Listeners need not comprehend “Rosary”’s addled narrator, or spend days decoding his monstrously sexual cri de coeur, to know they should fear for the singer’s soul. His voice is formidable: at once rent with terror and devastatingly vulnerable, with vibrato like a loved one choking up mid-sentence. Each part springs from a death-black silence-“like a great hands and mouth coming out of the dark at you,” as Walker once said, though at the time he was describing how it felt to have too many fans. While the lyrics bide their time before scaring you shitless, the music is less patient: Stretches of near-silent skitters and scrapes portend percussive blasts, which in turn summon infernos of celestial guitar, tremulous strings, and mammoth church pipe organ. The house is on fire, but Walker refuses to dial 911 instead, he devises encrypted distress signals. We had more in or going out You were responsible for the rolling stock I knew nothing of the horses Nothing of the thresher Tilt’s most gasp-inducing swells accompany lines like: His internal battle between political urgency and emotional deflection suspends these sadistically cryptic songs in a dream world. More than ever, Walker was attuned to mass human despair-to trauma, nationalism, war as a contemporary issue-yet icky about little feelings like his own. Amid the confusion, he had slipped out of his lyrics entirely. In the peripheral public eye, Tilt catapulted him from pop’s left field into a freaky avant-garde interzone. Walker had chased his muse to the bottom of the charts and tunnelled somewhere surreal and strange, to an outré-rock Atlantis. “I hate Tilt, absolutely hate it,” said longtime devotee Marc Almond, one of the few to put his cards on the table.ĭespite little consensus on its merits, Tilt became a byword for artistic ambition and integrity. release through Drag City in 1997, the album received a trial by fire in the UK, where the border between idiosyncrasy and pretension is vigilantly patrolled. The Telegraph sheepishly pronounced it a “masterpiece” in a review so hedged it felt like its own retraction.īefore its U.S. Mojo noted bewildered faces and, eventually, begrudging recognition of a “record to be greatly admired, if not enjoyed.” Was it good? Nobody had a clue. Tilt premiered at a playback party in London that year. Walker was finally free to fail exactly how he wanted. ![]() ![]() But by 1995, as his last act dawned, the pressure was letting up. He failed in flummoxing ways-sold out and became less famous-and would, in some corners, be seen to fail until the bitter end. ![]() Within a half-decade of that late-’60s crossroads, his sales were circling the gutter and credibility had flown the coop. When Scott 4 flopped, in 1969, they pondered promoting him to Vegas.īut Scott Walker had a superpower, the unique ability to fail again and fail better. When his first front-to-back masterpiece, Scott 3, slowed sales, the business people gave him a TV show. He ditched his wildly successful band and went solo, covering the Belgian bohemian Jacques Brel and dreaming up originals that would be, he opined, “very Dylan Thomas, very Kafka.” But his records were selling, so nobody minded-and besides, he was doomed to fail upwards. He denounced hippies, fled to a monastery, studied Gregorian chant. This sort of fame required rebellion of a higher order. He was 22 and allergic to fame, which made him untouchably cool-forever staring off-camera in an existential reverie, dreaming of Playboy bunnies laying wreaths at his tomb.
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