Scott Walker: “That Francis Bacon, In-The-Face Whoops Factor...”

TWENTY-TWO YEAR OLD Noel Scott Engel was on the run from Uncle Sam. He was fleeing from a country that would never connect with his mordant soul. He was not the hail-fellow jock type that sunny California seemed to require. He was stirred by Albert Camus and Ingmar Bergman and his head was full of European romance. He felt alien in his homeland at the best of times, but now it was at war in Vietnam and pretty soon Uncle Sam would be drafting his meek, existentialist ass. He was afraid. And, as his plane touched down in England one freezing February morning in 1965, he couldn't know that he was running from one unasked-for terror into another. He was about to become very, very famous.