Scott Walker: Scott 4

I bought this for a fiver in Fopp the day before my birthday in 2001. That was during the period when my collecting got a little out of hand: I bought 150 albums in the calendar year. Obviously I couldn't give them all proper attention, and I'm not going to pretend I know this album at all well (though some of the songs I know better from a compilation I bought some years earlier).

I'll just say that having a knight play chess with death doesn't make for great cinema in my book, and it doesn't make for a great song, either. And The Old Man's Back Again may be "dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime", and I'm sure the regime is grateful for the dedication, but may be as indifferent as I am to what it's all about. Scott 4 is one of those albums that critics always go on about. Anyone who nails their colours to this mast forfeits the right to be sniffy about Van Der Graaf Generator's lyrics.

MusicBrainz entry for this album