Day 84. Pavements of poets will write that I died in nine angels' arms... (25/3/19)

(Soundtrack: Scott. Obviously. Lots of Scott, all morning. For the rest of the day. At the moment, Mary Anne Hobbs' 6Music show, because it starts with a message that we'll talk about in a bit...)

It didn't hit me like Bowie hit me. It didn't hit me like Mark Hollis hit me. Although it's hitting me right now because I'm listening to Bowie cry after receiving a fiftieth birthday message from Scott.

I think the main reason it didn't hit me as hard is because J told me. I'd stepped out of the bathroom, getting ready to go for a run and she said, "Have you heard the news?" in that tone that tells you somebody has gone. "It's going to really upset you."

And she told me Scott Walker had died.

There'll be loads who hadn't really been aware of Scott Walker until today. Not specifically aware. Tangentially aware through The Walker Brother's sixties hits of epic grandeur. They weren't brothers and they weren't called Walker.

Scott wasn't Scott Walker. He was Noel Scott Engel. Until he became Scott Walker. Because being Scott Walker is bigger than just being a person, bigger than just being the self you were born with. Scott Walker is a series of reinvention. Scott Walker is a myth and a mystery. I've said it for decades, partly glibly, but I'll say it again: Scott is god.

1981. Like most men of my age/generation/profile/interests/musical tastes, 1981 is vital for us. 1981 and Julian Cope.

Copey had been banging on about Scott Walker in interviews for a year. This pop star who was more than a pop star and took everything somewhere else.

This was back in those days when, as I was telling somebody the other night in one of those statements that make you sound unfeasibly old, if you wanted music you had to search for it. I made the point that it took me months to get my hands on a Velvet Underground album once.

You couldn't get hold of Scott Walker albums. Not at prices you could afford. You could get the Walker Brothers' Greatest Hits, so we did with that. Because that was where the voice lived.

I saw a copy of Scott 3 once. Late eighty/early eighty-one. In a record shop at the top of London Road. The original pressing with the foil cover details. An album that we knew already was quite possibly one of the greatest things ever created by humanity but we had no way of hearing. There it was. Unbelievably expensive. Far beyond the cost of a seventeen year old with a part time job. So, probably about thirty quid.

The remedy came, as hinted at, through Julian Cope. A compilation on Zoo Records (the label of The Teardrops and The Bunnymen): "Fire Escape In The Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker". A plain grey sleeve (which remained stained when you removed the price sticker), lettering in a lime green-ish font. No image whatsoever of a man who was one of the most ridiculously good looking singers of the sixties. And had the greatest hair of the decade. No image of him from then, no image of him from what we called 'now'.

The songs were Scott's. His own work. The covers from the albums weren't available to us yet. The Jacques Brel covers that made him change his life would have to wait before they arrived with us.

And they were magnificent. Grand, ambitious, broken hearted, beautiful.

I lived with 'Such A Small Love' on a tape in my walkman for so long. That song got me through my late teens.

For an angst ridden, doomed, somewhat gothy, teenager, Scott was perfect. And remained so for life.

He'd had those early hits and decided he didn't like the life that came with it. There were rumours and hints of overdose, deliberate car crash, time spent living at a monastery until the fans tracked him down. And then there was the reinvention as something more adult, more fractured; a body of work that concerns itself with the losers and the lonely, a psycho-geography of an imaginary London created by a displaced American.

The Scott album was a hit. So was Scott 2. And Scott 3. That's 1967, 1968 and 1969.

Scott 4 was also 1969. And it did nothing. It didn't sell, it was deleted almost immediately. It creates a later retrenchment into easier work, into TV, into the mainstream. To an extent.

All songs by Scott for the first time, credited to Noel Scott Engel with the word Walker appearing nowhere on the record. It didn't sell. Obviously it's a masterpiece.

And from that point on Scott kind of fades from the public eye. There's a Walker Brothers reunion. It gives us No Regrets. And if memory serves, it gives us live dates in the likes of Batley Working Men's Club. Then the reunion gives us Nite Flights. Which gives us the title track and The Electrician. Which is a terrifying image of where we're going.

Then it's quiet again. Rumours of Scott sitting in London pubs playing darts, an appearance in an advert for the Mini - he's sat in the window of a cafe, looking out. We scoured that ad each time it came on. And he plays a killer in a Muppet movie. As you do.

1984 gives us the first new work that my generation has access to. Climate of Hunter. And, at the time, it disappoints. It's too eighties. The production sounds too up to date. By the mid nineties I'd realised it was incredible.

Which was handy because the mid nineties brought us bang up to date. Tilt. Like very little else that's ever been released. An interest in the Lieder songs of Bach combined with a view of the atrocities created by human beings across the ages. Dark, relentless. Brilliant beyond belief. Not for everybody.

Another eleven year gap and we get The Drift. The album whose legend is based on the fact that the rhythm track for 'Clara' (a song about Mussolini's mistress) is built on the sound of a man hitting a side of meat.

And is so much more than that description.

Bisch-Bosch follows another lengthy gap and takes us further. Scott has become more and more singular. He's creating music that has no parallels.

So this morning's run was soundtracked by the solo hits of the sixties. A drive into town was accompanied by the Jacques Brel album because I needed that rush of strings from 'Jackie' and 'Mathilde' and writing this has seen me reach for Tilt and Drift. Because writing this requires the understanding of what drove him to keep refining his understanding of his art, his understanding of what he wanted to say of the world.

Halfway through all this I opened up my CD copy of Scott 4. And found a quote across the inner sleeve that I had forgotten. A quote placed on that album fifty years ago by the man who was at that time moving away from the myth of Scott Walker to be himself:

'A man's work  is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.'

A man in his mid twenties describing in one sentence the following fifty years of his life.

RIP Scott.