When I first listened to THE DRIFT by Scott Walker it was like the first time I read 'The Wasteland' and the first time I watched Mullholland Drive. It's an oppressive and impenetrable album, cloaked in mystery. But it struck an emotional chord deep within me, that rare thing of being moved but uncertain of the mechanics that provoked my response.
Driftng and Tilting is a fine name for the Barbican's staging of songs from Scott Walker's last two albums. The Saturday night audience was suspended in a state of flux, vulnerable to the music's dissonant attack or swept up by its swelling, dramatic flourishes. It was not without humour: I smiled as Jarvis Cocker raised his head from his paper during 'Cossacks Are' to congratulate his interlocutor's 'swanky suit'. But it's funnier on the album, in Walker's rich baritone.
Walker wasn't performing. Instead an array of vocal talent had been enlisted to perform the song cycle. So there was Cocker, Dot Allison and Damon Albarn from the pop side of things. But the plaudits must really go to the classical singers. Owen Gilhooly and Nigel Richards delivered on 'Clara''s promise of harrowing opera about Mussolini's execution. They intoned a rich and doomladen series of images as a pig's body was strung up and pounded by a boxer, just as Mussolini and Claretta Petacci's bodies were in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan in April 1945. Gavin Friday's lament for Elvis's stillborn twin brother in 'Jesse', as a silhouette looms behind him, was stunning: 'I'm the/only/one/left alive'.
What verged on an unnerving and turbulent experience was compunded by a weird woman sitting in front of me, dressed exactly like Walker in baseball cap and tinted glasses, her hair cut short. I'd read he would be in attendance doing a live mix, and noted the mass of wires, laptops and equipment for which they had taken out two rows of seats at the back of the stalls. The woman in front kept looking back to glimpse him, and I almost told her to turn around and do him the courtesy of actually watching the show he'd put together.
But that's the draw of this enigmatic 'recluse'. I could see his smile from under his cap as he waved at the audience during the standing ovation. Shaking hands with the other engineers, he actually looked very happy indeed.
