Scott Walker (singer)

Scott Walker (singer)

Scott Walker (born Noel Scott Engel on January 9, 1943) is an American-British singer-songwriter, composer and record producer. He is noted for his distinctive baritone voice (once described as "one of the finest voices to ever sing of emotional hurt and the great unknowns") and for the unorthodox career path which has taken him from 1960s pop icon to 21st century experimental 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 perspective. Despite a series of acclaimed albums, a disastrous drop in sales forced him back into straight MOR 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 experimental areas).

Since the mid-1980s Walker has revived his solo career while drastically reinventing his artistic and compositional methods, via a series of acclaimed and vividly experimental albums. These combine his iconic singing voice with an unsettling avant-garde approach owing more to modernist and post-modernist classical composition than it does to his pop singer past. The change in approach has been compared to "Andy Williams reinventing himself as Stockhausen".

Walker continues to release solo material, and is currently signed to 4AD Records. As a record producer or guest performer he has worked with a number of artists including John Maus, Pulp and Bat For Lashes.

Despite being American, Walker's success has largely come in the United Kingdom, where his first four solo albums reached the top ten. Walker has lived in the UK since 1965; he became a British citizen in 1970.