New Scott Walker album: 'The Drift'

But I dunno, I thought it was ok. SW seemed funny and gracious and thoughtful. It's a 7pm show aimed at a general audience, you know - not ILM nerds.

When I heard I was going to be interviewing SW a couple of weeks ago, I expressed my surprise/joy/nervousness to my cow-workers. They are a pretty bright bunch, but none of them had even heard of him! Which baffled me, but means I don't think you can forgo this kind of general, basic kind of introductory piece.

3 crossposts

IT'S '30 CENTURY MAN' NO TH BLOODY HELL

The only thing that's different is Sky TV, etc., but where's the intellectual challenge in that? And what business has a station like BBC2, whose remit is supposedly arts and culture, to be putting out programmes like Eating With Cilla Black? If it's about audiences and they want to compete with Channel 4, then the security blanket of the licence fee should be withdrawn and they should compete in the marketplace, like everybody else.

They should have got JtN on to interview Scott, too. At The Donkey Sanctuary, Salcombe Regis.

xpost: Eating with... is culture to, isn't it?

As for the Trellick Tower, five minutes' walk from White City - cheap to do innit?

Scott is the most unpretentious "serious" artist I can think of. He just does it, without pontification, pseudo theorizing (sorry, Brian) or smugness. Scott has influenced bands like Xiu Xiu, by working outside "time" and " fashion" as a real artist should. He's doing something that is equally audacious and idealized like a musical Michelangalo running against the trend of other high Renaissance classicists - reshaping the song form in a way that nobody has yet caught up with, as if those "blocks of sound" were blocks of marble. Mr Penman just has to keep it concise and simple as snare drum clipped on the exact beat.

Scott looks bloody great for 62, it must be said.

A lot of people get hung up on the " abstraction" of the post- nite flites work, don't you think?. But sadly forget the emotional simplicity of what he does, as he always states he's "pairing" the text down to a feeling.. Just as they do in the French chanson or German leider tradition, were words and enunciation articulate unsaid expeiences. Walker sings through the feelings of others as if they were inside him, exorcising all the horrors he's watched and read. He conveys the souls of the unspoken victims through his compositions ... people who are victims of poltical/state control. Take for example the ironically titled Patriot 91...

He conflates the narratives of the Nazis third Reich and the fourth reich of the good old USA. The " highway of Death" with incinerated bodies ... "shock and awe"... christ you can hear him close to tears when hes sings "Aryanuary"... Scott Walker knows the score of what is politically going on right now on in front of our very eyes. How our planet is being turned into a global corporate fascist state, and how this very state is trying to destroy the human spirit.

Walker is fighting against that horror with this music, and reflects the mirror of our cruelty back to our faces whether in Treblinka or in Iraq. He is touch with the violence and the 'sublime' just as Goya or Picasso were, or in cinematic terms as Passolini, who was exploring the same idea of corporations/fascism in Salo.

He is one of the most vital as well as humble artists working today and should not be ignored.

Christ, I went on rant there. But it would nice if people focussed on the work, rather than lazily quip it's "Inacessible".

Ciao for now

I agree. But in fairness, it is often these very attributes (save the latter) that make for a dud interview.

what i could make out of "Jesse" sounded magnificent.

(nb: this is actually what Freddie Garrity was doing in 1974)

People funny boy, I liked your comment it made me chuckle... you are right. It's sad but patently true.

Anyway, maybe I was too harsh on Eno. What the hell do I know? and Jarvis and his hairdo, yeah he really needs to stop hanging on to that Kistch, retro-grade phoneyness. It's dull. Iam worried about this documentary, because it will contain a plethora of stupidity. Although my hands will be rubbing to see how Ute Lemper eulogizes Scott. I have a feeling she will come out with some intellectual meat in her interpretations of Scope J and Lullaby.

i can't verify because i dont live in UK...

The use of all these middling musos tho is irritating... Eno's fair enough, and Bowie (if he's in the proper documentary...) cos Eno's worked with him (abortively) and Bowie/Scott have had clear influence on each other (see Post Berlin Bowie's inluence on Walker from Nightflites onwards...)...... but the rest of them are lightweights... seemingly there to justify Scott and convince those who don't know anything about him that he's worth investing time and energy in....

But this is audience-be-damned stuff - Scott Walker's audience

Question is would it be better to have noting at all on highbrow stuff if the media is not going to treat it with the time and seriousness it merits?

def. not. that just breeds a kind of ugly elitism, feeding real quickly into repugnant ideas like "you wouldn't understand it anyway!" &etc.

scott's work has a lot of layers, but i don't think it's a crime to neglect those layers for a general-purpose interview that might get his name back in the brains of people who haven't thought about him in a while. i appreciate the frustration, the idea of excluding a complex artist from general-forum coverage because that coverage is necessarily limited gets into a kind of scary walling-off that i don't think scott himself would be keen on.

fact is, walker-philes are going to root out the layered stuff anyway. and in truth, scott has made it abundantly clear that he generally recoils from discussing his songs in any kind of incredible detail anyway.

"i appreciate the frustration, but the idea of excluding a complex artist from general-forum coverage because that coverage is necessarily limited gets into a kind of scary walling-off that i don't think scott himself would be keen on."

Why is it necessarily limited?

And to be honest the other thing I weirdly noted whilst watchig the interiew with Walker was how whilst I identify with his music, the man is completely seperate, almost like there's little relation. This is almost certainly as a result of knowing very little about him, and him being basically unwilling to discuss in depth the minutiae of his lyrics. This means that his work is not so contextualised, and leaves more room for your own thoughts... I almost think mystery is a good thing... so the less we hear the better: who wouldn't agree that records wer more "magical" and evocative back in the day whe you couldn't simply google all the information you could ever want about them, or visit their myspace account???

This means that his work is not so contextualised, and leaves more room for your own thoughts...

insanely OTM. my thoughts about his music exactly.

You can choose to follow the " Cue" or not.

I have read more intelligent discussion here than the babble I have witnessed on the Culture show.