Song of the Day 3/27: The Walker Brothers, “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”

UK music critics and fans are mourning the March 22 death of Scott Walker, pop idol-turned-avant garde composer. He’s most widely known as lead singer of the Walker Brothers, a Los Angeles trio that reversed the British Invasion formula by hitting it big in England in the mid-1960s, first with the Bacharach/David classic “Make It Easy on Yourself” and then this lush ballad. None of the three were related, and none was born with the surname (Scott was born Noel Scott Engel) they all eventually adopted.

Like most of the group’s early material, the song was a cover, written by Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio, the team that penned most of the Four Seasons hits, and initially released by Frankie Valli. His tepid rendition went nowhere, but Walker’s reverb-soaked baritone proved the key to a No. 1 hit in the UK (No. 13 in the US). As you can hear, the production made the group sound like The Righteous Brothers, a musical direction Scott Walker grew unhappy with. The “brothers” broke up for a few years, reunited in the early ’70s and released some albums with a country-rock sound. Their last album, 1978’s “Nite Flights,” featured originals by all three, who by then had contrasting styles. The LP’s title track foreshadowed the direction Scott Walker eventually pursued.

His audience dwindled but included a who’s who of experimental rockers like David Bowie, Julian Cope and Thom Yorke. By the time he recorded the LP “Drift” in 2006, he was in a world of his own, and it wasn’t a pretty place. “Jesse,” an imagined soliloquy from Elvis Presley to his stillborn twin brother, is the album’s darkest piece — “song” seems like the wrong word — but captures the unsettling sounds of a man living in a nightmare.