Did ‘Scott Walker 4’ ever make the charts?
If you’d seen as much chart success as Scott Walker had, including two number one singles as part of The Walker Brothers, ‘Make It Easy on Yourself in 1965 and ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Anymore)’ a year later, as well as reaching number three on the album charts for his debut solo album and climbing to the summit with his 1968 follow up, you’d be forgiven for thinking that anything you touched might turn to gold.
Perhaps he’d become either bored by or overconfident in his own success, or perhaps he simply wanted to test out whether it was his music itself or his now-esteemed name which was carrying each new release to such success, but when Scott Walker released his fifth album, naturally titled Scott 4, he did so under his birth name of Scott Engel, not the more well known Walker stage name.
The first of his albums to comprise exclusively self-penned material, Scott 4 is now regarded as his masterpiece, and has been retrospectively reviewed as being “arguably the best album of his career, you can hear from the first notes of the opening track that he was ambitiously and boldly pushing both his lyrics and soundscapes into a stronger terrain”.
Not that you’d know it from the reception it received at the time. Each of his previous four solo albums comfortably nestled within the upper reaches of the UK album charts (going to number three, number one, number three and number seven, respectively). Scott 4, though, failed to trouble the charts at all and was barely reviewed, or, seemingly, even noticed upon its initial release.
It wasn’t for a lack of quality material, though.
‘The Seventh Seal’ is an ambitious, meandering and dramatic opening number that feels like a late ’60s update on Marty Robbins’ timeless Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs. ‘The World’s Strongest Man’ recalls the grandiosity of production and country-croon of Glen Campbell’s greatest works, while elsewhere, the huge sound across so much of the album was as clearly informed by the epic scale of the Bacharach and David hit ‘Make It Easy on Yourself’ that Walker had previously seen success with as it was by the movie soundtracks of incomparable composers like Ennio Morricone and Erik Nordgren.
Though the album has eventually come to be seen as some of Walker’s strongest material, and potentially as his best album, its commercial failure was a sign of things to come. Scott 4 was the first of his albums which failed to chart at all, but it wouldn’t be the last. In fact, even though from his next release onwards he returned to a more commercial sound and attempted to recapture the public attention by using his more familiar stage name, none of Walker’s next five albums troubled the charts at all. He wouldn’t see any kind of success again until 1975, when The Walker Brothers reunited for the album No Regrets.
Despite the title, given how the last few years had gone for Scott Walker, you’d imagine he might have had at least a few.
