Biography
Though he started out as a mainstream pop singer, Scott Walker became one of the most uncompromisingly iconoclastic and innovative recording artists ever, influencing generations of artists despite (or perhaps because of) the extreme idiosyncrasy of his output. He was born Noel Scott Engel on January 3, 1943 in Hamilton, Ohio to a Jewish family and was living in California when he became a teen actor. In 1964 he and John Maus and Gary Leeds became The Walker Brothers in L.A. but the next year they relocated to England, where they became pop stars with such mid-'60s hits "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" and "Make It Easy on Yourself." With his rich, deep voice and photogenic look, Scott became a teen idol in the U.K. In 1967 The Walker Brothers split, and Scott embarked on a solo career. His first solo LP, Scott introduced a markedly more eclectic, unconventional aesthetic that mixed orchestrated adult pop with folk-rock balladry and the influence of European art songs, especially those of Jacques Brel, whom Walker would cover numerous times. Despite their eccentricity, his early albums were all big chart successes in England. Though 1969's Scott 4, Walker's first album to feature only original material, would become extremely influential, it marked the beginning of his commercial downturn. In the first half of the '70s, seemingly in reaction to drastically dropping sales, Walker released a string of extremely commercial, mainstream-oriented albums from which he would later distance himself. The move proved unsuccessful, and in 1975 he reunited with The Walker Brothers. They scored their final British hit with "No Regrets" a Tom Rush cover from their album of the same name. They released two more albums together, and the last, 1978's Nite Flights, found Scott finally pursuing a unique artistic identity again. His bewitchingly quirky contributions to the album would influence David Bowie and others. One of Walker's disciples was Teardrop Explodes frontman Julian Cope, who oversaw a compilation of classic Walker material that revived interest in Walker in the early '80s. Consequently, Walker released his first solo album in a decade, Climate of Hunter, in 1984, picking up where Nite Flights left off and going in an even more offbeat direction. In the years that followed, he released several more albums with long gaps between releases, each record more challenging and avant-garde than the last. Walker developed a reputation as an uncompromising but seminal musical maverick. The cult hero was an undeniable legend by the time he died on March 22, 2019 in London at the age of 72, hailed as a hero by everyone from Radiohead to Marc Almond.
