I always thought of Scott Walker and his earlier role in The Walker Brothers as very different beasts. But by 1978 they had merged.

The trio were pop idols, making hits like Make It Easy On Yourself and The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore.

By all accounts they prompted as much of a teen frenzy as Beatlemania with their heavily orchestrated ballads.

By 1967 that style had been overtaken by rock music and Scott had started a solo career as a kind of cult crooner making melancholy baroque pop, with a particular penchant for Jacques Brel.

By the Eighties he had become an icon of the avant-garde, embarking on a series of “difficult” albums that increasingly verged on the unlistenable by the 21st century.

So it’s a surprise to find that this spooky song, oddly titled The Electrician, and which would sit comfortably in mid-period solo Scott, is in fact by The Walker Brothers.

Against a disturbing background of synthesised strings, its subject is the torture of Chilean dissidents during the US-backed dictatorship of Pinochet.

Released as their final single, released in 1978, it was unsurprisingly not a hit single…