Stephen Kijak’s documentary has the access, the archive and a queue of famous admirers, and it uses the first two well. But it is too reverent to ask its subject anything difficult, and the admirers mostly tell us how admiring they are.
Stephen Kijak has made a documentary about a man who plainly did not want one. In the mid-1960s Scott Walker was one third of the Walker Brothers and one of the most photographed faces in Britain; by the end of the decade he was making solo records that grew odder and less popular with each release; and then, with a few interruptions, he more or less disappeared. 30 Century Man finds him in a London studio, courteous and quiet, and tries to work out what happened in between. It is careful, affectionate and well stocked, and it never once asks him a hard question. We would send a Walker admirer to it tonight and a sceptic to the records instead.
The structure is the ordinary one. The film runs in order, the pop years, the solo years, the silence, the return, with the present-day studio footage threaded through. Grant Gee and Mat Whitecross, who edit, keep the three kinds of material distinct: black-and-white television from the 1960s, interviews with Walker and his admirers today, and the studio, where a roomful of session players waits while Walker searches for a sound. The studio is where the film is best. Walker explains to a patient engineer the exact noise he has in his head, the players wait to be told what the noise is for, and nobody at this point says the word genius. They are too busy.
We laughed, a little, at that first studio scene, at the sight of serious professionals waiting on a man who can only describe what he wants by what it is not. Then Kijak plays us the result, with that voice over it, and we stopped laughing. That is the film doing its job: it puts the method next to the result and lets us hear the distance between them. The rest of the time it is talking.
The talking is the problem. David Bowie, Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker, Marc Almond, Sting, Johnny Marr and Dot Allison each take a turn, and a documentary with this many famous people in it quickly becomes a documentary about how many famous people are in it. Cocker is dry and useful. Almond comes closest to describing something specific about the voice and how it sits against the arrangements. Most of the others say that Walker is extraordinary and that they cannot explain why, which is pleasant to hear and tells us nothing. The sequence in which some of them are handed the records and listen on headphones, faces going slack, has been widely enjoyed, and it is agreeable, and what it mostly tells us about is their faces.
Kijak also commissions animated passages to run under some of the songs. They are decorative, and they sit where somebody might have explained what the lyrics were doing. The film tells us repeatedly that the later records are difficult and never shows us how to listen to one; it does not stay with any of the late songs long enough for us to hear its shape. Walker’s own music is on the soundtrack throughout, and it says more than anyone standing in front of it, which is awkward for a film that is 95 minutes of people standing in front of it.
The archive is another matter. There is black-and-white footage of Walker singing a Jacques Brel song: a beautiful young man in a suit performing to a television audience that has come for something lighter, and doing it with complete conviction. It explains more about where he went than any interviewee manages. The 1960s footage, screaming girls and all, makes the case the talking heads keep asserting, that this was a pop star and he walked away from it. Walker himself, when he is allowed to speak, is shy, funny and precise, and we wanted a great deal more of him. Kijak had the access; he seems to have been too grateful for it to use it.
As music documentaries go it is a solid middle entry, better supplied than most and less daring than its subject deserved. The reviews so far have been a little warmer than ours, and if you already own the records you will likely side with them. If you do not, watch the Brel clip, sit through the studio, and then go and find the records. It runs 95 minutes, and about twenty of them are the ones that matter.
