Then came the ’70s, and a burnout that Walker blamed on alcohol, disillusionment, and contractual obligation the cover versions he recorded during the first half of the decade were so rote that Pulp evoked “the second side of ‘Til The Band Comes In” as emblematic of both a metaphorical and literal “Bad Cover Version”. When the pop life soured, Walker broke free as a solo artist whose first big revelations came largely from his English-language reworks of songs by Belgian chanson great Jacques Brel. With the not-actual-siblings Walker Brothers, Scott made a popular impression on the charts with singles that outdid the originals on the charts, whether it was the Bacharach/David “Make It Easy On Yourself” (first cut by Jerry Butler) or the Bob Crewe/Bob Gaudio Four Seasons braintrust’s “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” (a flop in the hands of Frankie Valli). Long before he was the most unlikely avant-garde singer of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the late Scott Walker was a pop star - and, during the decades in which being a pop star meant being an interpreter, an alternately remarkable and frustrating one.
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