For diehards, Scott Walker's Climate Of Hunter was the comeback of the decade. For insiders, the experience was extraordinary, baffling, often exasperating, as, 40 years ago, the dormant star emerged from the arena of myth to craft his strange, 'Tarkovskian' masterpiece. "When he got into the studio he completely changed," learns Ian Harrison. "It was Jekyll and Hyde."
IN EARLY 1984, LATE AT night in an underground carpark in Battersea, former ’60s pop idol Scott Walker filmed his only music video of the decade. With an alarmed harmony vocal overdubbed by chart hitmaker Billy Ocean, Track Three was muscle-deep, brooding and counter-intuitive, both rock and not-rock, with obtuse lyrics of predestined doom.
The monochrome promo featured a subterranean car chase, anointment by blood and the rolling of mysterious dice. Walker described the clip as “Tarkovskian” to the late Richard Cook of NME, presumably referring to the chamber piled with sand which echoed a famous scene from the Soviet director’s 1979 screen classic Stalker. Tarkovsky’s movie concerned an illicit trip into the mysterious ‘Zone’ where unearthly visitors had left various supernatural objects, including a Room where all desires would be granted.
A philosophical, wreckage-strewn work of mindbending science fiction, one of Stalker’s themes remains Be Very Careful What You Wish For. Scott would likely sympathise. An American in Britain, in the mid-’60s he’d pursued and enjoyed monstrous pop fame with ersatz siblings The Walker Brothers, before embarking on a stellar solo career in 1967. His life had been complicated by those pin-up years ever since.
With a break for photographer Anton Corbijn to take some portraits, Walker’s manager Ed Bicknell recalls the ’84 video shoot as “sitting in a caravan for hours while they set everything up and put concrete dust all over the floor. And then, you couldn’t write this shit, there was a murder down the street. There were police cars, ambulances… Scott got really rattled and drank and got more and more pissed. It was the only time he ever talked to me about The Walker Brothers.”
Walker told Bicknell he’d decided to quit after a car they were in was turned upside-down by a phalanx of ultra-Walkerfans. “They didn’t have seatbelts so they were literally up in the roof space,” says Bicknell. “Total pandemonium. He’d enjoyed being a pop star for a bit, but as it got bigger and bigger he found the whole thing awful.”
Yet here he was, back in the game again. One re-connection with the wider world was an uncomfortable interview on Channel 4 music show The Tube on March 23, 1984, when the non-charting Track Three’s video was given its sole broadcast. Speaking to interviewer Muriel Gray in a crowded green room, a poli
