Scott Walker is an American singer, long resident in England born Noel Scott Engel in Cleveland, Ohio in 1941.

He was discovered by Eddie Fisher in the late 1950s and appeared several times on Fisher's TV series as a teen idol type in the vein of Fabian or Frankie Avalon, under his real name.

In the early 1960s, he formed a band called the Walker Brothers in Los Angeles. Relocating to London in 1964, they attained great worldwide popularity with pop ballads, many of them written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. As the lead singer, he attained pop star status.

Mental problems led to the breakup of the Walker Brothers in 1967, although they would reunite for a tour of Japan the following year and would produce two albums in the 1970s. He soon began a solo career in a different style than he had been known for in the past, turning to a downbeat mixture of pop, folk, and European cabaret, with a concentration on the songs of Belgian singer and songwriter Jacques Brel. His original songs were very much in the vein of Brel, only sung in a voice reminiscent of Frank Sinatra.

He would have his own TV series, "Scott", in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s.

Known for being somewhat private and reclusive, his activity has been sporadic since the late 1970s, releasing only two albums since 1980, and also producing the Britpop band Pulp's 2001 album We Love Life. In 2000, he produced the London South Bank Centre's annual summer live music festival, Summer Meltdown, which has a tradition of celebrity producers.

Walker signed to British independent label 4AD in early 2004.

External links

1995 interview with Richard Cook, from The Independent

"I've become the Orson Welles of the record industry. People want to take me to lunch, but nobody wants to finance the picture....I keep hoping that when I make a record, I'll be asked to make another one. I keep hoping that if I can make a series of three records, then I can progress and do different things each time. But when I have to get it up once every 10 years. . . it's a tough way to work."