How many albums did Scott Walker release during his “lost years”?
Often pictured as withdrawing himself into reclusiveness throughout the 1970s, singer Scott Walker was actually busy in the studio during his "lost years".
(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Music » From The Vault
Wed 12 February 2025 8:00, UK
There are few singers in popular music so shrouded in mythos as baritone crooner Scott Walker. It’s tempting to indulge in the romanticised narrative keenly written by fans enamoured with his enigmatic reclusiveness, a story that essentially plays out like this: teen heartthrob turns his back on fame to craft a series of cerebral and challenging baroque pop before disappearing into the ether to sporadically drop haunting masterpieces of increasingly dark, cavernous avant-garde excavations every ten years or so, before an accelerated spurt of activity presaging his death in 2019.
It’s certainly evocative and paints a heroic picture of a dogged pursuit of creative principles and abandonment of all fame and fortune to link arms with the artistic vanguard. The truth is he was busier in the studio in the 1970s than he would have been for the rest of his career following 1984’s Climate of Hunter.
He was already a seasoned recording artist by the time he joined The Walker Brothers in ’64, having cut a string of singles under his real surname, Engel, as well as a revolving run of groups and short-lived bands. After decamping to England from Los Angeles, the trio found huge fame off the back of singles ‘Make It Easy on Yourself’ and ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More’, their wall of sound flourished, stirring pop won a fanbase that, for a moment boasted more members than The Beatles’ official fan club.
Gathering the material and arranging all the sessions eventually took its toll on Walker, who parted ways with John and Gary and indulged in his love of ornate orchestral arrangements and the works of Belgian chanson singer Jacques Brel for the three Scott albums released across ’67 and ’69, Walker striking an initial happy balance of chamber pop innovation and commercial success. While busy with a brief Walker Brothers reunion and production work in Japan, the failure of his BBC TV series foreshadowed the confused reception to his fourth instalment of the Scott albums, an LP entirely composed of original material and confusingly released under his Engel name.
“The record company called me in and carpeted me and said you’ve got to make a commercial record for us,” Walker told The Guardian in 2012. “I was acting in bad faith for many years during that time… I was trying to hang on. I should have stopped. I should have said, ‘OK, forget it’ and walked away. But I thought if I keep hanging on and making these bloody awful records…”
Those “bloody awful records” were cut between an intense period of alcoholism and a private crisis, and he even entertained suicidal thoughts. Through this turmoil came the first of his “lost years” records, 1970’s ‘Til the Band Comes In, a cautious step backwards away from Scott 4‘s heady cutting-edge baroque pop to safer territory with its MOR easy-listening retreat, but by no means an embarrassing blot on his discography. ‘Time Operator’s possesses eccentric charm with its lounge croon and sampled speaking clocks, and the title track evokes ‘Jackie’s gripping action drama.
When did Scott Walker’s downfall start?His output starts seriously plummeting south across his next four LPs, The Moviegoer, Any Day Now, Stretch, and We Had It All. Like records from a different artist, his descent into corny country and insipid ballads document a former visionary trapped in creative bankruptcy. For some reason, he affects an exaggerated Southern accent on the twangier cowboy pieces, and there’s an atrocious attempt at funk on the stilted ‘Use Me’. For a long time, Walker personally blocked any attempt at reissues of these four albums, and BGO Records independently distributed them without his approval in the 1990s.
Desperate times called for desperate measures, and Walker regrouped with his former ‘Brothers’ in ’75 for the moderately successful No Regrets album. Its ’78 follow-up Nite Flights sparked flashes of Walker’s return from the MOR sterility, however. Inspired by David Bowie’s Heroes the year before, Walker’s contribution to their final LP delved back into the world of avant-garde arrangements, the only single released being the confoundingly eerie ‘The Electrician’, a window into the dark sonic traversal he’d take on later challenging masterstrokes Tilt and The Drift.
Walker then truly disappeared for three years, recording no material and seemingly vanished from the music industry. It took The Teardrop Explodes frontman and musicologist Julian Cope to introduce Walker’s work to the new wave generation, overseeing 1981’s Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker compilation for Zoo Records. Issued in blank grey and free of any associations of his mid-career banality, his early haunting orchestral pop found an unlikely bedfellow with the post-punks who keenly crafted the Walker cult that existed right up until his death.
From shoddy country to collaborations with Seattle drone metal druids Sunn O))), Walker’s unerring creative instinct pulled him back from washed-up parody to one of contemporary music’s exemplary mavericks.
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