Wow. My whole life gets completely turned around sometimes, and music normally the culprit. Over the past five years, this feeling is attained only under the best of circumstances, and it certainly isn’t as frequent as it was when I first realized there was music beyond the realm of top 40 and Grateful Dead.

Last night I watched Scott Walker: 30th Century Man, a documentary of the life and career of Scott Engel, the American transplanted in the United Kingdom who assumed the Walker surname upon joining the Walker Brothers, a group whose popularity rivaled that of the Beatles and Stones during their heyday in the mid-60’s (gosh do I love rambling run-on sentences.

Anyways, it’s a great documentary. A lot of luminary figures appear, among them David Bowie (he also played the role of executive producer), Eno, Marc Almond, Julian Cope (in letter form), Evan Parker and the many producers and arrangers from Scott’s past.

The interviews are wonderful, and they thankfully don’t pound you with too much background. You get a sense of their fame, Walker’s burgeoning song writing skills, his amazing run of solo records (Scott 1-4, all must-haves if you ask me), and his inevitable downfall. Overnight, he went from the prince of melancholy orchestral pop to a cabaret covers singer.

The point in the film that truly grabs me is the section pertaining to the Walker’s reunion album Nite Flights. I don’t download music (not out of principle, I merely hate the idea of downloading spyware), so these were all new songs to me. I had heard Scott 4, and portions of his solo records, as well as 1995’s startling Tilt.

The title track ‘Nite Flights’ pours out of the speakers, a pulsing hi-hat reminding me that this was the late-70’s era of disco. But the bass line is falling down a flight of stairs repeatedly, and the song is basking in a drone of shimmering electronics and strings. Scott’s vocals are as per usual meter-less, wandering amongst the sound scape with lyrics of terrible nightmares and humans that take on cretinous forms. Awesome. Just awesome. Brian Eno appears later in the same scene and listens to the “Nite Flights” tracks and is similarly taken aback. “It’s humiliating, really,” he says. “No, really. We haven’t gotten any further.” Woof. Coming from Eno it is a searing indictment of today’s musicians. And he’s right.

Watch this film. It broke me in half, and made me want to collect his entire catalog of music.

I’m off to Europe, so expect even more doldrums here. Rats. Updates soon though. Bye!