1967–1974: Solo work
For his solo career, Walker shed the Walker Brothers' mantle and worked in a style clearly glimpsed on Images. Initially, this led to a continuation of his previous band's success. Walker's first four solo albums — Scott (1967), Scott 2 (1968), Scott 3, and Scott Walker Sings Songs from his TV Series (both 1969) — all sold in large numbers, with Scott 2 topping the British charts. Walker also achieved two UK Top 20 singles during this period with "Joanna" (1968) and "Lights of Cincinnati" (1969).
During this period, Walker combined his earlier teen appeal with a darker, more idiosyncratic approach (which had been hinted at in songs like "Orpheus" on the Images album). While his vocal style remained consistent with the Walker Brothers, he now drove a fine line between classic ballads, Broadway hits and his own compositions, and also included risqué recordings of Jacques Brel songs (as translated by Mort Shuman, who was also responsible for the hit musical Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris). Walker's own original songs of this period were influenced by Brel and Léo Ferré as he explored European musical roots while expressing his own American experience and reaching a new maturity as a recording artist.
Walker continued to grow as a producer. In 1968 (during the brief Walker Brothers reunion and tour of Japan), he produced a single with the Japanese rock group the Carnabeats, featuring Gary Walker on vocals. Upon his return to the UK, he produced a solo album for the Walker Brothers' musical director and guitarist Terry Smith. In 1968, Walker also produced Ray Warleigh's First Album. According to Anthony Reynolds, "[Warleigh's] album, recorded on December 13 and released in the following year, had little in common with the more esoteric progressive jazz that Scott was digging at the time, and the result veered more toward pleasantly middle-of-the-road muzak than the jazz fusion just around the corner." In 1968, Scott Walker also produced John Walker's solo single "Woman".
Walker's own relationship with fame, and the concentrated attention which it brought to him, remained a problem for his emotional well-being. He became reclusive and increasingly distanced from his audience. In 1968 he threw himself into an intense study of contemporary and classical music, which included a sojourn in Quarr Abbey, a Catholic Benedictine monastery in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, to study Gregorian chant, building on an interest in lieder and classical musical modes.
At the peak of his fame in 1969, Walker was given his own BBC TV series, Scott, featuring solo Walker performances of ballads, big band standards, Brel songs, and his own compositions. Archival footage of the show is extremely rare as none of the footage conserved, though surviving audio recordings from the show were released in 2019 as the box set Live on Air 1968-1969. Scott 3, released in early 1969, was Walker's first album to be dominated by his own songwriting, though its follow-up, mid-1969's Scott Walker Sings Songs from his TV Series, featured no original material and exemplified the problems he was having in failing to balance his own creative desires with the demands of the entertainment industry and of his manager Maurice King, who seemed determined to mould his protégé into a new Andy Williams or Frank Sinatra. Despite the failure of the Scott TV series, the companion album was a commercial success, reaching the top 10 of the UK Albums Chart - Walker's last album to do so. Around this time, Walker also recorded the title song for the French/Italian film Une Corde, Un Colt (The Rope and the Colt in English), and in 1970 he recorded "I Still See You" for the soundtrack of the film The Go-Between.
Having parted company with King, Walker released his fifth solo LP – Scott 4 – at the end of 1969. Compensating for the previous all-covers album, this was his first album to be made up entirely of self-penned material. It has been speculated that Walker's decision to release Scott 4 under his birth name of Scott Engel contributed to its chart failure. All subsequent re-issues of the album have been released under his stage name. As Sean O'Hagan wrote in The Guardian, "Now recognised as one of his greatest recordings, it sold poorly. The world was not ready for the existentialist musings of a pop singer whose touchstones were the films of Kurosawa and Bergman and the novels of Kafka and Camus."
Walker then entered a period of self-confessed artistic decline, during which he spent five years making records "by rote, just to get out of contract" and consoling himself with drink. His next album, 1970's 'Til the Band Comes In, showed a pronounced split between its two sides. Side A featured original material (mostly co-written with new manager Ady Semel) while side B consisted almost entirely of cover versions. Although commercially and critically unsuccessful at the time, 'Til the Band Comes In has since been generally regarded as a worthy but compromised follow-up to Scott 4. Subsequent releases saw Walker revert to cover versions of popular film tunes, easy listening standards and a serious flirtation with country music. All of his next four albums - The Moviegoer (1972), Any Day Now, Stretch (both 1973), and We Had It All (1974) - feature no original material whatsoever. These four albums and the 1969 TV Series album would subsequently be disowned by Walker, and he would prevent them from ever being issued on CD (though Stretch and We Had It All did receive a CD release, without Walker's approval, by independent label BGO Records in the late 1990s).
In the 2006 documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, Walker describes these as his "lost years" in terms of creativity. He has also confessed to having surrendered his direction due to outside pressure: The record company called me in [following the commercial failure of Scott 4] and carpeted me and said you've got to make a commercial record for us... I was acting in bad faith for many years during that time... I was trying to hang on. I should have stopped. I should have said, 'OK, forget it' and walked away. But I thought if I keep hanging on and making these bloody awful records... this is going to turn round if I just hang in long enough, and it didn't. It went from bad to worse...
