Scott Walker: 30 Century Man

Scott Walker, one of the most talented, exciting and exceptional figures in the history of music, has been avoiding the attention of the media for ages. This film does not provide you with the much sought after information about his personal life (which I would have found very interesting, I admit), but instead focuses on his music, which, of course, is much more important. There are a lot of talking heads, mostly famous musicians and people from the music business, listening to Scott Walker's music and describing their impressions and the significance it has for them. Naturally, the most fascinating thing about the movie is Scott Walker himself and the metamorphoses he went through in the course of his musical career, drifting more and more in dark and abstract directions. I would highly recommend the film to anyone who likes Scott Walker (if you do not know who he is, hear some of his music, preferably beginning with the 60s).

Watching this movie created a strange feeling in me.

For quite a few minutes into this film, I though it to be a mockumentary in the style of "This is Spinal Tap". A teenager (in a band) in the late sixties, I thought I new quite a bit about the music of the time.

Yet, in spite of the film's obsessing of Walker's work and its impact, I had no recollection of him whatsoever. I thought the film was a joke.

Only when the story began to weave in interviews from people I knew did I begin to think this might be a factual story. Then, when I heard "The Sun Aing't Gonna Shine Anymore", I recognized a hit I had heard (my after-the-fact research shows that the Walker Brothers had only two top 40 hits: this one, which reached #13, and an earlier one "Make It Easy On Yourself" which reached #16 in 1965 and 1966).

So I became convinced Walker was real--for a while. As I listened to some of Walker's stranger efforts I again thought the film might be a put-on. The two hits I mentioned? I began to think they were done by another group (or even Engelbert Humperdinck, whose voice is similar to Walker's).

In the end, though, Walker is very real. As to rather the film is a put-on, you'll have to see it and make up your own mind. Some of Walker's music is very interesting (the spacey, avant garde stuff is unusual and unlike anything I've heard). Some is just nice, soothing pop (the two hits). Most of it does not stand the test of time well.

So there's the rub, the reason I rate this film only 4 stars, and the reason the film is not as enjoyable as it might have been. The producers' intentions are vague and the true spirit of the film is impossible to discern for certain.

At the outset, had they mentioned the subject of the film was very real (even though we might not have heard of Scott Walker) and put the film in context, things might have been different. Instead, they seemed to assume we'd all know him, admire his work and think of him as an icon. We don't know whether they're making fun of Walker, of us, or both.

Perhaps things are different in the UK, but in America, Mr. Walker is not an icon, even though perhaps it could have turned out otherwise.

More than five years in the making, filmmaker Stephen Kijak gave us a chance to spend some time with Scott Walker, or Noel Scott Engel (his real name if you prefer), and listen to other collaborators and musicians who have been touched by Scott, talking and commenting while listening to selections of Scott's music presented during interviews. Scott, the consummate and committed songwriter-poet-explorer of the 'un-tread' territories of the senses, intrepidly transforms his internal imagery and inherent clues into his unique music, 'avant-garde' or otherwise (as demonstrated in his albums "TILT" 1995 Fontana Records UK, and "THE DRIFT" 2006 4AD label).

From the beginning of the reel, we can tell he's a soft-spoken man, an ordinary looking man (regular guy) now in his sixties (he was quite a heart-throb, in his curly pop hairdo and husky low tone with his guitar, being the lead singer of the famed Walker Brothers circa 1964-66). He's not flashy or arrogant (as you might think pop culture idols would be), actually he's downright shy, sort of hiding away under his baseball cap. Once you hear him speak, passionately about his music, offering amusing anecdotes of 'yesteryears', you will be absorbed into this world of Scott Walker and wanting to know as much as you can about him, go checking on the Web for his music, album availability, even his song lyrics, without hesitation. (There's a substantial database of lyrics site at "scottlyrics.vniversum.com/".) Amazon.com seem to have a comprehensive source for all Scott Walker's albums, from Scott '1' (the Jacques Brel period), Scott 2, 3, 4, "Tilt" and "The Drift", including "Nite Flights" 1978 - the one-time reunited Walker Brothers album (MP3 album 'downloadable'), more Scott solo efforts like "Climate of Hunter" 1984, "Pola X" 1999 film soundtrack of nonconforming French director Leos Carax, "And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball?" 2007 orchestral piece in four movements by 4AD label.

He is, indeed, a 30 Century Man, a poetic purist at heart. His meticulous care in composing guitar chords for his songs as composer Hector Zazou pointed out as he wondered how Scott had in-tune and out-of-tune chord arrangements at the same time - true genius recognition, alright. Collaborating arranger & keyboard player Brian Gascoigne explained how Scott went for the unconventional - the in between 'chord' and 'dis-chord' and holding for 16 bars. It's amazing just 'soaking up' the many shared accounts described by Scott's fellow musicians, colleagues, and managers. "His lyrics are peerless," so Brian Eno admirably confirmed. David Bowie is executive producer to this documentary film of Scott Walker, who is definitely still alive and well, seriously flourishing in the music world in UK, where he's fondly appreciated more.

Considering most of the films and documentaries of the decade are about musicians past, like "Control" (2007) on Ian Curtis of Joy Division, "A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake" (2000), both died quite young at 24 and 26, Kijak's documentary "Scott Walker: 30 Century Man" is invariably of a different tone, definitely worth your while especially if you appreciate music or film-making, as you'll get to enjoy sight and sound simultaneously (there are plenty of typographic visual play on the presentation of Scott's song lyrics through out the film). This is a gem well-cut. Enjoy the 95 minutes and you shall rewind to review, if it's certain segments to repeat, or simply the whole length of the feature once again.

Memorable quotes: It's fascinating hearing him talking about his songwriting that "it has to come to you, can't push it". And what a sensible man Scott Walker is as he said, "I'll know when I write my next record where I'll be".

Scott Walker is an American composer and poet (original name Noel Scott Engel) who has lived in England for many years. Originally he was a handsome Sixties pop star who sang with the group The Walker Brothers in a "warm, sepulchral baritone" (as Eddie Cockrell puts it in 'Variety') that made young girls scream and, in England, was more popular than the Beatles. After a couple of albums the group disbanded (though reuniting for a while in the Seventies), and Scott went solo. Gradually over many years, moving haltingly at first from covers of other people's songs to increasingly complex and personal compositions in albums a decade apart, Walker has established a reputation as a unique musical figure focused on recording, not public performance, which the screaming girls taught him to hate. His haunting, surreal, emotionally demanding pieces, all the way back to the Sixties, have influenced Radiohead and The Cocteau Twins. Vocally admired by Sting, Brian Eno, and David Bowie (executive producer here), he receives on screen testimonials from Ute Lemper, Jarvis Cocker, Lulu, Marc Almond, Damon Albarn, Allison Goldfrapp, and Gavin Friday.

Kijak's film is interesting enough to attract new converts to this cult artist. It's also a pleasure to watch because it's so well made. It's convincing, elegant, revealing, seamless, and frequently quite beautiful.

The film begins by teasing viewers with the historically reclusive nature of the man ever since he gave up public performance some time in the Seventies. Then it springs its bombshell: Scott has consented to a lengthy interview for the film. '30 Century Man' is not so much a life as a life-in-art. We learn little about personal matters such as depression and a drinking problem but everything about his style and imagination and the stories of the individual albums. The beauty of the film is as a portrait of musical evolution describing changing ensembles, recording methods, and moods from album to album, the latest many years apart. It's also the story of an artist influencing other artists, rather than prancing before the public.

Before we get to that, there's enough footage of TV performances to show that The Walker Brothers (who were neither brothers nor named Walker) were a conventional cute singing package. M.O.R. slop, you might say, especially considering their peak year of 1965 was the time when Dylan released 'Highway 61 Revisited.' On his own, Scott wanted to do Jacques Brel, the angst-ridden, sweaty French songwriter. He did Brel smoothly, in English, with that mellifluous baritone of his.

Later when the solo compositions emerge, he moves further and further toward art compositions with horror-show moodiness and highly crafted sound landscapes. The latest songs some say are not songs at all but something else, haunting tone poems with words born, Scott says, out of a life of bad dreams. Some of the images used to illustrate later compositions, however, still put one in a Seventies mood, though the dreamy floating patterns, colors, and texts have nothing dated about them. Maybe even the mature Scott Walker style grows out of a strain of Seventies English rock impressionism. (That may partly explain Walker's remaining in the UK, but he was also in love with Europe through its films.) The lyrics, often floated dreamily on screen with lines in space, are occasionally quite strange.

One suave passage traces key songs from all Walker's albums through time to show he did interesting work even early in his solo career. While the music is playing multiple screens show musicians listening and commenting on the work.

Though the film doesn't say so, Walker's lyrics from the Eighties on, when the albums became less frequent, are stronger and freer.

'Cripple fingers hit the muezzin yells/some had Columbine some had specks/Cripple fingers hit the rounds of shells/some had clinging vine some had specks

The good news you cannot refuse/The bad news is there is no news' ('Patriot,' a single, 1995)

Excerpts we hear (and partly see) show Walker is adventurous and extravagant (but a deft and calmly focused director) in studio orchestrations, using lots of strings and building a large wooden box to get just the right percussion sound. Another time a percussionist must hit a large slab of meat. Doing the music for Leos Carax's film 'Pola X,' he has a large studio full of loud percussionists. Classical musicians are instructed to play violins to imitate the sound of German planes coming in to bomb English towns--not an easy day's work. It's all very intriguing, suggesting a personal musical world that's scary, but still welcomes you to come in.

I can understand why a previous reviewer mistook this at first for a mockumentary. It is jargon-loaded, trivia-burdened, and at times downright (unintentionally) comic-pompous. Walker had a fine mellow voice for ballad singing and expressed some originality in a very few later songs, but aside from this?

Why drag in everyone who knew him and/or once grooved on his music and lyrics so they can be mugshot while straining to convince us he's some kind of unsung (pun intended)phenom all of us should recognize and appreciate? If this was the intended theme and purpose of the film, it is an utter failure, suggesting the mystery of Scott Walker's life is that there is no mystery.

If the film makers are trying to make some other point (as is achieved in better music bio films), it's not clear what that might be. It doesn't help that some of his incomprehensible pseudo-poetic lyrics are scrolled in the background.

Several of the commentators are as embarrassingly inarticulate as Walker's own more "advanced" lyrics are. (Are we sure this isn't a mock-umentary?) Where was the director/editor in all this rambling? Off somewhere grooving on Walker's earlier recordings?

Interestingly, the most intelligent comment comes briefly from Sting when he begins to talk about the dark side of romanticism, etc. It's a shame he (or somebody) wasn't given more time to explore the significance of Walker's life. Scott Walker was not one of the greatest musical/poetry talents of the last forty years, but surely he deserves better than this inept bio-film.