How Scott Walker and his album 'Tilt' influenced and impacted my writing work
How the singer Scott Walker influenced my work with his seminal album from 1995 'Tilt'
One of my favourite singers is the 60s singer, Scott Walker firstly known for his work with the Walker Brothers in the mid-60s who had major hits such as ‘The Sun ain’t gonna shine anymore’ ‘Make it easy on yourself’ and ‘My ship is coming in’ etc before then moving on with 4 albums namely ‘Scott 1’ to ‘Scott 4’ which are among the most striking both in poetic terms and emotion I have ever heard which afterwards for me with a few expectations can be skipped (The Electrician being one) for both the 70s and 80s.
‘Tilt’ Scott’s album from 1995 proved a major influence on me when I went to university I know at least one of my lecturers hated describing as not poetically, just sketches and badly written sketches but songs like ‘Farmer in the City’ I believe still reduces me to tears over 28 years later resulting eventually in my own poem to Pasolini ‘ ‘ which eventually appeared in my winter book ‘The Midst of Winter’ which looked at life as just another door.
As a writer now heading into his fifties, my own work has developed over time partly because I simply didn’t let it go and kept pushing myself onwards and I can see that with Scott over his work in the 1970s and even into the 1980s where he let himself get bogged down with his singing.
I think it’s easy sometimes to give up when you get to a certain stage with work, and I’ve seen one or two writers saying recently on public posts that they have given up on their work as they have nothing else left to say. Why I have not stopped myself is a harder point to work out myself as certainly in the early 2000s right after leaving university I hit a creative brick wall but then pulled myself out of it learning to re-invent myself several times.
Most recently, as stated elsewhere my work has moved away from my personal-based poetry even away from poetry altogether at the start of this year upon completion of my 10th and currently final full-length poetry book ‘Changing Carriages at Birmingham New Street’ into other aspects of writing.
Tilt by Scott Walker however has remained an influence and a firm favourite over the last few listens all these years later into a starker form of listening from ‘Farmer in the City’ to the second ‘The Cockfighter’ excerpts relocated from the trial of Queen Caroline and the trial of Adolf Eichmann weighty topics indeed and certainly not a piece I would have liked to approach.
It's made me think though and still makes me think as a writer and I believe as a writer we must still think and that I can thank Scott Walker. I’m in the process of completing my debut novel ‘Birth’ and have been experimenting with either 40-word flash fiction or more technical, 300-word flash fiction pieces of incidents told through three points of view – one hundred words each. The tone in the pieces is not Scott Walker but the will to not stand still with my creativity is Scott Walker and that is something I will always be grateful for.