“We will be gods on nite flights”
Sad to report the passing of Scott Walker at the age of 76, as announced by his record label, 4AD, this morning.
Most of you will be well aware of David Bowie and Scott Walker’s mutual appreciation for each other’s work, indeed, fans have been sharing the recording of Walker’s 50th birthday message to David on the BBC Radio 1 special, CHANGESNOWBOWIE, presented by Maryanne Hobbs in January 1997:
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“Hi David, this is Scott Walker. I’m coming to you via a very crappy old handheld tape machine, so I hope it’s alright. I’m gonna be a devil today, and not ask you any questions. I’m certain that among the many messages there’ll be those about how you’ve always embraced the new and how you freed so many artists, and this is, of course, true.”
Like everyone else, I’d like to thank you for all the years, and especially for your generosity of spirit when it comes to other artists, I’ve been the beneficiary on more than one occasion, let me tell you. So have a wonderful birthday, and by the way, mine’s the day after yours, so I’ll have a drink to you on the other side of midnight. How’s that?”
After a short pause and a sharp intake of breath, an emotional Bowie responded:
“That’s amazing...I see God in the window. That really got to me there I'm afraid. I think he’s probably been my idol since I was a kid. That’s very moving. I want a copy of that. I'm absolutely...That’s really thrown me. Thank you very much.”
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David was first made aware of Scott Walker’s catalogue by Lesley Duncan, who had co-written with Walker, including You're All Around Me on The Walker Brothers’ 1965 debut, Take It Easy.
Bowie talked about this and his appreciation of Jacques Brel in Vanity Fair’s November 2003 feature: David Bowie’s Favorite Albums:
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JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS
CAST ALBUM (1968, CBS)
“In the mid-60s, I was having an on-again, off-again thing with a wonderful singer-songwriter who had previously been the girlfriend of Scott Walker. Much to my chagrin, Walker’s music played in her apartment night and day. I sadly lost contact with her, but unexpectedly kept a fond and hugely admiring love for Walker’s work. One of the writers he covered on an early album was Jacques Brel. That was enough to take me to the theater to catch the above-named production when it came to London in 1968. By the time the cast, led by the earthy translator and Brooklynite Mort Shuman, had gotten to the song that dealt with guys lining up for their syphilis shots (“Next”), I was completely won over. By way of Brel, I discovered French chanson a revelation. Here was a popular song form wherein poems by the likes of Sartre, Cocteau, Verlaine, and Baudelaire were known and embraced by the general populace. No flinching, please.”
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Over the years Bowie covered Mort Shuman’s translations of Next, My Death and Amsterdam, originally brought to a wider audience via Walker’s own covers. That torch was carried further by successive musicians, including Marc Almond who had this to say in an exclusive interview for DavidBowie.com in 2014:
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Total Blam Blam: Were Bowie's versions of My Death and Amsterdam your introduction to Jacques Brel?
Marc Almond: “It was hearing Bowie's versions of Brel that really turned me onto Brel in a big way. When I turned over Bowie’s single Sorrow and played Amsterdam on the B-side, it really was a seminal influential moment. I had been aware of Brel through hearing Scott Walker and Alex Harvey but it was Bowie who really sanctioned Brel as being very cool. Bowie opened up a whole world to me. When Bowie mentioned a Singer or a Writer or Artist I had to check them out and they would become a big part of my cultural sphere. Genet, Lou Reed, Lindsay Kemp. Iggy Pop, Brel and many more. When Bowie recorded Pin Ups, all the artists he covered were instantly cool. His influence on Pop Culture was and is enormous. I’m sure it was the same for many musicians of my generation. Bowie taught me what my teachers at school couldn’t.”
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Bowie gave several more nods to Walker over the years via the likes of: Nite Flights on Black Tie White Noise in 1993; a 1996 artwork for the Milestones 1997 charity auction titled: The Walker Brothers Triptych; Stephen Kijak’s 2007 film SCOTT WALKER – 30 CENTURY MAN, of which Bowie was Executive Producer, from where today’s montage pic of Bowie was taken and this pre-release quotation from him:
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“He really didn’t want to abide by the rules of the genre. He kind of opted out of rock very early on in his career. It just seems he wanted to expand in some very unusual ways. And that was pretty much what I wanted to do. And it was always guys like that that I admired”
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In an exclusive interview in the film Bowie also had this to say regarding Walker:
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"What I really like about his songwriting is the way that he can paint a picture with what he says. I have no idea what he's singing about and I've never bothered to find out and I'm not really interested. I'm quite happy to take the songs that he sings and make something of them myself, and I read my own reasoning into the images and all that, which is how I use music personally. I construct my own worlds out of the music that I listen to. It's rarely important to me what the reason was that someone wrote something, it doesn't matter to me really. So his songs are really useful! (laughs) They're useful for everyday living!"
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The closest Bowie got to the sound of Scott Walker was possibly the sublime Heat from 2013’s The Next Day, with its echoes of the verse of Walker’s own The Electrician from aforementioned Nite Flights. Also, Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) was certainly in the spirit of some of Walker’s later recordings, particularly the first single version released ahead of Blackstar.
Bowie continued to champion Walker's work to the end and but we’ll leave you with something Scott himself told Jarvis Cocker in a rare interview on BBC Radio 6 music’s Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service in 2017:
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“We spoke several times on the phone about various things. He wanted at one stage to do an interview with me. This was 10 years ago, maybe, something like that. I didn’t do it and I can’t remember why I didn’t do it. Every time I spoke to him he was very nice to me. He always was on my side. He would recommend people to listen to my records. He was really generous when it came to me and always was interested in what I was doing. It’s funny, every time I spoke to him on the phone, he’d say, ‘Here I am overlooking the park. It’s sort of snowing, it looks lovely.’ You know, he’d describe where he was. And I thought, ‘I’m sitting in the flat here,’ you know, wherever I was [laughs]. But I always remember that about him. But [his death] was such a shock to all of us.”
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Scott Walker 9th January, 1943 – 25th March, 2019
#BowieWalker
