The Walker Brothers “Fat Mama Kick”

Released a year after Low officially entrenched the synth in the realm of serious musical artistic statements, The Walker Brothers, who were not brothers and who were in fact not technically even Walkers, released Nite Flights, one of the strangest “comeback” albums of all time. First, they didn’t necessarily have anything to come back from–the only one of the three with a measure of a career outside of the trio’s minor Sixties Peter and Gordon pop charters was lead vocalist and possessor of the world’s lowest singing voice Scott Walker (né Engel), whose solo albums from the late Sixties were avant-garde because Leonard Cohen was still trying to be the Canadian Dylan and no one really knew who Jacques Brel was. Walker’s lyrics, about dying and prostitutes and dead prostitutes, were surrounded by the baroquest strings money could buy.

Nite Flights pimp-slapped listeners with its clever Bowie/Eno-isms, has been credited for almost single-handedly inspiring the New Romantics of the early Eighties, and, although coming from a completely different place, perhaps Neil Young’s Trans as well. “Fat Mama Kick” (mp3), in particular, is as buzzy and strangely moody as Howard Devoto’s debut with Magazine that same year, Walker’s croon sounding like a dying hipster cyborg over a mutant disco backdrop.

Nite Flights is, perhaps predictably, out of print.

Filed under: Scott Walker  Walker Brothers