Pitchfork: 5xCD Scott Walker Box Set Due This Month In UK

5xCD Scott Walker Box Set Due This Month In UK
Still ashamed to admit that Darth Vader is his father

[Posted Thursday, November 13th, 2003 04:00:00 Pitchfork Central Time]

There are barely any superlatives left to describe the talent and oeuvre of Scott Walker, once of the Walker Brothers, and long a notable musical eccentric and trailblazer. And yet, sadly, many people have never heard of him, not to mention that the availability of his recorded output has been patchy, to say the least. His grand, almost-operatic vocal style and his relentless experimental streak have given rise to countless, mostly British imitators including Julian Cope, Ian McCulloch, Neil Hannon and Jarvis Cocker, amongst others.

Mr. Walker himself has been hard to track down (although he did curate London's Meltdown Festival a couple of years ago, and he also produced the last Pulp album, We Love Life), much of his back catalogue has been more elusive still. But no longer, since Universal plans to issue a monster five-CD box set of Walker's work, entitled Five Easy Pieces, on November 24th in the UK. The box set is curated by one-time Julian Cope manager Cally Calomon, who has also worked with The The's Matt Johnson and now works for the estate of Nick Drake.

The collection is divided into five more-or-less thematically-arranged discs, and comes, we note thankfully, with extensive liner notes. There are, however, no demos, outtakes or previously unreleased tracks-- God knows, Scott Walker's previously released material is hard enough to find.

Disc One, subtitled "In My Room," contains an entire album of Scott's "kitchen sink dramas," musical vignettes of "tiny worlds in bedsits," as Calomon puts it. He comments further that "Soft Cell made a whole career out of this disc alone." Disc Two writes large what we kind of always not-so-secretly knew about Scott Walker: he has written and sung more songs about, for and/or named after women of his acquaintance than anyone we know. Check it out: Joanna, Johanna, Angelica, Genevieve. Take that, Iglesias (both of you)! There are so many women to whom Scott has written odes that he can't even fit them all on one disc. Thus, "Mathilde" is relegated to Disc Three.

Disc Three, "An American in Europe," shows Scott in his European cabaret phase, and this is where we see Walker as the great interpreter of other people's songs. This is where things get seriously baroque and Brechtian. Disc Four, "This is How You Disappear," showcases Scott's continued flight from the limelight, at the same time that he proves himself ever able to retain an immaculate sense of what the pop song can do. The curators have subtitled this disc the "Alternative Greatest Hits," just to drive the point home. And finally, there's Disc Five, "Scott on Screen," originally intended as a bonus disc, and which includes Scott's contributions to movies such as Pola X, Deadlier Than The Male, The Rope and The Colt, The Moviegoer, Toxic Affair, To Have and To Hold, and, yes, The World Is Not Enough, just in case you thought he'd lost his common touch. Tracklist:

Disc one: In My Room:
01 Prologue/Little Things
02 I Don't Want To Hear It Anymore
03 In My Room
04 After the Lights Go Out
05 Archangel
06 Orpheus
07 Mrs. Murphy
08 Montague Terrace
09 Such A Small Love
10 The Amorous Humphrey Plugg
11 It's Raining Today
12 Rosemary
13 Big Louise
14 Angels Of Ashes
15 Hero Of The War
16 Time Operator
17 Joe
18 The War Is Over

Disc two: Where's The Girl?:
01. Where's The Girl?
02 You're All Around Me
03 Just Say Goodbye
04 Hurting Each Other
05 Genevieve
06 Once Upon A Summertime
07 When Johanna Loved Me
08 Joanna
09 Angelica
10 Always Coming Back To You
11 The Bridge
12 Best Of Both Worlds
13 Two Weeks Since You're Gone
14 On Your Own Again
15 Someone Who Cared
16 Long About Now (Esther Ofarim) [from Til The Band Comes In]
17 Scope J (sung by Ute Lemper) [from Punishing Kiss]
18 Lullaby (sung by Ute Lemper) [from the Japanese version of Punishing Kiss]

Disc three: An American In Europe:
01 Jackie
02 Mathilde
03 The Girls And The Dog
s 04 Amsterdam
05 Next
06 The Girls From The Streets
07 My Death
08 Sons Of
09 If You Go Away
10 Copenhagen
11 We Came Through
12 Thirtieth Century Man
13 Rhymes Of Goodbye
14 Thanks For Chicago
15 Cowbells Shakin
16 My Way Home
17 Lines
18 Rawhide
19 Blanket Roll Blues
20 Tilt
21 Patriot

Disc four: This Is How You Disappear:
01 The Plague
02 Plastic Palace People
03 Boy Child
04 The Shut Out
05 Fat Mama Kick
06 Nite Flights
07 The Electrician
08 Dealer
09 Track 3 (Delayed)
10 Sleepwalkers Woman
11 Track 5 (It's A Starving)
12 Farmer In The City [full-length version]
13 The Cockfighter [full-length version]
14 Bouncer See Bouncer
15 Face On Breast

Disc five: Scott On Screen:
01 Light [from Pola X]
02 Deadlier Than The Male [from Deadlier Than The Male]
03 The Rope And The Colt [from The Rope And The Colt]
04 Meadow [from Pola X]
05 The Seventh Seal [from Scott 4]
06 The Darkest Forest [from Pola X]
07 The Ballad Of Sacco And Vanzetti [from The Moviegoer]
08 The Summer Knows [from Summer of '42)
09 Glory Road [from The Moviegoer]
10 Isabel [from Pola X]
11 Man From Reno [from <>Toxic Affair)
12 The Church Of The Apostles [from Pola X]
13 Indecent Sacrifice [from Toxic Affair]
14 Bombupper [from Pola X]
15 Threw It All Away [from To Have And To Hold]
16 River Of Blood [from Pola X]
17 Only Myself To Blame [from The World Is Not Enough]
18 Running [from Pola X]
19 The Time Is Out Of Joint [from Pola X]
20 Never Again [from Pola X]
21 Closing [from Pola X]

Although a native of Ohio, Scott Walker found fame and made a home in Britain after the success of matinee idol vocal group the Walker Brothers in the 1960's. Once having enjoyed such significant popularity, Walker took the first of what would become many and ultimately characteristic maverick steps away from the public eye, releasing a series of progressively more avant-garde albums, and retaining a hardcore of devoted fans along the way. The series of four numbered solo albums (Scott 1, 2, 3, and 4) are landmarks of the torch song canon, and Walker developed a genius for combining original material with standards of the European cabaret circuit, most famously the work of Brecht and Weill and Jacques Brel.

This delicate balance also meant that Walker was able to keep one foot in the camp of mainstream pop music while at the same time cultivating an ever-deeper interest in more avant-garde musical styles. This latter direction led him eventually to such acts of weird genius as 1983's Climate of Hunter, 1995's Tilt, and of late into the rarefied world of film music. But if you can't afford or deal with this much Scott Walker, do yourselves a favor and try to get hold of a copy of Scott 4, which contains many of Scott's multitudes, including "The World's Strongest Man," one of the most affecting and unappreciated love songs ever written, and Walker's paean to a Bergman movie, The Seventh Seal. How many pop heartthrobs can you name who wrote a song about avant-garde Scandinavian cinema? OK, Van Halen, but other than that, who? Really.