Story of the Song: The Electrician by The Walker Brothers

From The Independent archive: Robert Webb on ‘The Electrician’ by The Walker Brothers

The track is a country mile from the band’s troubled teenage anthems (Getty)

The trio’s final studio release was the widely ignored Nite Flights. This patchy collection launches with four striking songs from Scott Walker. The title track (later covered by David Bowie and the Fatima Mansions, among others) may be the better known, but “The Electrician” is the most influential song the Walkers recorded together.

Directing his venom at the country of his birth, Scott’s disembodied lyrics concern American torture specialists, or “mechanics”, in Latin America in the Seventies. It’s a disturbing account of gleeful torturers extracting confessions from their victims with an almost sexually sadistic enthusiasm: “He’s drilling through the spiritus sanctus tonight/ Through the dark hip falls/ Screaming, ‘Oh you Mambos/ Kill me and kill me and kill me...’”

“The Electrician” is a country mile from the Walkers’ troubled teenage anthems, hinting instead at the bleak and disoriented worlds of Beckett and Kafka. Walker’s bottomless bass booms like a death knell over a synthesised tremor. Then, midway through, the song erupts into a heart-wrenching crescendo of strings, harp and Spanish guitar, arranged by the jazz-rock keyboardist and producer Dave MacRae.