1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 117. Scott Walker – Scott 2 (1968)

 

Here’s another album that belies expectations. Walker, ex of The Walker Brothers, sings songs that in his vocal style, and backing arrangement, feel a bit Andy Williams, a bit Englebert Humperdinck. But on closer inspection, the lyrics are quite dark, delving into a world of prostitution, drugs, and isolation.

A couple of the songs I know as covers by other people, and it turns out they, in turn, are Walker’s interpretations of Jacques Brel songs. Jackie, which I’m most familiar with the Marc Almond cover, dreams of a louche and decadent libertine lifestyle where the singer can be “cute, in a stupid-ass way”. Next (best known to me from the Sensational Alex Harvey Band version) tells of the regimented and perfunctory experience of a “mobile army whorehouse”. The final Brel song, The Girls and the Dogs, is a comic turn about the difference between the changeability of women versus the reliability of dogs (and yet, at the end, the songs points out that it’s the dog that will be kicked out in favour of the girl).

The album sometimes sounds like it’s a caberet, or the soundtrack to a film, and indeed a couple of tracks (Wait Until Dark and Come Next Spring) do come from film soundtracks. There’s even a Bacharach/David track – Windows of the World.

I’ll put this one into the pile of albums that I probably won’t return to in a hurry, but by the same token I enjoyed listening to it – indeed it seemed a lot shorter than its run-time, which is usually a good sign.