RIP Scott Walker

Just learned today that Scott Walker, the former singer of the Walker Brothers and architect of the most challenging avant garden pop I have, passed away at the age of 76.

I first learned about Walker from a muso friend, who gave me a look of withering disdain in 2003 or 2004 when he told me that this Walker guy had produced Pulp's latest album, and I said I didn't know who he was.

How could you blame me, though? As I discovered a year or so later, when I wandered into a New York record store and asked about Scott Walker's albums, the guy wasn't well known at all in the US in those days. Which is ironic because he was American, though he'd made his name as a 60s boy band icon, and then again as a critical darling in the 1980s for the succession of challenging albums that started with Climate of Hunter. I soon started reading Pitchfork's 100 albums lists, and Walker was all over those (as much as you could be releasing an album only every 11 years, that is).

And as I got more familiar with the history of British rock, I started seeing him get name-dropped again and again. He may not appear in official histories of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, but Scott Walker was creating music, both with the Walker Brothers and on his own, that would be just as influential to the Britpop acts I would become obsessed with in high school.

When I got back to London in 2006, about the time Walker released his album The Drift, I caught a wave of interest in him, and so I picked up the essentials: Scott 1 through 4, and a greatest hits album featuring some of his best solo and Walker Brothers material. I also watched the shit out of a documentary about him and the recording of the Drift, called 30 Century Man. My flatmates at the time were bemused by this slavish attention to an artist they'd never heard of, but I've never shaken my love for Walker since.

I did pick up the challenging albums later, of course - I got the Drift a couple of years later, and Bish Bosh a few years after that, and for Christmas recently I got Climate of Hunter and Tilt. And more awesomely, in 2008 I saw Drifting and Tilting, a concert of Walker's music from those albums, played at the Barbican by an orchestra and sung by luminaries such as Blur's Damon Albarn and Pulp's Jarvis Cocker.

The music was impressive, for all its challenging nature, because it was just as much performance art piece as rock concert. Just as in the recording of the Drift, for the song Clara (about Mussolini's mistress Clara Petacci) the musicians wheeled out a side of pork onto the stage and had a boxer punch it to achieve the percussion sound from the album.

And of course, what was most impressive was turning round idly at one point during the concert and seeing the great man, Scott Walker himself, sitting at the production boards. That's as close as you could get to a live performance by him.

Thinking about him today, what struck me was that I got into his music at a very dark time for me personally. 2008 was a sucky year, full of job strife, discord with flatmates, bad health and existential angst over my dating life (even more than now, if you can believe it). I was so alone and afraid that I found myself having to go find a psychoanalyst, whom I saw for a year afterward.

Scott 1 through 4 played on fairly continuous loops during those days. "Two Weeks Since You've Gone", a mournful ballad from Scott 3, was what I was listening to one night as I lay in bed unable to sleep from the depression and the anxiety caused by my poor physical health (I was eating like shit and not exercising, and getting more depressed because of it). The string sections perfectly captured my feelings that dark night, and I remember being pleasantly weirded out not long after when I heard something similar-sounding in a Stella Artois commercial - a synchronicity that made sense because Belgian chansonnier Jacques Brel was a huge influence on Scott Walker.

It's been a fairly constant Scott Walker "moment" since he released the Drift, and since that documentary came out about him. Artist after artist has fallen over themselves in the last decade to talk about his influence on them, to the point that the frontman of the Arctic Monkeys even released his own Walker-influenced album, as the Last Shadow Puppets, to explore that influence on his music. It may not be a great album, but the words "influenced by Scott Walker" were enough to get me to plunk down money for it.

The Guardian ran the obituary today, of course, along with a number of testimonials from fans and collaborators. Some never met him, and some worked very closely with him, but all spoke movingly about him.

But the thing that sticks with me right now is a scene from the documentary, when the filmmakers interview Angela Morley (previously known as Wally Stott before undergoing gender reassignment surgery). Morley is telling about her experiences working with Walker, and they play Montague Terrace (In Blue) for her. And as the strings swell, and she hears again the music she helped commit to tape, she tears up - probably the most important moment in a movie aiming to pin down why exactly this one artist, who most people have never heard of, was so revered.

I'm just glad I did get to find out about him, before he passed. And that I got to see him, in real life, sharing the music he wrote, all those years ago.