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Artist
Scott Walker
12+ albums
singer-songwriterexperimentalAvant-Gardebaroque poppop
about
Scott Walker (Noel Scott Engel, January 9, 1943 - March 22, 2019) was an American-born singer-songwriter, composer and record producer. He is noted for his distinctive baritone voice and for the unorthodox career path which took him from 1960s pop icon to 21st century avant-garde musician. Originally coming to fame in the mid-1960s singing orchestral pop ballads as the frontman of The Walker Brothers, Walker went on to a solo career balancing a light entertainment/MOR ballad approach with increasing artistic innovations in arrangement and writing. Despite a series of acclaimed albums, a disastrous drop in sales forced him back into straight Middle of the road recordings with little of his own artistic input. This in turn eventually led to a Walker Brothers reunion in the mid-1970s (although the latter eventually moved, by mutual consent, into more avant-garde areas). From the mid-1980s, Walker revived his solo career while drastically reinventing his artistic and compositional methods, via a series of acclaimed and vividly avant-garde albums. These combined his iconic voice with an unsettling avant-garde approach which owed more to modernist and post-modernist classical composition than to his pop singer past. This change in approach has been compared to "Andy Williams reinventing himself as Stockhausen". Walker has been a continuing influence on other artists, in particular The Last Shadow Puppets, Marc Almond, Goldfrapp, Douglas Pearce of the band Death in June, Billy Ma
