Only two days ago I cued this up for publication. It turns out Scott Walker had already died. A while back I posted Scott’s “Little Things (That Keep Us Together)” which had been going through my head around that time, and recently “Angels of Ashes”, a gentle song with comforting lyrics with darker hints, has also.
In 1995 I picked up a cheap cassette of Scott 2. Over the weeks/months after I picked up further cheap cassettes of the “big four” early solo albums. This led up to the actual release of “Tilt”, which I devoured. I am pretty sure this was my first experience of really contemporaneous avant garde music.
My early preferences were the Brel songs, but as time has gone by I am less impressed by these (and by Brel in general , or rather the translated Brel who seems a lazy shorthand for pseudoBohemianism) and I keep coming back to the less celebrated tracks on the early solo albums.
Here is a video of Angels of Ashes, illustrated with the works of Marc Chagall, who by coincidence I featured yesterday:
RIP Noel Scott Engel AKA Scott Walker
Séamus Sweeney 