In 1978 The Walker Brothers were facing extinction. Again. The trio—not brothers, not named Walker—had been one of the biggest selling groups of the mid-sixties in the U.K. scoring major hits with wall-of-sound style ballads like “Make It Easy On Yourself” and “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” and at one point notably claimed more fan club members than even the Beatles. The brooding and restless Scott Walker, always the focal point of the group, slowly split from the other members—guitarist/singer John Maus and drummer/singer Gary Leeds—through 1967 and 1968 and crooned his way through four massive and influential solo albums followed by a fair amount of schlock before joining John and Gary in a full-fledged Walker Brothers reunion in 1975. At first the reunion provided a glimmer of hope for the now struggling musicians as the single “No Regrets” cracked the U.K.’s top ten, but the 1975 album of the same name and its follow-up, Lines, in 1976, proved both artistically and commercially fruitless. The world had more or less written off the group and their crooning, sensitive center, Scott Walker. 

Then news came that their record label, GTO Records, was going to be acquired by CBS and the trio would likely be homeless when the smoke cleared. What must have been depressing news at first soon morphed into artistic license for Scott and in a 1984 interview he recalled the philosophy of the group leading up to their final recording: “I said to the other guys, this is going to be the last album so everybody just get as self-indulgent as you want.” This freedom—and possibly a shot of inspiration coming from the general direction of Berlin, where David Bowie and Brian Eno had just completed what would become known as Bowie’s groundbreaking Berlin trilogy: Station to Station (1976), Low (1977) and Heroes (also ‘77). After the bloodless soft rock of Lines, the future-shock wallop of Scott’s songs on 1978’s Nite Flights seems to have come from nowhere. It did little to resurrect the Walker Brothers’ commercial prospects, but Scott’s tracks were undeniable heavyweights that instantly made the singer a big wheel in art rock circles.

Nite Flights is usually dissected as three solo miniatures lashed together—Scott’s four blazing tracks open the album, Gary’s two contributions follow, and John’s four songs round out the running order—but in the end it’s all about Scott’s four tracks. The album opens with “Shutout,” an intense proto-metal funk complete with a furious guitar lead; “Fat Mama Kick” is disco drowning in dread with a haywire saxophone solo; and “Nite Flights” is simply one of the coolest pop songs of the 1970s, and exhibits the most striking parallels to Bowie’s Berlin work—for his part, Bowie, an avowed Walker disciple, covered the song on his 1993 album, Black Tie, White Noise—but it’s Walker’s fourth and final contribution to the album that’s the real showstopper and became the blueprint for his subsequent career revitalization. A disturbing, organ-chilled torture drama, Walker’s career unfurls into the past and the future from “The Electrician,” the brooding romance of his early albums represented by an impossibly lush middle eight, while his career to come is represented in the song’s haunting experimentalism and opaque poetry. While interviewed by a German DJ in 1984 Walker was less tight-lipped than usual about the song’s origins, revealing that it’s about “the Americans sending in these people, trained torturers in South America… I imagined these lovers in a conversation.”

In November 1975—following a string of coup de-tats across Latin America during the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s—the military governments of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay established Operation Condor as an anti-leftist plot to rid South American countries—primarily Argentina, whose “Dirty War” ran concurrent to Condor—of their political opponents. Though the stated objective was the eradication of guerilla activities, the civilian population, particularly trade unionists and students, also became targets resulting in a wave of repression, torture, and murder. The full scope of the atrocities that occurred during Condor will likely never be known, but researches estimate that as many as 50,000 people were murdered, another 30,000 were disappeared (the tragically infamous “desaparecidos”), and another 400,000 were incarcerated. 

As Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla consolidated his power leftists and members of the People’s Revolution Army were often tortured and disposed of without mercy. In an auto workshop torturer’s used the sounds of roaring engines to mask the screams of their victims, who were beaten, shocked, and dunked headfirst into water using a pulley system—an act the torturers referred to as “The Submarine.” Officials at the National Security Archives in Washington, D.C. admit that the U.S. had “general but very solid knowledge” of the crimes as they were occurring. Documents have revealed that the U.S. funneled tens of millions of dollars to the military dictatorships of South American countries during this time, that then-Secretary of Defense Henry Kissinger looked the other way regarding human rights violations, and that a shared intelligence program was created using U.S. telecommunications networks that included specifics on torture programs did exist, though suggestions that U.S. torture specialists had their feet on the ground remain unfounded. 

With the United States’ involvement in Argentina’s “Dirty War” during the ‘70s—when many Argentineans were imprisoned, tortured, and killed—as a backdrop, and Walker’s “tortured lover” metaphor established, the oblique lyrics begin to reveal themselves, and when he sings the song’s pivotal line, “He’s drilling through the Spiritus Sanctus tonight” it can be read both figuratively and literally as a breaking of the spirit. “If I jerk the handle, you’ll die in your dreams / If I jerk the handle, jerk the handle / You’ll thrill me and thrill me and thrill me.” Then, from nowhere, a gorgeous orchestral mirage blossoms, dotted with thrumming harp and Spanish guitar—like the kick of hallucinogenic endorphins that accompany brain death, or the sadistic joy of the torture artist, or, more likely, both—before quickly disintegrating again into the same darkness it erupted from moments earlier, Walker explaining one more time in his shrouded croon over a threatening pulse of synths, “When lights go low / There’s no help, no.” 

“The Electrician” was released as a single and despite its obvious artistic merits it unsurprisingly failed to make a commercial impression—“Stayin’ Alive,” which ruled the charts for four weeks in early 1978, it was not. On the strength of “The Electrician” alone Bowie—who was then finishing work on 1979’s Lodger—contacted Walker’s record company with a desire to collaborate in some way with the reclusive singer, but Walker turned him down through an intermediary. Impressed by his work on Nite Flights Virgin Records signed Walker to a notoriously ridiculous-in-retrospect deal that was predicated on an eight album deliverable. (Little did they know it would be more than four years before the world would hear another Scott Walker album—1984’s Climate of the Hunter—and that would notably be his only album of the 1980s.)

Roughly 25 years after praising the song upon its release in the pages of Melody Maker, Brian Eno, while listening to Nite Flights for the 2006 documentary, Scott Walker: 30th Century Man, reflected on Walker’s groundbreaking quad of songs and mourned the stasis of popular music as art, quipping, “We haven't got any further than this. It's a disgrace.”