The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More

We had big snow here a couple of weeks ago, the proper Hallmark/Hollywood cotton wool stuff. Great for a day or two then a treacherous pest for the rest of the week, it was just too early for Christmas. Snowed in with a classic film and a houseful of food and drink is not a bad place to be. Getting to and from work when your street is an ice rink and it’s barely light in either direction not so much. We’re now back to rain, torrential today, and the sort of wind that can whip your car door straight outta your hands if you’re not expecting it. (It did, I wasn’t. The car parked beside me seemed scarless afterwards though. Quick! Run!)

It’s at least half a week too early for Christmas music on here, so as the days creep ever-shorter to Friday’s Winter Equinox, there’s no better time to blow the dust off of Scott 3 and let it play, softly and gently, as the weather conditions – which they haven’t yet personified with a daft human name – swirl madly outside. Scott 3, Scott Walker‘s third album, funnily enough, is stately and grandiose and packed full of Ivor Raymonde’s searing and soaring string scores, practised on Dusty and perfected deftly with each subsequent Walker Brothers and Scott solo release. If you’ve never experienced it, you must do. If only for the cover art at least, I think you’d love it.

Scott Walker – It’s Raining Today

It’s Raining Today is the album’s opener, perfect for our current winter weather and a handy stall-setter for what follows on the rest of the record. It begins with the eerie scrape of high pitched, disconcerting strings – exactly the sort of strings that Jonny Greenwood has taken to employing across The Smile’s and Radiohead’s more outré work – before a pulsing two note electric bass and classically-strummed nylon acoustic offset the jarring with a bit of colour. There is too, you notice, a subtle foreshadowing cascade of icicle percussion, spiking the brain, preparing you for Walker’s tale to unfold. ‘It’s raining today,’ he croons almost immediately, ‘and I’m just about to forget…the train window girl…that wonderful day we met…she smiles through the smoke from my cigarette…‘

The melody rises and falls, ebbs and flows with Scott’s perfect delivery – smooth, slow, almost somnolent – providing a real cinematic cocoon to the world outside. You can wrap yourself right up in It’s Raining Today. Stick it on and you, the listener, are safely sheltered from the storm of life, metaphorical as well as physical.

Then…don’t get too comfy…the strings take a sudden dischordant and unnerving tumble and Walker is lost in a fog of nostalgia and regret, the song’s melody creeping like the coming of winter’s equinox itself, the fingers-down-the-blackboard strings now slow-bowed and majestic, sliding down the scales to the lowest notes possible. They’re the only instruments in the mix until right at the end, when a ripple of piano and the familiar refrain of percussion and edgy strings leads us back to another verse, the titular refrain leading us to cellophane streets and street corner girls and cold trembling leaves. Great imagery.

A few short years before this, Walker and his Brothers were headlining a wonky package bill that included Cat Stevens and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, one of three mis-cast teen idols desperate to cut the puppet strings and call their own shots. By Scott 1, Walker was. By Scott 3 he was deep in the throes of auteurship. Magic stuff.