Revisiting Scott Walker’s final masterpiece

Apollo Frequencies is a series exploring sounds that seem to come from another world. In this week’s edition, we dive into American-British auteur Scott Walker’s most unhinged song.

No one ever has or ever will do it quite like Scott Walker. In his 60-year recording career, he went from teen idol to pop innovator to washed-up crooner to reclusive mad scientist. Born Noel Scot Engel in Hamilton, Ohio, he spent his teen years in Los Angeles and then moved to London with his new band, The Walker Brothers — none of them brothers and none of them surnamed Walker. There, they found massive success with songs like “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” inspiring a craze akin to a regional Beatlemania (a reverse British invasion, if you will).

The Walker Brothers made schmaltzy, overproduced ’60s pop a la Tom Jones and barely played their own instruments. Other than their good looks, their only real asset was Scott’s voice, a quavering baritone meant for far greater things. In 1967, he left the group to start his solo career, releasing five increasingly strange albums (Scott 1–4 and ’Til the Band Comes In) that took perilous risks while staying within the era’s Middle-Of-the-Road (MOR) format. Then the bottom fell out: His original songs and Jacques Brel covers weren’t selling, and, trapped in a long-term label contract, he was forced into singing ill-advised covers for the first half of the ’70s.

When Philips Records finally dropped him, he went full recluse, surfacing in 1978 to write the only four great songs on the Walker Brothers’ reunion album Nite Flights, and again in 1984 to release Climate of Hunter, a wonderfully bizarre hybrid of ’80s rock and brazen experimentalism. His last three solo albums — Tilt (1995), The Drift (2006), and Bish Bosch (2012) — dove further into the deep end, extremely challenging records that seemed to preclude any possibility of enjoyment. By then, his career had formed an inverse arc to that of the artist-as-hero’s journey archetype: Too strange to continue his massive success as a pop idol, he suffered a decade of binge drinking and self-hatred and emerged a different beast. While some fans were distraught by his heel turn, he gained legions of new enthusiasts, many of whom (myself included) have remained loyal Scott stans long past his death in 2019.

Of that final era, his most sonically ambitious album was The Drift, the making of which was documented by director Stephen Kijak in Scott Walker: 30 Century Man. For that record, Walker asked an orchestral string section to play like airplanes crashing; built a human-sized wooden box with internal mics to be a canvas for slamming pint glasses and a rolling giant thimble; and had his percussionist spar with a side of beef to emulate the sound of a mob mutilating the hanged bodies of Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Pitacci. Relative to that record, Bish Bosch feels at times like spaghetti thrown at a wall but contains moments of intense brilliance. Take, for instance, the pure chaos of the project’s centerpiece — a 22-minute song named after a distant, long-dead dwarf star called SDSS1416+13B, one of the coldest known objects in the universe.

“SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)” tells a fictional tale of the final minutes in the life of the historical figure Zercon, a diminutive jester in the court of Attila the Hun. Delivered mostly in the first person, the track begins with an atonal a capella full of profane insults. “If shit were music / La da da, la da da / You’d be a brass band,” Scott-as-Zercon sings. Then a doomsday guitar note sounds, and he begins to spout a mix of erudite mythology references and bathroom wall jokes, including phone numbers read in Roman numerals. He sings of a botched circumcision, a “wormy anus,” severed “reeking gonads” fed to a “shrunken face,” and a Roman “who’s proof that Greeks fucked bears.” We’re only halfway through. Later, Zercon climbs a pole, and the rest of the story is told from his rising perspective. When he reaches the top, lightyears from Earth, he realizes he’s a goner. “It’s so cold! Infrared!” he moans. “What if I freeze and drop into the darkness?”

Listening to “Zercon” from start to finish is a feat of endurance, but that hasn’t stopped it from inspiring a multitude of deep-dive essays and Reddit threads by amateur Scottheads expounding on its brilliance. (It’s also been an object of ridicule, an example of Walker’s ur-abstruse pretension, though these can be found in virtually all of his solo works). It reminds me of the best scenes in Alejandro Jodorowski’s Santa Sangre, an epic circus film so ambitious in both breadth and depravity that even when it fails (and it often does), it’s still fascinating. The song paints images of road-rashed bellies, Reagan sodomizing Gorbachev, and a screamed passage about an unnatural son throwing his mother’s food back at her. But just when it threatens to topple off the rails, it hangs on by the edge of a wheel, hurtling with purpose toward its final moments.

Its ending is surprisingly poignant, considering we’ve just listened to 20 minutes of poo and pee jokes. Picture the life of a fifth-century dwarf, groomed to entertain a famously sadistic ruler: Under unspeakably cruel conditions, he survives by debasing himself. During one such humiliation ritual, he turns the tables on Attila and then escapes, not west through Europe or east through Asia, but into the sky. As his torturer disappears in the distance below, he finally tastes freedom, but he soon climbs past a point of no return. In his last moments, surrounded by the blackness of dead stars, he realizes he’s dying. His human body becomes a celestial one, frozen in space until, many centuries later, Scott Walker arrives to sing his story.