Photo: BBC/Mark Allan
Exhaustively promoted by 6 Music the first ever live performance of material from Scott Walker’s first four solo albums lived up to its hype. Much more satisfying than last year’s Bowie prom, largely because Jules Buckley stuck with Walker’s original arrangements rather than significant experimentation, the project had been conceived with the singer’s approval. The conductor added to the Heritage Orchestra’s burgeoning list of collaborations, that includes John Cale, Massive Attack and Dizzie Rascal, by seeking four interpreters of Walker’s signature baritone for whom the Ohio born icon has been an inspiration. The songs were expertly matched to each artist’s vocal style and his influence in their work was visible.
Jarvis Cocker opened the show with ‘Boy Child’ followed by ‘Plastic Palace People’, which could have been the title of a Pulp hit. In his contribution to the high tempo mid set Cocker roved around the stage with his miming hands and jerky dance moves, a la Jacques Brel, on’ Little Things That Keep Us Together’, his voice velvet and intimate over the thrumming backdrop. Fears that he might not have the vocal power to soar above the wall of string sound were unfounded.
Barrel chested wizard John Grant replicated Walker’s oak-aged, haunting voice with uncanny precision and so felt the most staged. He was at his best on Walker’s melodramatic retelling of Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’, which is given a Miles Davisesque flamenco twist. Richard Hawley was a surely a shoe-in for the gentler, melancholic ballads and he excelled on the wry observational details of daily life and disappointments in ‘Montague Terrace’.
A natural female interpreter for the night would have been Anna Calvi, whose own songs echo Walker’s operatic qualities, but Norwegian singer songwriter Susanne Sundfor was revelatory. She seemed to inhabit the compositions more than any of the performers and her Joanna Newsom-like inflections and expansive timbre generated an electricity of pure feeling in true Walker fashion, sensation that erupts and rapidly blossoms throughout the body like a prodigious triffid.
Scott Walker’s sixties songs reflect his love of European arthouse cinema in their own mise-en-scene narratives , filmic overlays and switches in mood that resemble changes of scene in a movie more than shifts in musical direction mid song. The Heritage Orchestra skilfully sprinkled the ironic juxtaposition of innocence and stardust with the lyrical turmoil lurking in the beauty, so reminiscent of the genius Walker frequently covered, Jacques Brel. In his Sunday Service interview with Jarvis Cocker Walker revealed he was introduced to the Belgian’s music by a Playboy bunny girl. Brel would have liked that.
The soul anthem ‘Get behind Me’ to finish was not in keeping with the existential questioning and profound sense of isolation at the heart of the most of Walker’s oeuvre. But as Hawley quipped after ‘It’s Raining Today’ there wasn’t a “dry seat in the house”. Many left the arena in tears. ‘Time was sweet yesterday’ Walker laments on ‘On My Own Again’ and it was once again tonight, the set thunderously appreciated, from the promenaders right up to the misty gods. Like all the great vocalists Scott Walker makes us feel more than we thought was humanly possible.
