Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
DEFINITELY THE BEST, 13 Aug 2000
A great selection of tracks from the best boy band of the 60`s. with well known hit songs such as their 1st hit "Make It Easy On Yourself" which reached no 1 in 1965. the evergreen "The Sun Ain`t Gonna Shine Anymore" the Romantic "1st Love Never Dies" "My Ship Is Coming In" & lots more. Then there is afew of Scotts solo hits that he made in the late 6o`s such as the brooding "Joanna" & "The Lights Of Cininatti" & "Jackie". Listening to these songs, the awesome voice of Scott Walker still manages to send a shiver down my spine! This C.D. is deinitely a must for any fans of The Walker Brothers & even if you arn`t, you could be converted after listening to it!
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51 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic sixties pop music, 2 Mar 2005
The Walker brothers were not brothers at all - they were actually Scott Engel, Gary Leeds and John Maus. Once they adopted their chosen group name, they dropped their own surnames and became Scott, Gary and John Walker. Unable to make it in their American homeland, they relocated to England, where they became successful all over Europe, although they had far more hits in the UK than anywhere else. They sang pop ballads superbly, though they could pick up the tempo enough to provide variation. Their biggest hits were Make it easy on yourself (a Bacharach-David song) and The sun ain't gonna shine anymore (a Four seasons song, never released as a single by them). Both those songs were number one hits in the UK, also reaching the top twenty in America. My ship is coming in, a number three UK hit provided their only other (minor) American hit. Of their other UK hits, the biggest were No regrets (7), Another tear falls (12), You don't have to tell me (13) and a Scott solo, Lights of Cincinatti (13), Other tracks include Jackie, If you go away (both Jacques Brel songs translated into English), Joanna (another Scott solo, written by Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent, better known via Petula's sixties hits) and We're all alone (a Boz Scaggs song that provided Rita Coolidge with a UK hit). This collection contains all the essentials, but I bought this many years ago only to feel it wasn't enough. I eventually bought the double CD, Singles plus. If you are sure you only want a single CD, buy this - if in doubt, buy Singles plus.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Why Julian Cope was right, 23 Nov 2008
In 1981 Julian Cope - then of the Teardrop Explodes - put together a compilation of Scott Walker's work entitled Fire Escape In The Sky. Its subtitle was The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker. That laudatory naming can be explained and understood by listening to this engaging collection, which spans eleven extremely interesting years of his career.
The tracks presented here can be seen in three distinct phases. Firstly, there is a tranche of material from his initial rise to pop stardom as part of The Walker Brothers (1965-1967). These songs - My Ship Is Coming In, Make It Easy On Yourself and The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore - are memorable, melodic and epic; they are of comparable quality to the `teen symphonies' of producer Phil Spector and Brian Wilson's work with the Beach Boys of the same time. Secondly, we see, following his decision to quit the group because of disillusionment, the embryonic stages of Scott's solo career (1967-70). That work is, by turns, challenging (the cavalier cover of Jacques Brel's risqué `Jackie'), symphonic (`Boy Child') and melancholic (`Montague Terrace In Blue'). Finally, and most briefly, it looks at the reunion of The Walker Brothers in the mid-1970s. This period includes the huge hit single which gives this collection its name: `No Regrets'.
Though the tracks on No Regrets are almost uniformly excellent (with the exception of 1976's mawkish `We're All Alone'), there are one or two drawbacks. This compilation is, for instance, too heavily weighted in favour of material from The Walker Brothers (two-thirds of its eighteen tracks to be precise). It also seems to prefer the less challenging moments in Scott's canon and sets itself an arbitrary cut-off date - therefore, there is nothing from the excellent experimentation on the first side of 1978's Nite Flights nor anything from 1984's undervalued Climate Of Hunter album.
Repeating back some of the many adjectives that music journalist Jon Wilde used in his brief, informed liner notes to the 1991 edition of this collection seems to me to be a fitting way to encapsulate the essence of Walker's beguiling music here: `haunted', `pain', `tenderness', `fear', `longing', `timeless', `intoxicating' and `genius'.
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