Scott Walker: 30 Century Man

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man brilliantly looks at the enigmatic singer, writes Michael Dwyer

DURING the recording of Scott Walker's most recent album The Drift, he unnerved the 36-piece orchestra when he instructed them to sound like "World War II bombers slowly approaching from 50 miles away and getting closer and closer". When Walker wanted to simulate the sound of seagulls, his co-producer Peter Walsh managed to get a guitarist to achieve the effect.

"Then he would say, 'I'd like a donkey,' " Walsh recalls.

These insights are provided late into Stephen Kijak's fascinating documentary. Much earlier is a clip from Walker's first US TV appearance in 1964, playing bass on the anodyne Cottonfields with The Walker Brothers when John Maus was their lead singer. Kijak adeptly charts Scott Walker's complicated personal and musical journey from there to the recording of The Drift 40 years later, from reluctant teen idol to deadly serious artist.

In the mid-1960s, at the height of Beatlemania on both sides of the Atlantic, the US trio known as The Walker Brothers found fame in London.

They weren't brothers, and none of them was named Walker. Now 64, Scott was born Noel Scott Engel.

Recording their first ballad, Love Her, they needed the lowest voice in the band and Scott took over from John on lead vocals, revealing the rich, deep baritone that would soar over the lush orchestrations on their two UK number one singles, Make It Easy On Yourself and The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore.

Scott Walker was arguably the finest male singer to emerge in 20th-century popular music since Frank Sinatra, but Walker went further, writing his own material, which became so utterly uncompromising that record companies would classify it as unpopular music.

He started writing B-sides for Walker Brothers singles, gradually becoming more adventurous in the social realism of Mrs Murphy, and the graphic imagery of the majestic Montague Terrace (in Blue) on his first solo album in 1967.

Discovering the work of Flemish singer-songwriter Jacques Brel, Walker had the first of few solo hit singles with Brel's Jackie, and Kijak's copiously illustrated film features a clip of him performing it in the incongruous context of Frankie Howerd's 1968 TV variety show. Soon, as the film's impeccable narrator Sara Kestelman notes, Walker's albums were mixing Burt Bacharach standards with "Brel songs about gonorrhoea and death".

Researched in admirable detail, Kijak's documentary operates on several levels beyond mapping the landmarks in Walker's life and work, as his output became as sporadic as that of another great reclusive artist, Stanley Kubrick.

It assembles various Walker devotees - who, with the exception of David Bowie (an executive producer on the movie), are mostly half his age or less - for a celebration of what former Teardrop Explodes singer Julian Cope described as Walker's "godlike genius".

The contributors discussing their favourite Walker tracks include Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn, Sting, Cathal Coughlan, Gavin Friday, Alison Goldfrapp, Radiohead and Johnny Marr, whose choice is the spine-tingling Scott 4 album track, The Seventh Seal, which dramatically recounts the story of the classic Ingmar Bergman film. The sole hint of dissent comes when one fan, Marc Almond, dares to demur regarding the radical, difficult, but rewarding 1995 album, Tilt.

In addition to observing the recording of The Drift, Kijak explores the marriage of mavericks when Walker wrote the original score for Leos Carax's 1999 movie, Pola X.

"He's as slow as I am, so it went on for years," Walker comments drily during the documentary's coup, a rare, expansive interview with its subject - so forthcoming that he even removes his trademark shades.