![]() ![]() By 1966, the Walkers’ UK fan club was larger than the Beatles’ and the Stones’ Mick Jagger, sizing up the competition, tried to start a feud by flicking cigarette butts down on Walker at a nightclub. As Reynolds wrote, the only “real” Walker Brothers were Scott and John’s voices, “ two solo singers sharing a b(r)and name… LPs were the works of a mythical beast, spawned and constructed under the laboratory conditions of Philips Studios.” Years before Bowie would create a “plastic” rock star, there was the Walker Brothers (not brothers, none of them really named Walker), who didn’t play on their records, who used different backing bands for touring and TV appearances (live, Gary Leeds used paper sticks, the actual drummer parked backstage). Like the spider-egg memory cruelly programmed into the replicant’s memory in Blade Runner, the Walker Brothers felt real but did not actually exist in any recongisable reality. The somber flavor of their songs suggested there was still a war on (and of course, there was-one reason the Walkers had left the US was to avoid the draft). The Walkers, though they looked like surfer gods, lived in darkened rooms: they suffered breakups, desertions and morning-after regrets, their albums were lonely hearts columns. Britain, more than any other country, took them to heart, a hint that beneath the shine of Carnaby Street and the “classless” glamour society pages of David Bailey’s Box of Pin Ups there was still a weary nation that had never gotten over the war, a Britain for whom the glum fatalism of “Make it Easy on Yourself” and the doom-struck “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” rang more true than “All You Need is Love,” whose promise seemed extended only to the beautiful and young. The Walker Brothers were cool, handsome Californians who sang maudlin, shabby pop. James, when Walker was a pop star and Bowie nothing but polite aspiration. They first met around 1966 at a London nightclub, The Scotch of St. Each was precocious, ambitious, beautiful. Jones became David Bowie, Engel became Scott Walker. One is Noel Scott Engel, born in Ohio in 1943, an American who went to Britain for fame and who stayed there the other is David Robert Jones, born in Brixton on the day before Engel’s fourth birthday, who scrabbled for fame in Britain and, once he finally got it, left for good. Start by placing them across the board from each other: two queen’s bishops, rows of squares ahead of them. And yet, haggard as he appeared, he looked always perfectly self-controlled, more than calm-almost invulnerable. ![]() It would have been miraculous if he hadn’t at one time or another. I suppose he had made some slight noise of some kind or other. Scott Walker, Message to David Bowie on his 50th Birthday, 1997. ![]()
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