Tilting At Windmills

Well, I have to ask. Where have you been all this time? "Who knows, right? Hanging out. Doing a little travelling. Nothing constructive." An answer to induce despair in the most patient of observers. Scott Walker is, though, his customary charming self. The most singular underachiever in music is a past master at explaining away whatever creative difficulty or business block he's had to labour under. One gets a glimpse of the beguiling manner that he's used to fend off some kind of disaster these past... oh, 25 years or so.

It's that long since the epochal Scott 4 was released to deafening disregard; 18 years since the tantalising EP's worth of material on Nite Flights; and more than a decade since Climate Of Hunter was detonated on the feckless pop surroundings of 1984. Some work rate. No wonder Walker exists as little more than a shadowy half-presence in music.

Tilt, his new record released this month, has a spectral quality about it that derives in part from his elusive, bewildering legend. It's a record of skeletal parts that coheres in the mighty, scarcely diminished voice that acts as its narrator. Just as Climate Of Hunter slipped Scott loose, finally, of most of his associations - the tormented crooner and lovelorn young man of 20 years before - so Tilt seems like a bulletin from an outer darkness that is very strange and rare ground for a 'rock' record to tackle. Or: who is this man and what is he doing here?

Now past 50, he is a veteran in a business that thrives on youthful fizz. At a time when Elastica and Oasis are touted as young radical gods, it might be asked who will want to hear such a dense, opaque meditation as this hour of music. There isn't much left of the thick romantic swirl that the early Scott Walker records were drenched in.

As finicky and detail-minded as Brian Wilson or Phil Spector, the young Scott Engel used European string writing to finesse a sorely beautiful songwriting style. The grand, sobbing orchestrations of Peter Knight, Wally Stott and Reg Guest on the early Walker Brothers records were a potent backdrop for his looming baritone voice. But now, that music seems as far away and remote from his current work as Beethoven is from Peter Maxwell Davies; as Charlie Patton is from Robert Cray.

"I didn't listen to lot of pop while I was doing this, because you subconsciously reference a lot. I listened to Beethoven's piano sonatas throughout and some Bartok string quartets. And some blues records. After it, I did what I used to do and gathered in every single thing that was going on and listening to all of it, to be sure I was... that the recording was going to be what I wanted.

"I can't tell you where it comes from. It comes from silence, most of it. I sit around and I'm waiting. I'm waiting and waiting."

Like the rest of us. Perhaps Scott Engel is just more patient than most. The waiting sits well on him: the famous Walker Brothers mane of hair has receded into a trimmed and thinning top layer, but otherwise he still has the lean, cowboyish physique that he brought with him from Ohio to London when he and John Maus and Gary Leeds set out to become 'bigger than The Beatles' on an exploratory trip to city in 1965. As The Walker Brothers, they sequenced some huge hits in the summer of that year. It didn't last long, and Maus and Leeds have never made much of an impact outside their few hits together. For Scott Walker, forever stuck with his adopted name, it was a different if equally star-crossed story.

Five solo records for Philips, cut between 1967 and 1971, were touchstones for a singer songwriter generation that never knew they existed. While bedsits everywhere hummed to the sound of Al Stewart or Cat Stevens, the deeper draughts of Scott Walker barely registered beyond his original following, which would always prefer him to return to "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Any More" in any case. By the time of Scott 4, which was deleted a year after it was made, the pop idol had lost his place and the enigmatic recluse had taken over.

Scott Engel's transition from one rock era to another might seem trudgingly slow. In fact, on the early records, he worked with almost indecent haste by today's standards. After a few compromised MOR records, came The Walker Brothers reunion, which seemed like no valuable escapade at all until the four mesmerising pieces which emerged on the Nite Flights album of 1977. Scott blueprinted all his subsequent work in those fractured, driven songs, culminating in "The Electrician", which enumerated many of the issues which have fired him since: the interface of politics and love, societies in flux, and music that bridges classical tradition with some displaced part of rock language.

It took him another seven years to release Climate Of Hunter. Frustratingly brief, the record still seems like an interim report: half of it is so powerful that it shames almost everything done in rock before or since, while some of the tracks seem nearly but not quite right. As with Scott 4, his other half-baked masterpiece, Engel couldn't seem to see it absolutely through. The best of these records is so extraordinary that anything else seems like failure.

Now, though, 11 years after we last met at the time of the release of Climate Of Hunter, we have some catching up to do...

"I think I said to you before, I don't write until I'm ready to record. It's pointless. If I'm going to sit around in a wilderness because I can't record any songs... I threw a whole lot of my songs away, as many as I could write. Which isn't a lot. Ever."

Finally, with a deal with Phonogram/Mercury/Fontana having bubbled under for several years, he started work on a new record. "I'll start an idea, the next part might come up in a couple of months... Nothing's wasted at all. I'll read something or see something and think, that's where that goes. . . I'm trying to go for something as carved down as possible. It's unlike a Dylan song or a Neil Young song where everything is moving along. That's not what I want. Everything that way seems too pat, to me."

Nothing on Tilt could be described that way. From the aria-like opening of "Farmer In The City" to the Delta blues threnody of "Rosary", the record unspools as a sequence of tableaux that abjure both simple interpretation and gratification. This is hard stuff so far removed from rock songwriting that it might as well line up with Franz Schubert as with Van Morrison. How is it put together in the studio?

"By the time I get to the studio, it's all written down. I have to have readers I can work with, because I always want the music to be played together, at once. I don't want any drum machines or click tracks. Nothing like that. Very little overdubbing, if possible. I never try to give them too much indications of what I'm going to do. Because then it'll turn into a group thing, which is what I don't want either. I want each piece to have an intensity of its own. So it has a kind of febrile quality.

"I'll do a couple of tunes on the first day, then take them home and listen to them in the evening, go in and do them again if I don't like them - I don't have any equipment at home except a guitar and an amp and a little five-octave keyboard, so I don't have any fantasy or idea of what it'll be like when I get in there. So I'm surprised, constantly."

What does Peter Walsh (co-producer of both Tilt and Climate Of Hunter) do? "He understands how I work. It's hard for a co-producer to work with me because everything is... everything comes from the songs. Every single sound in the track relates to the lyric in some way. So he's a security thing there. as it goes along, I give him indications of what I want and he tells me if he can get it. I leave that to him. That's valuable to me, because a lot of guys will feel they have to justify themselves in some kind of way. And then they get in the way."