Cheap music but great music

On occasion, while out shopping, I like to see what I can find in the "two for a tenner" section of a music store. I bought two for £10 over the weekend. Allow me to share the story behind one of them.

A few months ago, I watched a documentary show on TV. I occasionally like to watch these things, y'know, the sort of programmes that come under series titles such as Imagine... or Storyville and the like.

The show I watched that evening could almost be considered life-changing. It was about a man who was a pop star in the 1960s. Of course I knew his name, and I knew one or two songs by the band he was a part of, but I didn't know he had reinvented himself after the dissolution of that band. And I didn't know that he continues to make music.

As I watched this man recording his latest album, he would bang things together in the studio to make the sound he wanted; he would build a box into which he would go to create yet another sound for a particular song; and similar things.

He spoke with that dull monotone of a science teacher, with the look of someone who might be slightly insane. Or might be a genius. Whichever way, he is an artist. An artist in that truest sense. A man for whom making music seems not to be about making music; moreover it's about creating something, and it just happens to be music.

Back in the late 1980s I met a guy named Brian, and Brian would often refer to this artist. We would talk for hours about music, fashion, and women, the most important things in life for a young man, surely. Brian would talk about this singer's "doom-laden vocals", an expression that has stayed with me for some 20 years as I applied it to others without ever really listening to the man about whom it was intended.

That man is Scott Walker, and I'm a recent convert. You might remember him from such songs as "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore", by The Walker Brothers. If, like me, you know (or knew) very little else about him, allow me to share with you a clip of him in action, singing the opening track from his debut solo album, Scott, one of the CDs I bought on Saturday.



As I wrote this post, I began to see parallels (in my own head) between Walker and David Lynch -- both artists for whom the medium is almost irrelevant. Not irrelevant, but... just a conduit, if you like. These two men -- and undoubtedly others, male and female -- just want to create. And as I then glanced at Walker's Wikipedia page, the parallel was cemented for me. Apparently, Walker told UK newspaper The Independent in 1995: "I've become the Orson Welles of the record industry. People want to take me to lunch, but nobody wants to finance the picture... I keep hoping that when I make a record, I'll be asked to make another one. I keep hoping that if I can make a series of three records, then I can progress and do different things each time. But when I have to get it up once every 10 years... it's a tough way to work."

A tough way to work, indeed, and a sad state of affairs. Walk into any music store and you will find row upon row of reissues by the likes of Sting or Phil Collins, reissues, re-releases, repackagings; greatest hits, best-ofs.

But where is the funding for those with a truly original vision? Those who have a deep, unstoppable desire to create? Another thing I love about those documentary strands I watch is the focus, from time to time, on Old Masters. Back when the likes of Michelangelo and Leonardo (no, not the TMNTs) were working, they had sponsors and patrons, people who commissioned these incredible, awe-inspiring works of art. And you know what? Sometimes I think we'd be in a better place artistically if that were still the case, instead of the shit that is churned out for the masses.