That Ribbon Cracks Like This One: SCOTT WALKER'S TILT (1995)

- April 04, 2023

When it first appeared, in 1995, Scott Walker’s album Tilt was difficult to fathom – even Climate of Hunter, his previous release, a whole decade earlier, suddenly sounded by comparison pretty commercial. Tilt’s abrasive, brooding arrangements, operatic tropes and lyrical ambiguity seemingly conspired to confound.

Thirty years on and in the context of his 21st-century releases like The Drift and Bish Bosch, Tilt feels like less of a hard listen and I turn to it more and more. In fact, I think it might just be the legendary singer’s magnum opus. Ok, there’s Scotts 1 to 4. Every Walker aficionado loves those – especially Scott 4. And of course Climate of Hunter has its fans. But Tilt is out there. It really was, and remains, an extraordinary record.

Walker emerged in the middle of the 1990s from an extended period of seclusion which included a brief sojourn at a London art school – Byam Shaw, which in 1990 moved to new premises at the top of Holloway Road, near Archway. An artist friend of mine recalls the enigmatic Walker as a fellow student during his own time there in the early 90s.

By the middle of the decade, Walker had released just one record since 1984’s Climate of Hunter – Man from Reno, written with Goran Bregović and issued as a CD-only single in France. In retrospect, that single might be seen as something of an overture to Tilt, the song re-emerging and reshaped on the album as the brooding masterpiece ‘Farmer in the City’.

Walker wrote most of the songs on Tilt in 1991/92, at home with a Fender Strat and a five-octave piano. One track, ‘Manhattan’, was written earlier, in 1987, after his contract with Virgin had been terminated. ‘Rosary’ was the final song to be composed (and the only one he performed in front of an audience, on the BBC show Later With Jools).

Mumblings that Walker was at work on a long-awaited album of new material first sounded early in 1994. Music Week confirmed in February of that year that he had been signed to the Phonogram label and had booked studio time. Peter Walsh was again producing. Then towards the end of the year, two promo CDs appeared. These were (slightly misleadingly) entitled Scott 1 and Scott 2.

The slimline jewel cases contain plain black inserts with minimal information, other than track titles, and shiny compact discs with shortened, slightly more punchy, accessible versions of four tracks pulled from the then still forthcoming album. These mixes have never been officially released and are not even on YouTube as far as I know. The CDs might well have come with a press release (although I don’t recall one). They still turn up from time to time, on eBay or Discogs.

Scott 2 comprises radio edits of two tracks, ‘Farmer in the City’ and the title track to the album, but it is likely that the first disc, which contains edits of two more Tilt tracks, A Patriot (Single) and ‘Cockfighter’, was misinterpreted by some reviewers at the time to be a promo for an actual single. ‘The return of the God-like Scott Walker is nigh’, trumpeted Music Week in December 1994. ‘Look forward to a new single from the balladeer of balladeers on February 27.’

Perhaps Phonogram/Fontana did originally intend to release one of the tracks as an A-side to trail the album, as Virgin had with Climate of Hunter and the 45rpm ‘Track 3’ (which I remember buying from Harum Records in Crouch End). If so, they must have reconsidered. February 1995 came and went with no new Scott Walker release.

Anticipation was ripe. It was exciting stuff. I hadn’t heard (or even heard of) ‘Man From Reno’, the French single, so when the album finally appeared in May 1995, this was the first new Scott Walker material I would have encountered since 1984. I guess that would be the same for most fans at the time.

The long silence had given me ample time to backtrack to the 60s and 70s and discover Walker’s eclectic back catalogue. In the 80s and early 90s, scouring markets and second-hand crates for Walker’s long-deleted Philips and CBS output was a largely fruitless experience. Cheap second-hand vinyl was ubiquitous back then, but I rarely came across anything by Scott Walker. I remember my excitement at finding a beaten-up copy of Scott 3 on Camden Market. I can’t recall the price but it would have been no more than a fiver or so.

Thanks to my girlfriend at the time, who played them incessantly, it was really the Philips Sings Brel compilation and Julian Cope’s legendary sampler Fire Escape in the Sky, and then a bit later the Boy Child collection, that plugged the gap. It would take another 20-plus years to find all the Scott Walker records I was looking for, by which time a lot of those long-lost albums had been reissued on CD and much of the music remastered on vinyl too.

Meanwhile, Tilt was a Wow! signal from another world – an enigmatic ping in the dark. Apart from the Pola X soundtrack in 1999, it was the only album Walker released between 1984 and 2006, but back then it was a reassuring indication that he was still there, still willing to make records and challenge the listener.

Walker broke his silence (no doubt reticently) with a number of media appearances following its release. This one includes the video for ‘Farmer in the City’.