Hello, hello everyone! I know that many of us over the last couple weeks have been asking the same question the late George Carlin once asked: “Where are we going, and what’s with the handbasket?” I don’t have any blazing insights, alas. But I can always bring some music. On that note, I will stick with Scott Walker this week. He was the frontman for a British pop group called The Walker Brothers who were a big deal in the UK back in the mid-1960s. They didn’t make much of a splash in the US, which is why many of us don’t discover any of their work as a group or individually until well after the fact. The Walker Brothers split up in the late 1960s, and after Scott’s solo career hit a very rough patch in the 1970s, he got the band back together again. They started off with a hit, and then commercially they pretty much fizzled. The LP Nite Flights would be their last release before going their own separate ways again. Scott really stretched out creatively for this last outing, and the songs he wrote for the album, including the title track, pointed the way for his future as a solo artist – away from mainstream pop and rock and toward something more on the experimental side. The title track for Nite Flights almost sounds like something David Bowie would have written and performed in 1978, and Bowie would later cover this song quite successfully. Scott Walker had an excellent baritone voice, and could sound as smooth as Bowie when he wanted to.
The content is a bit on the dark side and likely off-putting for fans of their work in the 1960s, and it does sound just a bit ahead of its time. Scott would go on to record only a small handful of albums before he passed away last decade. Each album was more avant-garde than the previous album, and his interest in shining a light on human rights violations and more existential themes from 1978 onward was on full display.
The bar is open and the jukebox is limited by your imagination. Stop by if you have a moment. Cheers!
