RIP Scott Walker

So I’ve just found out that Scott Walker, one of the greatest, most influential, and uncompromising artists in all of pop music, has died at the age of 76. I guess that’s a decent innings but it still feels a blow, and too soon. It felt like he still had a lot more in him.

The newspaper obituaries all seem to be dwelling on his early mainstream success back in the 1960s with the Walker Brothers, with hits like ‘Make It Easy On Yourself’, ‘My Ship Is Coming In’, and especially the utterly magnificent ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’:

And that's to be expected, but the truth is, his most important work came later, with a long solo career that paid no attention at all to chart success or sales, or his movie star good looks, but instead fiercely followed his own obsessive, idiosyncratic avant-garde path into unknown realms, with deeply serious work that has no real contemporaries or precedent in the English speaking music world, and more easily discerned roots in French and German theatre and cabaret, as well as Russian writers of the past.

To me, more than anything, he resembles one of the great French film directors, like Bresson, or Cocteau, or Renoir, if they had instead chosen to work only in song. And like those great artists, the best of what he made will never age or go out of fashion, but still be encountered with new eyes and treasured a hundred years from now.