Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Scott Walker’s 1995 turn to the avant-garde, a dense and operatic work of geopolitical and psychosexual pop music.
He was supposed to fail upwards. A photogenic genius with a golden voice, a half-gone gaze, a hotness so soft it felt mildly taboo. He had been a child star, and we all know how that goes, but on this occasion, TV and Broadway conspired to let one off unscathed. He flushed rebellion from his system early—joined low-rent gangs and toppled Beverly Hills outhouses, got himself expelled from a school or two—before flying to Europe to beat the Vietnam draft with the Walker Brothers, his pop trio of pretend siblings.
England loved him. He was 22 and allergic to fame, which made him untouchably cool—forever staring off-camera in an existential reverie, dreaming of Playboy bunnies laying wreaths at his tomb. This sort of fame required rebellion of a higher order. He denounced hippies, fled to a monastery, studied Gregorian chant. He ditched his wildly successful band and went solo, covering the Belgian bohemian Jacques Brel and dreaming up originals that would be, he opined, “very Dylan Thomas, very Kafka.” But his records were selling, so nobody minded—and besides, he was doomed to fail upwards. When his first front-to-back masterpiece, Scott 3, slowed sales, the business people gave him a TV show. When Scott 4 flopped, in 1969, they pondered promoting him to Vegas.
But Scott Walker had a superpower, the unique ability to fail again and fail better. Within a half-decade of that late-’60s crossroads, his sales were circling the gutter and credibility had flown the coop. He failed in flummoxing ways—sold out and became less famous—and would, in some corners, be seen to fail until the bitter end. But by 1995, as his last act dawned, the pressure was letting up. Walker was finally free to fail exactly how he wanted.
Tilt premiered at a playback party in London that year. Mojo noted bewildered faces and, eventually, begrudging recognition of a “record to be greatly admired, if not enjoyed.” Was it good? Nobody had a clue. The Telegraph sheepishly pronounced it a “masterpiece” in a review so hedged it felt like its own retraction.
Before its U.S. release through Drag City in 1997, the album received a trial by fire in the UK, where the border between idiosyncrasy and pretension is vigilantly patrolled. Some felt Walker was trespassing. “I hate Tilt, absolutely hate it,” said longtime devotee Marc Almond, one of the few to put his cards on the table.
Despite little consensus on its merits, Tilt became a byword for artistic ambition and integrity. Walker had chased his muse to the bottom of the charts and resurfaced somewhere surreal and extreme, in an outré-rock Atlantis. In the peripheral public eye, Tilt catapulted him from pop’s left field into a freaky avant-garde interzone. Amid the confusion, he had slipped out of his lyrics entirely. More than ever, Walker was attuned to mass human despair—to trauma, nationalism, war as a contemporary issue—yet icky about little feelings like his own. His internal battle between political urgency and emotional deflection suspends these sadistically cryptic songs in a strange dream world. Tilt’s most gasp-inducing swells accompany lines like:
I knew nothing of the horses
Nothing of the thresher
Or:
We had more in or going out
You were responsible for the rolling stock
The house is on fire, but Walker refuses to dial 911; instead, he devises encrypted distress signals.
While the lyrics bide their time before scaring you shitless, the music is less patient: Stretches of near-silent skitters and scrapes portend percussive blasts, which in turn summon infernos of celestial guitar, tremulous strings, and mammoth church pipe organ. Each part springs from a death-black silence—“like a great hands and mouth coming out of the dark at you,” as Walker once said, though at the time he was describing how it felt to have too many fans. His voice is formidable: at once rent with terror and devastatingly vulnerable, with vibrato like a loved one choking up mid-sentence. Listeners need not comprehend “Rosary”’s addled narrator, or spend days decoding his monstrously sexual cri de coeur, to know they should fear for the singer’s soul.
In the ’70s period when Walker really was sliding out of his mind—alcoholically anesthetized, sleepwalking through MOR slosh—he was prolific, effortless, his voice plain gorgeous. He spent the decade undercover in the spotlight, a neurotic heartthrob slicking up for the suits. He smiled at the camera on record covers. Something was horribly… right.
In 1978, he finally pulled himself together, turned his frown its usual way around, and masterminded the Walker Brothers’ swan song. Led by a now-classic suite of Walker originals, Nite Flights debuted the songwriting idiom that Tilt went on to master. Lead single “The Electrician,” he said, describes the intimate relationship between torturer and prisoner, based on stories of C.I.A. agents who would fly to South America, strap suspected rebels to beds, and wire their genitals to electrode-firing hand cranks. It established a chilling Walker archetype: the spiritually corrupt narrator in the throes of excess, deriving sexual frisson from political power.
Nite Flights attracted enough cognoscenti buzz to secure Walker a solo deal with Virgin. Meanwhile, Julian Cope’s 1981 compilation, Fire Escape in the Sky, was helping dispel Walker’s fusty air for a new crowd of post-punk freaks and gourmands. But Walker’s 1984 comeback, with the mutant AOR oddity Climate of Hunter, threatened to alienate the aliens, not to mention his paymasters. He identified himself as music’s “great leper”: a bubonic prophet lurking under the bridge, dooming any A&R who strayed across his path.
As Climate of Hunter made its way from the shelf to the bargain bin, Walker went missing, presumed drunk, lost in another peculiar seclusion. Two and a half years passed before his suffering manager, Ed Bicknell, finally made contact with his client.
Honestly, Nevermind
Drake
“What have you been doing?” Bicknell demanded.
“I’ve been painting,” Walker said.
“Really? Oils or watercolors?”
“No, man,” Walker replied. “Walls.”
He was scoring odd jobs as a painter and decorator.
Virgin put its sacred cow back on the market. Prospective producers included David Bowie, David Sylvian, the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Reid brothers, Brian Eno, and Daniel Lanois. Walker shrugged. Eno and Lanois had the most success, ensnaring him long enough to record some master tapes that Walker disowned and reputedly threw in the Thames.
Virgin snapped. Walker went missing (again), then resurfaced to cameo in a soft drink ad. The Sunday People offered rewards for sightings of a man now lost to himself.
“I’ve become the Orson Welles of the record industry,” he told The Independent. “People want to take me to lunch, but nobody wants to finance the picture.” He was exalted but not in the way he envisaged; forever in demand to sing as anyone but himself; a noble outsider teleported into a pop star’s perpetual flop era.
Nine, ten, eleven years passed—not only an eon in industry time but long enough to start a new life, study botany in Veneto, get to know your convolvulus from your crocuses. Or to clean up and get filthy rich in Vegas. But Walker had endeavored to be boring once, and his lost years haunted him. Now, passing 50, he craved a reinvention.
“I’m looking for that Francis Bacon, in-the-face, whoops factor in the sound,” he said of Tilt, speaking to Mojo in 1995. “I’d like people to sit and listen to it,” he added, “get into it through the words.”
Walker had written most of Tilt between ’91 and ’92, in the heyday of capitalist triumphalism. Amping his “Electrician” style with a new modernist extremity, he sketched geopolitical outlines, lashed the canvas with grotesquerie and psychosexual suggestion, and disrupted linear readings with a smear of voices from history and myth. It was serious contemporary art, which he mused had become a matter of “who combines better than who, who combines this way or that way.”
Working alongside Walker, Pete Walsh captured the whoops factor with brutally analog production: no samples, guide tracks, or compression; a cavalcade of clangor and quiet. Though Tilt sounds operatic by pop standards, a song like “Patriot (A Single)” revolts against refinement, colliding Walker’s vintage-velvet baritone with vanguard composers like Messiaen and Penderecki. “The Cockfighter” wants you to cry out in shock, its metal mechanics evoking Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft—a concert-hall transplant of Einstürzende Neubauten industrialism—as Walker splices excerpts from the trials of Queen Caroline and Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann into a wet-nightmare narrative of what he calls “national eroticism.”
However you spin it, Tilt’s bewildering lyric sheet is strewn with unidentified remains. Displaced images, fished from mysterious backwaters of history, hint at a logic just beyond the frame. Some demand scrutiny; others seem happy in suggestive soft focus.
“Patriot (A Single),” named for an American missile, opens and closes with disjointed phrases that, together, form the date that America launched the Gulf War. (“That’s why I call it a single—a single disc,” Walker said of the circularity.) The next line, “See how they run,” playfully alludes to a standard of another circular song form, the “infinite canon.” In the verse, Walker draws each melody eerily off-course:
I brought nylons from New York
Some had butterflies
Some had flecks
The hum of panic in Brian Gascoigne’s string arrangement is no false alarm. As the writer and researcher Robert Nedelkoff explained in Seth Sanders’ zine A Nest of Ninnies, Soviet aircraft bombarding Afghanistan in the Gulf War dropped nylon parachutes carrying Butterfly Mines. The oddly pretty market scene appears to be a smokescreen, Walker’s narrator a fighter pilot.
Sometimes a phrase resists you until, like a crossword clue, it gives in, and an arid verse blooms. “Bolivia ’95” opens with a wink toward the song’s subject, Che Guevara: “Doctorie, give me a C/For this Babaloo.” Guevara, a former physician born Ernesto, is “Doctor E.” The C gives his nom de guerre.
But in those eight words, Walker also conjures a cosmos of suggestion: the Afro-Cuban god Babalú-Ayé, said to heal earth and man, more explicitly referenced later on; the “C” as South American cocaine specter, cemented in the next line’s plea to “opiate me, doc”; the I Love Lucy character Ricky Ricardo, played by Cuban-born actor Desi Arnaz, whose signature song is the “Babalú”; and, as Nedelkoff has noted, a melody transposed from a ’60s series called Daktari, set in an East African zoo run by white Americans.
Ardent Scott Walker loyalists have despaired at the song’s cryptography, particularly its “Lemon Bloody Cola” chorus. But through that little opening lyric, “Bolivia ’95” cracks open. It encompasses not only Guevara’s C.I.A.-assisted capture and his execution by Bolivian forces, but also imperial America writ large. In this light, the rest of the song may implicate the stealth imperialism of Cocacolonization, U.S. interventions in coca production, and a raft of related hypocrisies and horrors that made headlines as Walker was writing Tilt.
If it all sounds exhaustingly dense, take solace in the occasional Easter egg hidden in plain sight. In Sundog, Walker’s 2017 lyric collection, he adjusts one phrase in Tilt closer “Rosary” to invite a startling read of the next. Here is Walker’s updated transcription:
We hear the song anew: the orgasmic, caged-animal moans; the promise of “all the trembling vein that you can bear”; the possible, surely-he-wouldn’t “pearl necklace” pun of “Rosary”; and the final, giant aural signpost:
I kiss holes for the bullets
In case of thigh
A perfect Walker gag: On an album condemned to appear hopelessly intellectual, the grand finale is, in some dimension, the confession of an orgasm addict—a howling paean to misbegotten blow jobs and the lustrous drizzling of semen on skin.
Walker’s final lyrics in the Sundog book—all written towards the end of his life, and sadly unrecorded—wade further into filth: one “dildo-smacked cheek,” two erections (one “mighty,” one “vengeful”), a demand to “dump on me for money,” one “nipple-zit” (“sucked”), a “felch” made flesh, and a chorus of “Thrust to shove/Like my love.” You can peg Tilt as the first masterpiece of Walker’s elliptical era, but “Rosary” illuminates a less-documented path: away from the sugared, black-coffee existentialism of Scott 4 and toward an indecorous, Brel’s-eye view of the species.
Even without his Rabelaisian wit, his moral intensity, Walker would remain canonical—a North Star for failures everywhere. Listening to Tilt, letting that great hands and mouth pull me into the void, one thought keeps leaping out: What a relief that you can even do this.
But is it good? Allow me to answer a question with a ques—only joking. Yes, Tilt is good. Scarily, maddeningly good. It is like an old mansion full of haunted arcana: revolving bookcases, secret rooms, a golden pouf to perch on sipping ancient eau de vie. Even the easiest pleasures, like the stained-glass daybreak in “Bouncer See Bouncer,” arise from such obscure surroundings their beauty is always sudden, a second too quick for your defenses.
Then again, Tilt is not so good that you should lock it away in a trophy cabinet. It is an album you can listen to. A gravitational weight, yes, and bad company in crowds, but not all that inhospitable. He welcomes you to go in easy, trusting your imagination. You can internalize the sound cues, the rattling chains, the freighted blackouts and flickers. Or you can hunt for his passionate emotion, hidden but desperate to be found within the lyric sheet. Rummage for psychic flotsam, cross-examine the non sequiturs, reverse the verses, noun the verbs, discard what won’t fit, squint and twist and flip until an inkling—of maternal neglect, American hubris, or some other unutterable thing—shimmers into view, as if through a frosted window.
To intercept Walker’s signals can be brain-mangling work. You can lose an evening to it, head hitting the pillow full of flowcharts with things like “‘tooth fairies’” at the top and “incest?” at the bottom. You might find that work torturous. But I want to suggest it is just like the torture that made “The Electrician” sing: the lethally intimate zap, from the crank to the groin to the heart, that feels, for a second, like love.
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