130. Scott Walker - Scott 2 (March 1968)

1. Jackie*

2. Best of Both Worlds

3. Black Sheep Boy

4. The Amorous Humphrey Plugg*

5. Next*

6. The Girls from the Streets

7. Plastic Palace People

8. Wait Until Dark

9. The Girls and the Dogs

10. Windows of the World

11. The Bridge

12. Come Next Spring

A-

This is an unusual album. Which isn't really surprising if you know anything about Scott Walker. But even so, this album stands at a crossroads. Stylistically, and in terms of content, it's a very old fashioned pop album. Lush yet tasteful orchestral arrangements and a mix of covers with a few originals thrown in. If not for the lyrical content (and the sheer quality) it could be mistaken for any number of sixties crooner albums currently clogging up charity shop milk crates across the world. 

What really sets this album apart is the song choices and the delivery. Walker has an odd voice - at once technically excellent and archly theatrical, with a tinge of bombast. The arrangements supporting his vocals are almost uniformly of a dark, slightly sinister type. And the songs themselves! Well - let's just say there are a lot of prostitutes mentioned. The result is a sort of grand, decadent album chronicling the dark side of life in the classiest way possible. Which must have been odd for fans of the Walker Brothers still hoping for another "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore".

The lyrics are uniformly excellent. The standout tracks are two Jacques Brel reinterpretations. "Jackie" is a galloping song about a man dreaming of every possible life he could lead and all the glory it would entail, but who ultimately just wants to bum around with low-lifes. "Next" is harrowing. We've seen it before back on the Jacques Brel album we had a while ago, but here in excellently translated English it's fucking bleak (if you're wondering, it's about the psychological trauma of having been forced to lose ones virginity in a mobile army brothel during the war). However, this album is noteworthy for showing Walker's development as a songwriter, and his originals are pretty good, too. My favourite is "The Amorous Humphrey Plugg", which is a musically gorgeous song about a repressed man who escapes the drudgery of children and work by wandering the red light district, imagining himself drowning in a sea of kisses. "The Girls from the Street" is basically what it says on the tin, and "Plastic Palace People" is an impressionistic song about slightly sinister bohemians.

The rest of the songs, a mix of covers, are kind of all over the place. There isn't a bad song on the album, but it's odd to suddenly veer from the ballad "Best of Both Worlds" to the melodramatised country of "Black Sheep Boy". And, as is often the case with old pop albums, side two can't really match the quality of side one. Still, this is a really good album. Very much a "late night with half a pack of smokes and a bottle of red" sort of affair. 

It's not really hard to see why Walker became such an important cult figure in music. His refusal to cater to contemporary tastes (this was released right in the heart of the psychedelic 60s, after all), coupled with his willingness to take some pretty odd risks, means that he manages to be both exciting and frustrating in exactly the way you want a slightly obscure, "difficult" artist to be. His music is as much about raising possibilities as it is about providing concrete artistic statements. This becomes far more evident on Scott 4 (which we'll be getting to in a while), which opens with, of all things, a bizarre art piece recapping the plot of The Seventh Seal, and features a truly gorgeous song about the dangers of Stalinism, of all things. And then there's something like Tilt, which is just fucking weird. 

Well this album wasn't really new to me, but it was nice to revisit it after a long absence. If you want something grand and eloquent and strange it's certainly worth checking out. Just maybe don't play it around any small children.