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For an example of Scott’s unorthodox songwriting techniques, take the album’s centrepiece, the twenty minute ‘SDSS1416 + 13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)’. The title contains two brown dwarves: one, the coldest sub-stellar body in the universe discovered so far; the other, Zercon, was a real-life Moorish jester at the fifth century court of Attila the Hun.
“I was interested in this thing about someone trying to escape his situation – in this case Attila’s wooden palace, which he regards as an immense toilet – and achieve a kind of spiritual sovereignty, and a height beyond calculation. As the song moves forward he imagines himself at different stages of height: he imagines first that he escapes and finds himself surrounded by eagles; then there’s the mention of St Simon on his pillar; then he jumps to 1930s America where it’s become a flagpole-sitter…’ Flagpole-sitting – trying to spend several days alone on a platform at the top of a pole – achieved a brief craze status in the 30s.
At the end of the song he eventually becomes a Brown Dwarf, known as SDSS1416. As with the majority of my songs, it ends in failure, Like a brown dwarf, he freezes to death.”
It’s not the only song that ends in death on Bish Bosch. ‘The Day The ‘Conducator’ Died’ is a charming little yuletide song (with sleigh bells that take on an increasingly sinister aspect as the song progresses) that juxtaposes a personality-profiling questionnaire with the execution of a hated dictator. Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed without trial on 25 December 1989. None of the firing squad waited for the command to ‘fire’ before pulling the trigger.
“I’m fascinated by dictators,” says Scott, recalling that The Drift also included a song about the death of Mussolini (he was even singing about Joseph Stalin on ‘The Old Man’s Back Again’, on 1969’s Scott 4). Violence appears in other ways: in ‘Pilgrim’, for instance, a song that compares vivisectionists to kids who delight in torturing frogs. “I’m not particularly fascinated by brutality – I mean, at times I’ll use it on a comic level, or it’ll be angry, but I’m never striving for it – it just happens. I don’t know why – that’s for an analyst!”
Across the album, there are cameos and fleeting glimpses of powerful historical figures, many with blood on their hands: Donald Rumsfeld, the Ku Klux Klan, Attila the Hun, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope Julius II, and the ‘Conducator’, a title used by both Ceausescu and his predecessor King Carol II. Sterzing, the Tyrolean village mentioned in ‘Corps De Blah’, was notorious as a bolthole for Nazi war criminals in the aftermath of the Second World War.
At the same time, Scott takes a delight in crude humour, and the album is awash with insults and sardonic put-downs, slapstick, body parts and bad smells (check the tight-sphinctered emissions of ‘Corps De Blah’). There’s plenty of rough and tumble and visceral argy-bargy, too. ‘Epizootics!’ (as well as recalling 1940s hipster slang, the word means an unusually high rate of new infections within an epidemic – appropriately for a man who once had a hit with a song called ‘The Plague’, Scott’s music has often touched on disease) soundtracks its descriptions of sweaty street hassle with swinging, strident percussion and the raucous sub-tones of the rare brass instrument, the tubax, played by Pete Long. ‘It’s a combination of a tuba and a saxophone,’ explains Scott, ‘and there’s only two in the country. It’s a monster thing, you actually have to sit on the floor, it’s enormous. But it means you can get below the bass, very very deep.’
All of which shows the efforts Scott and his team have gone to invent sounds appropriate to these songs’ unique atmospheres. ‘Zercon’ features ramshorns, among them the kudu shofar, a monstrous natural instrument used in ancient times. On ‘Tar’, an argumentative piece which deals with ‘contradictions in the Bible’, Alasdair Malloy & Mark Warman brandishes some swishing machetes – four-foot blades which Scott was nearly banned from bringing into the studio. ‘Corps De Blah’ includes percussionist Alasdair Malloy chipping away with a chisel. These are songs in which every sound signifies, because it’s so intimately bound up in the words. “There is always meaning for me there; I don’t write haphazardly. I’m pretty sure everything is right and balanced, as far as I can get it. I won’t throw anything in that shouldn’t be there.”
So the foreign language in ‘Dimple’ turns out to be Danish, a reminder that Scott himself lived in Copenhagen for a while in the early seventies. “I read somewhere no matter how much your face descends with age, the dimple remains in the same place. In this case I’m using it as a metaphor for a constant presence, and building a kind of mythological face throughout the first part of the song.”
“I’ve always thought since the late 70’s, “This is my last record.” Every single record has been that way… I guess I just pull the trigger each time.” Scott Walker
Scott’s music may have changed irrevocably over the past five decades, but his unmistakable, magnificent voice, and his dogged refusal to choose the easy, popular artistic path, remain a constant presence in everything he does. How does Scott characterise his world view these days?
“I’m a pessimist, in that I know it’s not going to end well,” he says, with a laugh. “But most of my songs are spiritual at the core. I try not to be too cynical about things, because it’s too difficult otherwise. You have to be able to work your way through it – you have to be able to see what’s there, and deal with it.”
Bish Bosch is big enough to contain heaven and hell.
Rob Young, September 2012.
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I'm so EXCITED!!!
http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/11462/1/20-qas-scott-walker
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