“The Electrician” (1978)

Track 4 on Nite Flights

when Scott Walker

brought The Electrician

to the family reunion

they rolled their eyes

in fright & looked

nervously at Death

of Romance

†††

From nowhere, a low tone. 

Again. 

You are in a boiler room. Something much worse than Fred Kruger lurks.

The nowhere takes on ambience. Screeching digital strings were there all along. A whining metallic curve. And then a voice, multitrack legion bent to hell. Or worse: no distortion, one demonic voice. Wherever Scott Walker had been since the last Walker Brothers album, he brought darkness back with him.

“The Electrician” is terrifying. Baby it’s slow / When lights go low / There’s no hell, no. It’s too much to take. Eventually drums come in, as devastating as that Phil Collins song is uplifting. Enter orchestral strings, in the ornate dream sequence when the song becomes soundtrack to a different movie. 

But the simmering synth strings return, and so does the infernal incantation: There’s no hell, no.

We don’t believe him. A whirling sound closes out the song, drifting away. We are soiled. We have become rotten. We are a corpse in the boiler room, the secret stink in the city.

Who is The Electrician. You don’t want to know. If I jack the hammer / You’ll die in your dreams. Repeat. No rinse.

By the time thrill me and thrill me and thrill me becomes, inevitably, kill me and kill me and kill me we are already dead.

Worse: it happens in reverse. Kill me and kill me and kill me gives way to thrill me and thrill me and thrill me. And then the jubilant strings. 

The Walker Brothers had already made at least one comeback album before 1978’s Nite Flights. They were cashing in on some of the most sublime ballads the western world had ever known. They might have been one of the first boy bands. Look elsewhere for a history; this is just to say “The Electrician” is none of that. Further, it sits indiscreetly among laughable tepid white disco and easy listening tracks like “Fat Mama Kick” and “Death of Romance,” making everyone uncomfortable. Scott Walker would go on to make entire albums of nauseating, sublime hellscapes, but no song in his brilliant solo oeuvre has a more effective context than “The Electrician,” the prodigal monster at the family table. That it sits in the cleanup spot after the eponymous third track, the stone cold classic that keeps this album alive, is another perverse trick to spring “The Electrician” on unsuspecting people who think they’re doing right by listening to this album instead of just streaming “Nite Flights.” 

Somewhere in the beyond, perhaps, Scott Walker laughs.

5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—J †Johnson