Mnemonsynon: Remembering Scott Walker
I found him at Swiss Cottage Library. They were running the music stock down. Record Sale. I had nothing to play it on but I bought Ryuichi Sakamoto’s B-2 Unit anyway. I didn’t listen to it for another ten years.
But I did have a cheap radio cassette player. The detachable speakers at either end of the table framed the third floor window view. It looked south, across the railway line into Euston, toward Paddington Rec and Maida Vale, the grand spike of St Augustine’s at Kilburn Park. It was just enough of a panorama. I’d sit at the desk smoking as the sun faded, surveying the land and its trains. It felt good to be alive. No, I can’t say I ever thought that. It was of note that I hadn’t entirely extinguished myself. Better, but I never quite thought that either. There was a blip on the monitor. That’s about all you could say of it.
I was in recovery. There wasn’t much professional help around. I’d referred myself to what is now the Integrated Camden Drug Service at 210 Kilburn High Road, but they weren’t sure what to do with me. They were dealing mostly with heroin and crack at the time. If my urine tested positive for opiates, they said I could go on methadone. It was tempting to fake my way onto the programme. It’s a sluggish sort of thing, a dead end fug that might have suited. The chat in the waiting area was where and what to score, offers of sleeping pills. I managed to decline. All the staff could offer me was a course of acupuncture. I’d been sticking needles in myself enough already. Jesus. But I took up the offer for a few weeks. It was human contact after all.
The therapist suggested I ate more watermelon. It would clear the heat. The fucking joker. I walked home back down the High Road. A rogue Irish priest was denouncing the evil ways of the homosexuals outside WH Smiths. I tore the outsized cross from his hands and broke it on the ground. You’re not fit to carry this, you cunt. His assistant punched me in the head. I came to amidst the indifference of the afternoon. They were gone. I dusted myself down for the short distance home. These were not the best of times.
I played this compilation constantly. I’d been listening to more country in recent years and if you want a narrative of being fucked up and a carrot stick of potential redemption, George Jones is as good as you’ll ever find, particularly in the rawness of these earlier 50s Starday recordings, before Billy Sherrill got to him. One of things I liked about this kind of country was that you didn’t space out to it in the same way you could to dance or dub. I didn’t need anymore spacing out. I wanted three chord songs with a solid backing and a narrative to hold onto. A decent bannister that would stop me cascading down any stairwells.
So I wasn’t too sure about the Scott Walker Boychild compilation they had on cassette. I knew the name of course. He’d been namechecked enough in the music press over the years by other people I liked and he was on a long internal list of things to check out at some point or another. So why not now? The now when there was so little to do but to make it through another cycle. My dreams were all torture scenes. Flemish judgements and John Martin cataclysms. I was at least eating again. I’d got down to just under eight stone at the end. I’ll never be that snake hipped again. I can promise you.
It was too much. The sound of Scott. These orchestral arrangements by Angela Morley, credited at the time of recording this series of four solo albums as Wally Stott, were beautiful. I could barely stand them. But I held onto the tape for several months and a fairly reasonable overdue fine. I’d manage a song or two at first then maybe a side. I had no idea who I was. There was this person now and there was this person then but they didn’t match up at all convincingly. There were holes everywhere. I didn’t dare feel anything if I could avoid it. Once I fell asleep I’d be eviscerated all over again.
On a good day I’d manage the walk to Swiss Cottage. The area to the east of the High Road was Camden bound. I’d often get a sandwich from Betty’s newsagents at the top of Belsize Road. There was a tiny Italian deli counter at the back that the husband ran. I’d eat on the way towards West End Lane, across Abbey Road, and then generally through Rowley Way, the Alexander Road Estate, along that ziggurat dale towards Loudoun Road. THE DEVILS! I would always think. Then up and across the Finchley Road.
The Library felt like home. I’d grown up around Gospel Oak and my mum, sister and me would visit the swimming baths in the early 70s. This was a definite memory. This one didn’t feel faked or implanted. I had been here before. I started developing a more conscious interest in architecture. Buildings were solid measurable objects that were difficult to fake. There was no way that Basil Spence’s work on the Hampstead Civic Centre had been constructed overnight by supernatural criminal conspiracy. With Betty’s sandwiches and the fry ups at the Famished Cafe on the bridge, some strength began to return. I’d wander longer distances to Edgware or Limehouse. Slowly filling in the map with material forms. I’d listen to Scott as I slumped on trains and buses home.
Stuart Tower was along Maida Vale. Seventeen storeys in an uninspiring Y. This stretch south towards the Regent’s Canal had been redeveloped by the London County Council, and then GLC, from 1959 onwards with various housing blocks on the western side. Stuart Tower however was a private development by the Church Commissioners and George Wimpey from 1964. I’d mentioned Scott Walker in passing to a friend and he said that his wife’s cousin had done some electrical work in Scott’s flat there. Or something like that. That was enough. Scott was in potential sight from my bedroom as I could just make out the upper storeys. I imagined Scott inside, possibly dosed up on tranquillisers, listening to Boulez or something on an old hifi and definitely wearing sun glasses at all times.
These were the last years before the internet. It existed but it was not ubiquitous. Urbi et Orbi on dial-up modems. So I was oblivious to that fact that Scott by this point was living in Chiswick. Not that anyone knew that much about what he got up to at all. He’d surface with an album and then it was back underwater for another ten years. I’d read the biography A Deep Shade of Blue which filled in a few gaps, but otherwise it was rather blissful silence. What on earth did Scott do with all that time? I kept my eyes open from the top deck of the bus or at the BFI but I never spotted him anywhere at all.
So I had to use my imagination. Maybe he was a keen amateur cook developing a line of jams or chutneys. Perhaps he spent his morning looking over the form and afternoons at the bookies. Then on other days he’d tune a grand piano to esoteric temperaments. Fuck knows. Scott’s life was the only thing I can remember imagining during this period. My actual life, such as it was, the recent memories, was so much grand guignol that I couldn’t escape. I was exhausted with it.
I began to develop a cunning plot. I’d picked up the habit in Japan of changing English sentences into kanji characters. This is sometimes used as a sort of mnemonic system in Japanese. There was a video lesson I’d had at university where a Japanese choir had done this to remember the Ode to Joy in German:
Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium!
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
Well, rather than just transliterate the sounds into katakana, you can use kanji to add helpful meaning to remember it thus:
風呂出で 詩へ寝る 月輝る 粉健
とホテル 会う末 理事 生む
ビルベ と 0点 夫追い得る 取るん健
貧無理死へ 台ん 入り人産む
Of course, this new Japanese meaning is not related to the German original, this is a quite separate tale of getting out the bath, going to sleep and so on. However this transmutation of meaning was rather appealing. If felt like an unexplored literary area, like Saussure and his anagrams. But it was also madness. Even sober, this practice still trailed me around as a tic. I’d been reading an article about the Conran family, the dynasty of Sir Terence, Shirley and Jasper. Conran was a Japanese homophone for 混乱/konran. Chaos and confusion. The same 乱/ran that Akira Kurosawa used as the title of his 1985 retelling of King Lear set during the Sengoku era (1467–1600).
I’d passed by the reconstructed Temple of Mithras which was then located at Queen Victoria Street in the City. Two thoughts coalesced. How would it be if the Conran family were involved in the resurrection of the Mithraic cult in contemporary London? A conspiracy of the crème de la crème? Not just the usual financiers, but also the designers and artists, the restaurateurs, tv presenters and so on. The Tony Blair period was only a a couple of years away. Cool Britannia. The story concluded with an ending taken pretty much straight from the 1967 Hammer version of Quatermass and The Pit but instead of a giant locust like creature amongst the cranes, a gargantuan Scott Walker (as the Yazidi figure of Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel) battled against Ahriman/Arimanius who had been summoned by the Mithraists. Of course, a specialist in Yazidi, Zoroastrian or Mithraic cosmology might have a few issues here, but that’s what it was. I worked on the potential book for about four years and then lost it in a hard disk failure, although I still have most of the written notes.
In the course of writing, I’d grown more and more uncomfortable about using Scott as a character. What if the book was a vague success? It’s not that the Scott Walker in the story had that much in common with Scott actual. It was clearly preposterous to claim that he was Melek Taus so there was nothing libellous about it. But I knew he’d want to be left to his own devices without being involved in any sort of speculative apocalyptic fantasy, however minor. I respected that. The process of writing it had been healing. Maybe that was enough. No need to put a used sticking plaster on display.
But now he’s dead. I can’t say that it made me particularly sad. I’m sure some of his fans were still hoping that he might turn away from his avant-garde experimentation back to the earlier more melodic work but I think it’s fair to say that period was done and I’m very grateful that he never took the shillings that must have been offered for him to do a few live gigs of that older material. Perhaps I could return to that story. Compared to the mid 90s, there’s a greater — if still tiny — interest or understanding in who the Yazidis are, but their story became so tragic I’m not sure I could go near it now. The Temple of Mithras was moved into the Bloomberg HQ, back to its original site on Walbrook and in a shiny new presentation. That still works. Scott’s later output from Tilt on became increasingly concerned with the end of things. I don’t understand the half of it but I think that’s the way of actual visionary eschatology.
I’m deliberately not posting his music here. Heavens, there’ll be enough of those think pieces and the like to find, the ones that any death will generate these days as so much copy. I guess I just wanted to add this personal note that is so imperfectly written and quite far from describing how Scott Walker really did pull me back from an abyss. There are epiphanies in music we don’t dare reveal to the Creator. We’d be mocked for them. A few years ago in Rome, trailing through Pasolini sites, sunshine along Via Eufrate, Finocchio Hill, Mussolini and mausoleums, wild boar ragu at Pommidoro, EUR and further to Ostia. Humming and singing Farmer in the City all the fucking time.
It was the journey of a life…
Oh do shut up! I’d say to myself. Leave me alone, Scott. Laughing.
