Scott Walker, prince of darkness

"I have a very nightmarish imagination," said Scott Walker in 2006. "I've had very bad dreams all my life." The musician, who died on March 22, created brilliant compositions from this darkness; the jarring, unexpected, dark songs were unlike anything his contemporaries had produced. He took traditional instruments and pushed them towards abstraction, detuning guitars and timpani; his influence is felt in the music of David Bowie, Nick Cave and Pulp. In "30 Century Man" (2006), a documentary about writing Walker's song Brian Eno described music as "humiliating". "We did not have more than that," he laughed. "It's a shame, really."

Mr. Walker, born Noel Scott Engel in Ohio in 1943, made his name in the 1960s within the band Walker Brothers, a vocal group singing (they were in fact not related) ). After a stint as a bassist – he had worked as a session musician on the Sunset Strip as a teenager – he became the band's lead singer. His melancholy baritone in "The sun does not look to go (Anymore)" and "Make it easy on yourself" helped turn the band into teen idols, especially in Great Britain. The band offers an alternative to Beatlemania, recording ballads by Burt Bacharach, Bob Dylan and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, as well as standards such as "Summertime" and "Land of 1000 Dances". When the band started publishing original tunes as B-faces in order to earn money on royalties, Mr. Walker offered sullen sketches, including "Orpheus", a piece about an affair with a married woman and "Genevieve". The group officially dissolved in 1968.

Freed from the constraints of commercial pop music, but still considered a bankable star, Walker has created a quartet of solo albums. They included baroque pop, covers and ballads, but also presented innovative ideas. With "The Amorphous Humphrey Plugg," "Plastic Palace People," and "Big Louise," he transformed the pop song into an epic scale, populated with vivid and strange characters. Obsessed with the European film – a song, "The Seventh Seal" was a nod to Ingmar Bergman – and the British drama on a kitchen sink, Mr. Walker reflected on sickness, death and death. 39; existentialism. He recorded songs by Jacques Brel, performing them in orchestral arrangements. "Scott" (1967), "Scott 2" (1968), "Scott 3" (1969) have been hits by both critics and audiences. He was so popular that the BBC gave him his own TV series.

At the time of the release of "Scott 4" in 1969, however, Mr. Walker had developed the ballads that pleased the crowd and amplified the strange. Many listeners switched to rock. Walker retreated for most of the 1970s, recording poor rehearsals on mediocre albums, perhaps to meet his contractual obligations, and meeting with the Walker Brothers for a series of soft-rock records innocuous. But "Nite Flights" (1978), the avant-garde swan song of the band, revived its ambitions. He wrote four tracks for the album and returned to solo work with "Climate of the Hunter" (1984).

A number of recordings followed, becoming more adventurous in form and lyrical content. The seminal "Tilt" (1995) featured "Farmer in the City", a mesmerizing song about the actual murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italian poet and director. "The Drift" (2006) tackled such sinister subjects with songs such as "Cossacks Are" and "Clara", a title inspired by the images of Mussolini's death that haunted Walker since his youth.

Mr. Walker's production was visionary, reevaluating the sounds and form of the song. He worked slowly and with dedication, challenging his musicians to avoid practicing or even knowing the melodies; he asked the producers to find the sound of bawling donkeys or raw meat hit to create an original soundscape. He found inspiration in strange, dark corners and his genius was to derive an unruly beauty from these nightmares.