Story of the Song: The Electrician by The Walker Brothers

The trio’s final studio release was the widely ignored Nite Flights. The title track 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. “I’ve become the Orson Welles of the record industry,” he told The Independent in 1995.