar pyrotechnics in a toilet cubicle got him suspended for several weeks, but it was the use of ‘profane language’ in the street that got him expelled from his last public (non-fee paying) school – resulting in Betty paying for his stint at Hollywood High.

Although his attendance could be erratic (as alluded to in the letter to young fan Elaine), Hollywood High’s more creative environment eased some of the tedium he’d previously felt in one interchangeable school after another. It was here that he joined the California Youth Orchestra, learning to play the double bass. Already basically competent on the guitar, he would soon combine his two chosen instruments to become a bass guitarist. Scott also found a focus for his musical interests far removed from the Americana of the era, in the florid themes of Mozart and busy sonatas of Haydn.

Modern jazz too offered new avenues of exploration. He started attending the Lighthouse Café underage on Hermosa Beach, a showcase for West Coast jazz since the early forties. It was here he’d listen to the fluid guitar stylings of Barney Kessel, played live. Having switched his own instrumental allegiance from guitar to bass, Scott took occasional lessons with jazz bassist Marty Budwood. It epitomised the ‘cool jazz’ ethos of LA, a world away from the frenetic storms brewing in New York as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman took improvisation further and further out. It was also light years away from mainstream pop – which was surely no longer where it was at (daddy-o).

At age 16, however, the sometime demo singer was still issuing single releases. In 1959, grown-up smoocher ‘The Golden Rule Of Love’ might have made a passable last dance for younger members at a rotary club. More rock’n’roll-inflected were ‘Comin’ Home’/’I Don’t Wanna Know’ – both sides of the disc written by original rockabilly Johnny Burnette. Cheesy backing vocals on the A-side dulled its edge, though the flip boasted authentic-sounding hillbilly guitar. ‘Take This Love’/’Till You Return’ were more schmaltz, underlined by horribly obtrusive backing vocals.