In 1970, when Dezo Hoffman produced this stylised portrait of Scott Walker, the 27-year-old singer was, as he would later admit, entering a long period of creative decline. Having been a reluctant pop star in the mid-1960s as lead singer of the Walker Brothers, a trio dubbed “the American Beatles”, he had embarked on a singular solo career as a balladeer whose style encompassed American show tunes and the more expressive songs of his hero, the Belgian chansonnier Jacques Brel.
In retrospect, Walker’s early solo albums are among the greatest, and most unlikely, second acts of 1960s pop stardom. Scott (1967), Scott 2 (1968) and Scott 3 (1969) sold surprisingly well despite being willfully out of step with the psychedelic experimentalism of the time. In 1969, he was even given his own BBC series, Scott, on which he sang Broadway standards and Brel ballads as well as his own material. That same year, he released Scott 4, an album written, he later said, “on drink” and entirely made up of original songs. Now recognised as one of his greatest recordings, it sold poorly. The world was not ready for the existentialist musings of a pop singer whose touchstones were the films of Kurosawa and Bergman and the novels of Kafka and Camus.
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