Scott 4

'Scott 4' was the first of Scott Walker's albums to feature entirely original material, and includes such memorable compositions as 'The Seventh Seal', informed by Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film of the same name. 'The Old Man's Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime)' was in reference to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia that had taken place in 1968, the year before the LP's recording. In a 2012 career overview for The New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones contextualised the singer-writer's artistic motivation by writing: 'To conceive of Walker simply as someone who moved from pop to art is to hear only one channel of a stereo narrative: the paired signal is that Walker has always been idiosyncratic, and favoured extremes from the start.'