I'll Be Home, Cowboy: Nilsson, Walker, Newman

After years and years of dwindling interest in music, 2011/2012 brought a double whammy of melodic obsession. First I discovered Harry Nilsson through the documentary "Who Is Harry Nilsson?" which is still on Netflix and you should see if at all possible.

I spent the next few months buying used cheap versions of his albums, reading all about him, and generally freaking out that I hadn't really even known who he WAS before. His career seems unthinkable when you examine it for even a split second and if you listed everything he did and everything that happened to him, you would think he lived to be 150 years old.

Nilsson inadvertently led me to Scott Walker. Here's how that happened.

I was having trouble watching narrative film. I had been spending most of my time either listening to or reading about Harry Nilsson. But I was too tired to read and it was too late to play my guitar. I had a mini realization. Hey, I liked that documentary about Nilsson. Maybe there's another cool music doc about someone I don't know much about.

The Walker doc had been on Netflix for a short while and I'd noted it in passing without giving it too much thought. The name rang zero bells. At least with Nilsson I knew the NAME even if I had no idea what songs he'd sung or written. With Walker it was a complete blank.

I watched it and obviously it had a large effect on me or you wouldn't be reading this.

However, it took me several months before I realized there was more of a connection between Nilsson and Walker than just ME watching the documentaries in quick succession.

While delving into everything Nilsson, I bought his landmark 1969 album "Nilsson Sings Newman". Nilsson had shot to prominence a short time earlier when The Beatles had named him their "favorite American band", which is hilarious when you think of it. So what does Nilsson do with this megaphone he's got pointed at a giant audience? He decides to sing an entire album worth of Randy Newman songs.

To put this into some kind of perspective, this would be like Adele deciding right now to record an album of MY songs.

The resulting album was not a giant success. It seemed out of step with the times which were getting louder and more rock and roll than ever before. This album was as far from that as you can get. Newman plays the piano, Nilsson sings. That's it. No jams, no psychedelica, no extended drum solos, nothing trippy. Were you to sit a family around the piano in 1903 (like the song on the album imagines), and have them sing all these tunes, they would hardly seem out of place.

What's all this got to do with Scott Walker, you ask? Well, after his career had been torpedoed and he was coerced into abandoning his songwriting, occasionally Walker seemed to put his foot down and demand a level of quality in the song choices. Granted, he sang some terrible songs. But mixed in with the dreck are some gems.

Two of these gems are songs taken from the Nilsson/Newman collaboration.

Clearly Scott Walker had heard it. So forty years before I would become obsessed with these two artists almost simultaneously, they were already connected.

The two Randy Newman songs that the Nilsson and Walker catalogs share are "I'll Be Home" and "Cowboy".

I love both versions and am including all four here for you to enjoy.

Nilsson "I'll Be Home"
Nilsson "Cowboy"
Scott Walker "I'll Be Home" (Skip to 11:25 of this link)
Scott Walker "Cowboy"

Scott Walker: The Next Great Crooner, The Last Great Crooner

By the time Scott Walker left The Walker Brothers to go solo, the tradition of the tuxedo clad handsome man standing in front of a similarly clad orchestra singing "standards" was so all-pervasive that YOUTH REBELLED AGAINST THE VERY IDEA OF IT. It had somehow come to represent the status quo, it had taken on a political meaning, and that meaning wasn't of the forward thinking radical, it's meaning was more the cop showing up to bust the party than the party itself.

Make no mistake, Scott Walker was being groomed to follow in the footsteps of those men, of Sinatra, of Dean Martin. The success of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" catalyzed a vast swath of teenage girls who were now as open to Walker singing softly as they were to the hip-shaking beautiful vulgarity of Mick Jagger. Whatever Walker had tapped into went very deep and the people in charge of his career smelled the proverbial blood in the water. Here was a mystery man, here was a person with the rare combination of sheer physical talent and impossible-to-quantify charisma. Add that to the strange songs of his own writing and you can see why they thought they had a gold mine on their hands.

When you say the word Sinatra, a certain style is automatically evoked in your mind. It involves red velvet walls, light glinting off ice cubes perspiring with brown liquor, evening gowns held lightly by gloved fingers to ensure that high heels don't snag, all class, all sophistication. Now, you can puncture that vision with any kind of deep gaze but Michael Buble is proof that the pudding still exists. Scott Walker's record company saw gold in them thar hills and Walker was their claim to it.

Thus, his first three solo albums are peppered with standards, with songs that wouldn't be out of place in a set by Judy Garland at The Rainbow Room, or from Sammy Davis, Jr. in the desert of Las Vegas. As that style of music must be, these recordings are immaculate. They are intricately staged set pieces of romantic imagination. Taken on their own they are some kind of pinnacle, but when paired with the OTHER work Walker was doing and would do, they become almost talismanic, they ARE the fantasy and they EVOKE the fantasy at the same time.

Watch him sing "When Joanna Loved Me" on the Dusty Springfield show. The song is from Walker's debut solo album "Scott".

The sound of this falls into some vague adult contemporary category, the world where Mel Torme and Englebert Humperdink live, the world where Steve and Edie sing the classics side by side and everyone's fears about the future are assuaged. There is no room for the radical there, the edges, the underbelly. The audience who was clinging to this type of music was desperately AFRAID of rock and roll, found it to be threatening in a fundamental way.

But Walker was a hybrid, the ultimate beatnik, a crooner who could pull off the formal emotional sweep of a show-tune like "When Joanna Loved Me" but who could also write his own material stranger than any experimental rock and roll anthem.

For a few short years, Walker seemed on the cusp of becoming a superstar combination of the two mutually exclusive genres. But the culture was rocketing away from the croon faster than Walker could work. By 1970 and the two albums that I consider to be masterpieces, he was seen as outdated, square, for parents. In a terrible perverse irony, he then spent eight years making music that was just that.

For a brief moment he'd been Sinatra in front of the orchestra. He paid for it by having to remain there as Mel Torme.

A Murder In Ostia

In Ostia, Italy on November 2, 1975, a seventeen year old hustler named Giuseppe Pelosi climbed into a car owned by Pier Paolo Pasolini. At the time, Pasolini was one of the most celebrated radical filmmakers in the world, certainly the premier director in Italy. Pelosi ran over Pasolini. Then he ran over him again. Then he ran over him again.

Roughly twenty years later, Scott Walker released the harrowing album "Tilt". It was his first album in eleven years. His last had been "Climate of Hunter", released in 1984, a slick strange pop collection of macabre funk laid over sensuous bass lines and even stranger melody.

"Tilt" would make "Climate of Hunter" seem like a Hall & Oates record.

The first song on "Tilt" is called "Farmer In The City (Remembering Pasolini)". Walker takes a translation of a poem by Pasolini and modifies it, layering it over an orchestral composition that can only be described as bleak. I don't know what he was trying to say about Pasolini, I don't know what the hell he is talking about in this song. At several points he seems to be an auctioneer and a bidder at the same time..."I'll give you 21/21/21/Do I hear 21/21/21". A further couplet states that he "can't go buy a man in this shirt", either referring to actual slavery or to purchasing the services of a male prostitute.

Again, I have no idea what Walker is talking about here. All I know is that by including Pasolini in the title, by referencing the name of the town where he was brutally murdered, and by invoking the specter of human trafficking of one degree or another, you are placed in the uncomfortable position of being a denyer, of having a truth-teller grab you by the back of your neck, forcibly keep you from turning away from what you most desperately wish to avoid, and having them snarl at you, "Look. Do not turn away."

But all the while, their voice is hypnotic. The bed of music that cradles it is epic and lush. No matter how many times I hear it, I am unprepared. I cannot take it in.

Nothing is mentioned in the song of what the young hustler felt as the wheels crushed the life out of the body of a great artist. No attempt is made to link the lyrical content of the song to the occurrences that led up to such a horrific end. Walker doesn't try to feel the pounding in the chest of the murderer shifting the car into reverse to increase the damage to the corpse. Shifting it back into forward, heart pounding with what? Exhilaration? Regret? Triumph? Relief?

The song might not even be about that occurrence. Walker isn't saying. He makes a bunch of sounds in a recording studio and forces us to say it for him.

Watch "Farmer In The City" off of Scott Walker's 1995 masterpiece "Tilt".

Dusty Springfield And Scott Walker: Velvet Perfection

The clip opens with Dusty Springfield in close-up, grainy black and white so that her blond bouffant seems to be dissolving slowly around her head, her facial features blurred, her speaking voice emerging from the confusion like a long high-heeled leg out the slit of a tight skirt.

At first blush she seems nervous until you realize that she is breathless, excited. She says, "Mm, there's a funny thing, when you've been working with two other people, as I did, with The Springfields, to suddenly leave and try and do something on your own, for a change, and this is exactly what's happened to my guest tonight, and I'm sure, this is practically, I would imagine his first appearance on television on his own, and I think he's really marvelous, we sometimes sort of pass in corridors of recording studios and that's about as close as I get to him which is a pity. His name is...Scott Walker."

The text hints at what is obvious in her delivery. Her voice quavers. She seems caught in a private moment. If you weren't looking at her on the screen you might think you'd inadvertently opened the door between hotel rooms to find her writing in her diary about an illicit kiss.

The camera pans left to a strange set that seems like the inside of some kind of darkly glittering dome. Walker emerges from behind Dusty and the dome brightens, sparkling to life with his arrival. Even though Walker is quite tall, he seems like a little boy in a Lord Fauntleroy suit. With skinny legs that always seem on the verge of buckling beneath him, he hurtles toward the microphone, alone in this cavern of light, and proceeds to sing one of the most deceptively upbeat songs of all time.

His hair is all wrong, he seems vaguely uneasy, but then he starts to sing and it is extraordinary. There doesn't seem to be enough time in the song for all the words he says and yet he is never out of breath, never enunciates anything less than perfectly...so NOT out of breath is he that you don't even get the impression that he is breathing at all.

Watch Dusty's scorching intro and then Scott Walker singing Jacques Brel's "Mathilde".

Springfield and Walker were labelmates on Phillips, an offshoot of some German conglomerate that had mostly been releasing classical titles but was moving into the pop arena. The classical catalog paid great dividends for Walker as he had access to arrangers and producers who could achieve the sophisticated compositions he was about to undertake. The lush nature of Dusty Springfield's catalog would not have been possible with some ragged rough rock and roll recording environment. Her stuff, like Walker's, is IMMACULATE.

Her BBC show which this clip is from was a smash hit and must have paved the way for Walker's a short while later. The format was simple. The artist hosts the show, sings a couple songs of their own, invites a guest on who performs a number or two, they team up for a duet and then the host finishes on their own. It was a way to keep the artist in the public eye without the rigors of touring, which at the time was almost medieval in its crudeness.

Later in the show, Dusty invites Walker to sing with her. There is no video of this clip that I can find, the BBC in their infinite wisdom never saved any of these shows, taping over everything because, shoot, why would anyone care that Dusty Springfield's work be preserved?

There is, however, audio.

The exchange is playfully flirtatious and deliberately humorous, with the two of them talking about how these kinds of scripted conversations usually go and how much they didn't want to do anything like that. Then they launch into a wonderful duet of "Let It Be Me".

At this point in time, Scott Walker appearing solo was giant news in the UK. It would be almost as if John Lennon announced he was leaving The Beatles and then appeared singing a duet with Shirley Bassey. Legions of young fans bemoaning the breakup of their favorite boy band now got to see Walker and Springfield seduce each other on live TV.

This kind of sophistication and craft were battling with The Stones, The Who, The Kinks and other rock and roll bands for the cultural mountain top. At this point, the pinnacle was in sight for both factions. In a few short years, however, Walker and company would still be looking up at the snow-peaked apex where the rock and rollers hung out, where those rough and tumble bands grabbed onto low flying jets and took over the world.

But for a brief moment captured between the sultry beehived English chanteuse and the slim-hipped mysterious American, velvet perfection almost jumped the line.

Fugitive Kinds: Scott Walker, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams

Scott Walker reclaimed authorship of his career after 1978's Walker Brothers swan song "Nite Flights". But what kind of career did he have? The Walker Brothers, after an improbable comeback, had finally ceased to be viable. Any remnant of his solo cultural impact had long since dissipated and the insider appreciation for his work didn't have any commercial manifestation.

In short, he was at very loose ends.

His next album wouldn't come out for six years. Between 1965 and 1978, Walker, either solo or with the band, had released fourteen full-length albums and countless stray singles and b-sides. Thirteen years of churning out product.

Then six years of complete silence.

Rumor has it that during this time he turned down the opportunity to have David Bowie produce an album for him. That sessions with Brian Eno did not satisfy him. So he hadn't entirely disappeared, but he was certainly unwilling to put something out that he wasn't completely happy with.

1984's "Climate of Hunter" ended the self-imposed exile. The first seven songs on the album are Scott Walker originals and if you can imagine Simple Minds being forced at gunpoint to play Nine Inch Nails songs you can get a vague idea of the direction he was headed in. Gone are the '70's string-drenched country covers, schmaltzy balladry and gauzy anthems.

But there is one song on the album that Scott Walker didn't write. And it was written by, surprise surprise, Tennessee Williams.

In 1959, Williams wrote the screenplay for the film based on his stage play of 1937. Brando stars as a drifter named "Snakeskin" who flees New Orleans and gets into trouble in a small town. Williams collaborated with Kenyon Hopkins to write a song that Brando sings, the character accompanying himself on guitar.

Watch Brando sing Kenyon Hopkins and Tennessee Williams' "Blanket Roll Blues".

Scott Walker must have seen the film at some point. He enlisted Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, at the time one of the biggest stars on earth, to play spectacular lone acoustic guitar to accompany his incredible voice, which would never be so straightforward again.

Listen to Scott Walker and Mark Knopfler go about as deep into a blues song as you can possibly go. Walker lets Knopfler ruminate on the melodic figure of the song, creating a sparse landscape that seems lifted out of a John Steinbeck novel. Almost a full minute and a half go by before Walker begins singing, and while it is subtle and understated, Knopfler's guitar work here is as amazing as the most soaring of Hendrixian or Van Halen solos.

"Blanket Roll Blues" from 1984's Climate of Hunter is just one more remarkable achievement from this staggeringly under-appreciated career.

Scott Walker: Mrs. Murphy

Listen to The Walker Brothers Mrs. Murphy from their 1966 album "Portrait".

This song is an entire melodrama in three minutes and twenty four seconds. Apartment complex neighbors Mr. Wilson and Mrs. Murphy flirt. Mr. Wilson complements her dress, she says this old thing. As they talk, Walker pulls his camera a flight up to a lone boy stretching on his bed in a languorous state.

Cut back to Mr. Wilson and Mrs. Murphy. Mr. Wilson asks if it is true that the Johnsons are expecting a child. Mrs. Murphy says yes, but word is out that Mr. Johnson is NOT the father. The true father lives in apartment 22.

Walker then returns to the lone boy (now placing him in apartment 22, letting us know that he might be a father soon) who is lost in a daydream of adventure on the high seas.

Mrs. Murphy describes the Johnson's marriage in scathing terms, criticizing Mrs. Johnson, implicitly sanctioning Mr. Johnson's infidelity.

The final line of the song is perfectly succinct.

"Upstairs he sits
He hears a knock, and nothing more
Come on in, you're late
Well, don't just stand there
Mrs. Johnson - close the door"

Now, what is interesting about this song, apart from the incredible string arrangement and cavernous melody, is that you would think the most dramatic subject would be the BOY, or Mrs. Johnson who is pregnant from an extramarital affair with a boy "less than half her age".

But, no. The song is about Mrs. Murphy, the gossip. She is talking with a man who is obviously NOT her husband, ostensibly Mr. Murphy. We don't know anything about Mrs. Murphy. She seems to be close enough with this Mr. Wilson that they openly and immediately jump to salacious stories of their fellow tenants.

This is a major component to Walker's appeal at the time. The repressed sexual drive of the English housewife who longed to be swept off her feet in some doomed romance but was trapped by propriety and societal pressure into remaining a dutiful wife. So while Walker clearly self-identifies with the "boy" upstairs, he removes the narrative from his own perspective and puts it into that of an observer.

This also may be the first modern musical appearance of the Cougar. Compare this song to the great "Maggie May". Imagine "Maggie May" somehow being told third hand, the focus of the song shifting from the young boy trained and burned by the older seductress to two completely uninvolved strangers discussing the affair.

This seemingly minor shift in perspective gives the song a much wider context, gives the personal a layer of society, forces us to watch what is unfolding as part of a larger collective. In "Maggie May" you are Rod Stewart and that's that. Here? Who are you? How do you get inside the story? You are forced to CHOOSE something.

Not many pop songs force that kind of rigor. Plus, good lord, listen to the damn song. Walker was very young, 23, and already he was pushing at the boundaries of pop music, chafing at what was expected of him. This discomfort would eventually catapult him about as far into the musical wilderness as anyone has ever gone.

Here? He's just stretching his legs.

Scott Walker In The '70's: 8 Years In Easy Listening Hell

In the three years after The Walker Brothers broke up, Scott Walker wrote, produced and recorded five full length albums. Most artists of the era tended to release an album a year, a pace which Walker almost doubled even though he was also hosting his own weekly BBC show during one of the years in question. Now, volume doesn't necessarily equal quality so there is an element of subjectivity here, but the sophistication and intricacy of these albums is, to my opinion, staggering.

The first three albums each charted quite high, with "Scott 2" reaching number 1, no small feat in an era dominated by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and countless other foreign acts. The special compilation compiled from the BBC program was released while Walker was preparing his first fully original album, the first three having been peppered with standards and Jacques Brel translations among his own compositions.

"Scott 4" was released in November of 1969. "Scott", "Scott 2", "Scott 3" and "Scott Walker Sings Songs From His TV Series" hit #3, #1, #3 and #7 respectively.

"Scott 4" didn't chart at all. His next album "Til The Band Comes In" was a compromise for Walker as he was forced by his record label to record songs that he didn't write in addition to his own material. It, too, failed to chart.

This hardened the resolve of the record label. There was nothing in Walker's contract that gave him the right to decide what songs went on the albums. He has never described exactly how this unfolded but the result was devastating.

In the five years spanning The Walker Brothers career to the failure of "Til The Band Comes In", Walker wrote upwards of fifty songs.

From 1970 to 1978 he wrote none.

Eight years. None.

Oh, he sang. Quite a bit. The label was attempting to rediscover the romantic niche triggered by the swell of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore", trying to tap back into the repressed female English libido that had sent legions of young girls hurtling at Scott Walker's frail tall body as he tried to sing through the screams.

Walker disconnected JUST enough to be able to do the job, to sing the treacle. Sure he was still involved in the studio and arrangements but his fire had been dimmed. These eight years see Walker release four solo albums and two with the oddly reunited Walker Brothers. A total of sixty four tracks. None of them original.

Now, there are factions within Walker's fans, as with any artist of note. Some followed him into the treacle and incorporated it into their view of him. These fans are invariably downright disgusted with his output since then, wishing that he'd return to the lush melodies that he wrote in the '60's. Then there are the modern punks who have no use for the MOR (middle-of-the-road) product he churned out during this cruise control and who are thrilled at the avant-garde boundary that he has sped past into uncharted waters.

I find the easy listening period fascinating, like watching a great actor in a terrible movie. These are not crude productions, they are lush affairs with perfectly executed string sections, brass trills, orchestral bombast. Walker's signing is impeccable and quite stunning. It all sounds effortless but if you try to match him note for note you are out of breath in an instant and he just keeps going and going and going.

There is an extra layer of meaning that these songs have accrued over time when you factor in what COULD have been. The weight of these weightless confections is somehow painful because you can't help but wonder what he would have done with all those resources in excavating his OWN strange and eerie vision.

Imagine Fiona Apple hidden inside a Celine Dion album.

It reminds me of the end of Being John Malkovich, with John Cusack trapped for eternity without a voice, doomed to watch all that he had loved just outside of his grasp.

And yet, somehow, against all probabilities, beauty remains in the trap.

Listen to Sunshine from 1973's "Stretch".

James Bond and Scott Walker: You Only Live Thrice

In 1967, The Walker Brothers were superstars in Britain. Their concerts seldom lasted very long because raging hordes of English teenage girls stormed the stage and tried to love them to death.

The fact that they were American boys who had chosen England as their adoptive country made them mysterious, the deep moodiness of their balladry opened other unlocked secrets in the hearts of these mostly female followers. They were a band but they weren't really rock and roll. They weren't rough and rowdy but there was something dark and dangerous about them all the same.

So it wasn't surprising when the James Bond team of MGM, Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman asked the band to sing the title song of the next James Bond flick, which was to be titled "You Only Live Twice".

The Walker Brothers declined.

On listening to Nancy Sinatra's version, it is now impossible for me to stop imagining what this song would have sounded like with Scott Walker's airless croon instead of Nancy's perfectly acceptable but pedestrian performance. Take a listen to the theme song to You Only Live Twice with it's incredible and instantly recognizable violin decrescendo.

The match of material to talent would have been electric. If The Walker Brothers had decided to record "You Only Live Twice" for the film they might have shot to international superstardom. Why did they say no? I have only read one book on The Walker Brothers called "The Impossible Dream" which is full of anecdotes but when it comes to the real inside scoop it seems to be as in the dark as we are.

Stranger still is the fact that that same year a film was released starring Elke Sommer called "Deadlier Than The Male". Scott Walker wrote the theme song of the same title. The movie is about a female spy. This song is also fantastic. In some perfect universe this film would have been a box office smash in the United States and the song would have broken the group in their homeland. But, as you can see from the opening sequence, "Deadlier Than The Male" has only one good thing in it. The song.

So. One year. Two spy movies. The Walker Brothers turned down covering "You Only Live Twice" to sing an original song for "Deadlier Than The Male." All in the same year.

It would be 32 years before James Bond and Scott Walker crossed paths again.

1999. David Arnold is putting together the soundtrack for "The World Is Not Enough" with the fantastic title track by Garbage. He writes a song called "Only Myself To Blame" and seeks out Scott Walker to sing it. In Arnold's mind, this song was the fitting conclusion to the failed romance between Bond and Elektra King, who winds up trying to kill 007.

Arnold saw the song as the finale. Director Michael Apted felt it was TOO somber, too down. The song is relegated to the soundtrack. Once again, the blast of recognition and distribution that normally accompanies a song from the Bond canon eludes Scott Walker. In fact, so obscure is the track that I just tried to find a youtube link to a video with the song and it is blocked by Sony in a copyright dispute.

It is worth the .99 cent download to hear Scott Walker sing a terribly sad song over a piano, an upright bass and a delicately brushed snare drum. He seems to be singing back to his younger self, back to that strange time when his band turned away from the spotlight and refused to become part of film history. They would never come that close again.

The Cognitive Dissonant

Cognitive dissonance is defined as the feeling of discomfort when holding simultaneous conflicting beliefs. In music, the meaning of dissonance hearkens back to the Latin, whereby a "dissonant" chord is considered "unstable".

The work that Scott Walker has been producing since 1978 is increasingly dissonant, it increasingly contains contradictory elements that are impossible to assimilate in a unified way, and it has become increasingly more terrifying to behold.

Most modern purveyors of fear in musical form attempt to achieve their desired result through intimidation, volume, or the shock value of violent lyrical content. Examples include Marilyn Manson who creates giant spectacles of fascism, Slipknot who dress like they are all meeting at Hellraiser's house later, and a whole gaggle of gangster rap artists who brag and boast about how cold blooded they are.

These are sunny walks in the park compared to Scott Walker.

Now, don't get me wrong. I actually KIND of like Marilyn Manson and I have plenty of gangster rap on my iTunes. Slipknot I have no use for because their aesthetic is so juvenile and stupid and so devoid of humor that the only appropriate response is laughter. I mean, is anyone really frightened by Saw XVIII?

But the brand of terror that the above dole out is inclusive. The result is more a prurient vicarious thrill witnessing someone instilling fear than truly inspiring actual fear. Actual fear is not thrilling. Actual fear is messy and humiliating. True fear results in a reversion to infancy, to a state where you cannot control your bodily functions, to the feeling you get when you know that you have absolutely no control over any aspect of your existence.

This is the kind of response that Walker achieves.

His is a fear born of ideas.

The indie record label 4AD is one of the most influential record labels of all time. Their most famous client is The Pixies. In the mid 1990's they signed an aging former crooner to a record contract. Outside of England no one cared. They have essentially insured that Scott Walker could attempt the masterpieces that were floating around in that terrifying brain of his.

In 2006, 4AD planned a compilation called "Plague Songs" with various artists each writing a song corresponding to one of the ten plagues of Egypt. For whatever reason, Walker drew the Plague of Darkness.

Does Walker use volume and bombast to affect us? Does he use thundering drums? Distorted screaming guitars? Violent imagery? No, there are only three elements used in the song.

A tambourine. A female chorus. And Scott Walker.

Terrifying.

Take a listen.

Darkness.

The Strangest Pop Hit Single In History

The Walker Brothers had broken up at the height of their fame. Their run only lasted from '65 to '67 but the breakneck pace of recording and touring made it seem much longer. Tensions in the group were high for all the typical reasons, but a crucial one was the burgeoning songwriting talent of Scott Walker. He'd started writing B-sides to singles as a way to increase revenue for the band. It worked. But it also showed that Walker was the true visionary.

Still having a Japanese tour to complete as a vestige of their contract, The Walker Brothers broke up. Walker immediately set to work writing and recording his debut, simply titled "Scott."

Walker had, through a German Playboy bunny he'd met at London's Playboy Club, discovered the music of Belgian superstar Jacques Brel. The first song on "Scott" is an incredible cover of "Mathilde" which Walker sings as if he is belting out the finale of some strange musical where a skinny American kid winds up on the BBC in love with a supermodel who drives him mad.

By default, the second track on the album is Walker's debut as a solo writer. It is also, as the title of this post states, the strangest pop hit single in history. (Get used to hyperbole; it is really the only appropriate response to the eccentricity of this man's work.)

This video is not an official one, someone matched old post-war Europe footage to the moody strains of Walker's imagination. The result is fascinating.

Watch "Montague Terrace (In Blue)".

The album was a smash, rising to # 3 and staying there for seventeen weeks, an eternity for an album. "Mathilde" and "Montague Terrace (In Blue)" charted as singles but the ALBUM was the thing in those days and Walker had a massive hit on his hands. This sent his career into the stratosphere, immediately dwarfing the one-hit-wonder nature of The Walker Brothers. He became a cultural phenomenon, a cult-hit who also achieved mainstream success.

"Montague Terrace (In Blue)" shows why. But what makes it work so well? Is it the strangely dissonant string figure that way back in 1967 felt like a sample but was obviously organic? Is it the harsh consonant clash of the lyrics against that lush bed of violins? Or is it the gunshot crack drum explosion which kicks off the soaring drama of the chorus?

As usual, with Scott Walker, it is impossible to put your finger on just what is going on and why it is so effective. I am also struck by how ENGLISH this song seems, how BRITISH. It animates a cloudy fog-ridden England in the mind's-eye, ancient, foreboding, sexy. It was written by a 24 year old American.

Scott Walker had arrived.