23/08/2010

Copenhagen



Hans Christian Andersen has had quite an effect on how people see Copenhagen. In reality he was supposedly grumpy, neurotic, a hypochondriac who went to bed with a sign round his neck saying ‘I’m not dead, I am sleeping’. However, his stories of the Little Mermaid, the Ugly Duckling and a score of others have forever linked Copenhagen to the imagination.

As a child, Copenhagen always had something a bit magical in its name . I think that came from two things. One was from hearing the Danny Kaye song,  Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen, on the radio. I never saw the film it came from, Hans Christian Andersen, so I constructed my own ideas of why it was so wonderful. These became intermingled with the Hans Christian Andersen fairy stories so that Copenhagen itself took on the quality of a fairy-tale town. I wasn’t even sure if it actually existed or was a made-up place. The other was from an old radio that lay about the house with a dial on which were the names of foreign cities, including Copenhagen. On occasion I would listen to the crackling of the static and the occasional burst of music and indecipherable language and it would only increase the sense of a rather magical place somewhere far away.

It was a long time before I actually got to the town, on a summer visit with my teenage son. Not everything was as imagined, of course, but the centre remains pretty much as it was in Andersen’s time and it didn’t disappoint. There was also the surprise of the unexpected – the autonomous commune of Christiana, vaguely reminiscent of the outer fringes of the Reading Rock Festival; or finding you could have a 5-course meal where each course was herring. Especially in the evening, when fairy lights in the Tivoli Gardens came on to cast ethereal light on the flowers and streams there, a glimpse of fairy-tale came through.

Not all songs about Copenhagen fit this picture. The Norwegian singer, Kari Bremnes, has a song Copenhagen Cavern, with a very different take - the story of a young girl from northern Norway, desperate and stranded without money in Copenhagen and waitressing/begging in ‘a run down bar beneath the ground, a place where the sun has never been’. It is always good to be reminded that any city has different sides to it. The song here, however, Copenhagen, by Scott Walker, was the one I took in my head when I went there.

As the focal point of the Walker Brothers, Scott Walker (Engels) had been hugely popular in Britain and Europe –but not his home country of the USA - in 1966/7, specialising in melodramatic pop ballads with Phil Spector-ish backing, soaked in heartache and loneliness and all delivered in his powerful but rather sepulchral baritone. The first line of one of their hits, The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More, summed up the existential tone: ’Loneliness is a cloak you wear’. Following the group’s split, Scott Walker took a completely different road, towards Jacques Brel territory and the European chanteur. He also became something of a male Greta Garbo, reclusive, enigmatic, seemingly tortured by his art, introducing references to Camus and Bergman in his lyrics ,and he became an influence on artists such as David Bowie, Nick Cave and Marc Almond. Not all of his new oeuvre worked. It could be over-dramatic or slushy and the Brel interpretations in particular seemed uneasy, partly because Brel’s songs don’t translate into English well.

What Scott Walker did, however, was to bring a love of European culture and history to his songs, some of which were later put out in a CD collection, An American in Europe. You just knew that he really wished he had grown up on the Left Bank, not Hamilton, Ohio. But it also meant that he brought new eyes to his observations on European places and conventions, introducing a child-like wonder at times. The self-penned Copenhagen is from this period, first appearing in 1969 on his third solo album, imaginatively entitled Scott 3, and later re-issued in 2006 as part of the 5 Easy Pieces collection. It is a short, delicate song, reminiscent of Paris Bells and it is like a musical miniature painting, capturing Copenhagen through mood rather than explicit lyrics. The lush orchestration, poetic words and veering to a MOR style in the vocals could have resulted in an overblown mess of pretension. What keeps it this side of that is Scott Walker’s obvious earnestness about the place and the second part of the song. The lines ‘Copenhagen, you’re the end, gone and made me a child again’ are a haunting mixture of sunny hope and melancholy.

The musical fade-out with echoes of a distant carousel is an integral part of the mood here. Listen to this and imagine being on a bench in a small cobbled square in Copenhagen on a sunny late afternoon, with dappled light through the trees. Nearby the street market of fruit and fish and craft is packing up. You can hear the sound of children in a playground, a faint peel of bells from a small church on the corner and in the distance the tinkling sound of the carousel in the Tivoli Gardens. Easy to be a child again.

Link to song

38 comments:

  1. Thanks Geoff! The only song I knew by Scott Walker was "Big Louise" from the same 1969 album, which is about a large prostitute I think! This one's a great new song to know about.

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  2. Great column about a great singer! The only singer I know of who ever sang about prostitutes and plagues and Stalin and transvestites and suicides.:)

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  3. That's so interesting that others perceive him to be so adventurous as a singer, and I learned a lot from Geoff's column about this artist. I only knew him from an album my dad used to play a lot called Fontana I think, where it seemed like he was just trying to be Frank Sinatra. Or maybe Tony Bennett. I think there was a song called "Amsterdam" on there though, which I liked - and should be added to Geoff's list of "songs about places"!

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  4. Actually, I think Fontana was just the record label. I think the album was just called Scott, the one where he is all Frank Sinatra in his style.

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  5. I wonder if I'm the only one who thinks this is a brilliant writer/lyricist hidden behing a lot of musical schmaltz. All the orchestral arrangements seem so bloated, and yet the lyrics - here in Copenhagen and in his other songs - are so interesting.

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  6. Yes, Fontana was the label. He did four albums then, I think, Scott 1,2,3,4. Bowie did the Amsterdam song later

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  7. Geoff, that's so interesting that Bowie did the song, because this "Copenhagen" one reminds me of Bowie - I wonder if there is some kind of influence from Scott to Bowie!

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  8. There was a a documentary film made about Scott Walker, 30 Century Man, made in 2006 with Bowie as executive producer. He has always said he was inflenced by Scott Walker

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  9. Yes, I agree with Chris. It seems very unusual to have this kind of tension between dense lyrics and huge orchestral production. And I agree with the strings creating some kind of a fog around lyrics.

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  10. I think Scott Walker lived in Copenhagen for a while, maybe after he wrote this song though. I'm not sure about this detail though.

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  11. Cool - thanks Geoff! I saw that you mentioned Bowie was influenced by him in the column, and it's great to know about the film. I hadn't heard about it but will track it down. Thanks!

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  12. This song feels like a love song to me - isn't it supposed to be about his partner Mette, because they went there for a holiday?

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  13. What a completely beautiful song, thank you Geoff!

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  14. Geoff, do you know if there is a particular meaning to the line about "an antique song for children's carousels' (I can only think that it means Tivoli, the Victorian amusement park in central Copenhagen).

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  15. Geoff, I've been thinking all week about songs to suggest to you! Here are some maybe unusual ones that I thought of:)

    Prefab Sprout - Andromeda Heights
    k.d. lang - The Valley
    Salem Al Fakir - Brooklyn Sun
    Mike Oldfield - Portsmouth

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  16. The lyrics here are amazing: the singer like really like a poet here.

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  17. Yes, I took the line about a carousel and the fade-out of a carousel sound to refer to the big carousel in the Tivoli Gardens

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  18. I think I need to listen to this album, Scott 3 - based on this song and Geoff's column, it seems like it completely moves away from all the bombastic pomp and orchestration of Scott and Scott 2, to become more melancholy, more interesting.

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  19. Thanks Kyle-some new ones here!

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  20. Wow, this is like a manic-depressive waltz. I think that while his brand of purple prose isn't for everyone (and combined with decidedly dated production values, some songs come off as unintentionally hilarious), his rich, eerie baritone will always lure you in.

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  21. Wow, interesting stuff. I'd only heard of him because the Trashcan Sinatras covered "Little Things (That Keep Us Together)".

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  22. Yes, Berg is right that he lived in Copenhagen. I found an interview with Scott Walker - here's a snippet:

    How much time have you spent in America in the last 40 years?
    If I compound the time, a little over three months, maybe.

    Why so little?
    I’ve had a good life over here, I was always drawn to Europe anyway, and I don’t know, there’s just never been a call for me to go there.

    Has this ever caused any conflict with your family?
    I have no family left apart from my daughter. I have a cousin somewhere, but I have no family left.

    How about in the past?
    Of course, I had people saying ‘why don’t you come over’ but it wasn’t unlivable. Sometimes I’d bring the family over or stuff like that.

    Where else have you lived since you left America?
    I lived in Holland for about a year and a half, and I lived in Copenhagen for a couple of years.

    When was that?
    Holland, that would have been probably 69, and Denmark, probably the early 70s I would imagine.

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  23. I think I saw the documentary you mention Geoff, it was pretty good. On the topic of Walker's thoughts on the U.S. versus Europe, he had interesting off-camera monologue about America: "I came from the Beatnik era in America—they labeled it the Beatnik era, anyway. I read Kerouac, and I dug progressive jazz, and got kicked out of schools and hitchhiked across America, and the whole bit, you see. I met a lot of wonderful people; relationships were ephemeral, but one of the best I've ever known." I think it was a recording from when he was younger though.

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  24. I think I have to disagree with those who dislike the tension between incredible gritty lyrics of Walker's songs and the orchestral arrangements. I really love the contrast between the fine grain of his voice/graphic imagery and the Delius and Sibelius-inspired arrangements, even when the crescendo of horns and massed strings intrude directly upon the lyrics.

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  25. This is some of the greatest orchestral-tinged pop music I've ever heard.

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  26. Here's what I think. Yes, Walker has a crooner-like approach. Yes, it's deep and a tad dramatic at times, but I don't find this annoying. Walker has a deep range that neither stays in an ultra-low or ultra-high register. Walker has some great stories to tell in his lyrics and they are full of colors. Singing about rumored affairs, lost loves and pretty places with a sense of cynicism, the material doesn't come across as ironic or tasteless.

    The shining quality of Walker's material is with the use of an orchestra. I love the sound of a large string section creating a feeling like you're walking in an English countryside in the autumn. The result is neither sad nor happy -- it's really peaceful. I've heard this vibe in songs by Nick Drake, Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot, but nothing so fleshed out as what Walker has done. Songs like "The Bridge," "Montague Terrace," "It's Raining Today" and "Copenhagen" beautifully illustrate this.

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  27. Wow, wow, thanks for writing about Scott Walker, Geoff! He made four such fantastic albums in the late 60's, the best being, of course, Scott 4. But for as much as I love that great album, it's Scott 3 that's been moving me for the last few months. How could you not love an album with such compelling songs as "Big Louise", "Rosemary", and of course "Copenhagen". And for all you hipster types, you should know that "30th Century Man" from Scott 3 was used in "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou". But still, as much as I like Scott 3, Scott 4 will always be the apex for me. I mean, the first 7 songs on that album are absolutely classic to me (especially "On Your Own Again, which I recently found out was played in it's entirety in Radiohead's "Meeting People is Easy" documentary) and it's quite possible that songs of this calibre will never be repeated in our lifetime. If you haven't already, I implore you all to seek out the first four albums of this great artist.

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  28. in the early 80's Julian Cope put together a comp called The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker.That was my introduction to his music.Over the years i have managed to buy almost everything by him. In the 80's cuts like The Electrician anticipated Bowies Berlin period & Joy Division.Obviously his newest music is pretty out there but his best stuff has always had an air of strangeness about it.Nick Cave,Tindersticks,they all owe a debt to this guy.And how cool is it he keeps making way out music?

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  29. It's a shame that his music morphed into free-form sonic soundscapes from the 1980s onward.

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  30. To see how au courant Walker remains, check out the clip below from Alex Turner's side project, The Last Shadow Puppets. The video, for one of the most underrated songs of 2008, even pays homage to The Walker Brothers look..
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8YRx47oylM&

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  31. Absolutely immense, thanks Geoff, and to think, he topped the British charts around the Beatles era, albeit it was the last time Scott actually charted a solo record. The man was/is a genius, and Scott 3 was his peak for me, full of fantastic character songs, all sung flawlessly without the aid of anything like autotune, with orchestral parts gorgeously arranged by the recently deceased Wally Stott, who later became Angela Morley. Big Louise is especially touching, while Copenhagen, Butterfly, and Winter Night are pure magic. Don't even get me started on his reading of If You Go Away. Scott has become more isolated as an artist over the years, and his recent albums are so far from the Scott of the 60's, and may be unlistenable for some, so buyer, beware. There are not many artists I can think of who have travelled so far from the poppier side of what they used to do. David Sylvian comes to mind, although he sometimes drifts back into more accessible sounds, while Marc Almond has always embraced the cabaret sound, but admits he does not enjoy more recent Scott.

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  32. I will say this, to correct David's claim that Walker's current music is "free form" - there is nothing "free" or even "experimental" about his music now, it is some of the most tighly constructed, deliberate and artistic music being made today - difficult, dark, disturbing, yes - but with a singularity and clarity of purpose and vision that is mindboggling. And well worth spending time with, especially if you have absorbed the early output (which could take several years) and are ready to step out on the limb with him...

    Geoff, thanks for helping to spread the word about this amazing artist!

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  33. Glorious. I have to say that it is entirely down to you, Geoff, that I ever heard of Scott Walker at all. Such a beautiful voice, full of depth and character. Quite quite stunning really. So thanks ;)

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  34. Geoff, we thought you might enjoy our tribute to Scott Walker - which we presented in 2006 in Copenhagen: http://www.spike.com/video/tribute-to-scott/2818370

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  35. Beautiful column Geoff - I really enjoy your writing.

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  36. Thanks Heather-great to know!

    Thanks for all the other info there has been about him

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