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Thanks S. I subscribe to The Wire myself, so received my copy a couple of days ago. Wonderful to see the Scott Walker interview, and to get a taster of The Drift. Certainly Rob Young's citations of Eliot, Pound et al are, in Walker's case, valid - as devices for illuminating Walker's own multi-textual, multi-voiced approach. Walker is - as logically follows - situated firmly within that Modernist tradition himself. That's what takes him away from most current music, even its supposed loftier peripheries. One can only speak of him in the same breath as Eno (for artist engagement, seriousness, and variety), even Ivor Cutler (for poetry, esoteria, personal singularity), perhaps King Crimson (for attempting to extend the Prog project - a Modernist project in essence). Tilt took a little from Peter Gabriel's third album, in some of its colours and attitudes; of course Rhodes and Gilblin played with both Walker and Gabriel, so there's that crossover anyway. Gabriel III is still a very good album, to my mind; though I never listen to it. Unlike Walker, however, Gabriel moved away from the possibilities offered on that album, toward the mainstream, musically, and toward the centre, as a personality, a kind of post-Prog national institution, in some ways - being involved in the Millennium Dome, for god's sake! Gabriel's influence is huge, though - helping to bring World Music into the mainstream. But, for me, Walker's tenacity and singular commitment is, firstly, more artistically interesting, and is, in its clarity, more productive in terms of originality, of moving forward, of invention, of making strange - the engines of Modernism. I doubt Walker is a recluse in the lumpen sense; he just isn't a populist. As he said during The Culture Show interview, there's already enough of that stuff around. There is something to be said for Gabriel's approach, though - in attempting to square the Prog/Modernist impulse with populism. It's just that, inevitably, that hybrid smacks of dilution, not concentration. That 'shaving down' approach Walker talks of is, in the end, a much more powerful way to make art. It would be good to think that The Drift is not his last album. Cheers, Anthony----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------From: Scott Walker : 30 Century ManDate: Apr 23, 2006 2:51 AM http://www.thewire.co.uk/current/story2.php Big article with some great photos by our brilliant Director of Photography Grant Gee - have to buy the magazine to read it, but well worth it - a great interview in which the man himself offers up some welcome clues to some of the songs on his new album The Drift, which, need it be said again, is a monolithic masterpiece. Cheers, as always - S