My favourite album: Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker

When this album was released in 1981, Scott Walker's solo career had almost been forgotten. The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore was already an oldies staple, but his solo work was remembered, if at all, as a brief postscript to the Walker Brothers' hit run. These 12 exceptional songs, wrapped in what looked like a grey felt sleeve embossed with olive-green lettering, were buried deep. It is hard to recall just how deep. At the turn of the 80s, Pet Sounds was out of print and the world of reissues was in nappies; hits compilations were the norm, and the Edsel label's groundbreaking, properly annotated collections by the Action, Creation, Merseybeats and Big Three were only just in the racks.

What made Fire Escape in the Sky all the more unusual was that it was put together by a Smash Hits pin-up, the Teardrop Explodes' Julian Cope. He had talked about Walker – as well as then barely mentioned names such as Love, the Left Banke, Tim Buckley – plenty in interviews, but put his balls on the line with this album. One listen to Plastic Palace People or Boychild and you could hear the inspiration for Cope's own Christ Versus Warhol or Tiny Children. It was an act of extraordinary generosity and selflessness. He was a model pop star, a one-man gateway to music's past and future. Sleevenotes would have burst the bubble. Cope was smart enough to unlock the door and walk away – after that you were on your own.

The music, then. Such a Small Love sets the scene with atonal strings, slowly joined by rumbling, executioner's tympani and Walker's dark, rich tones: "He speaks, I don't hear a word he's saying..." Here are 12 tales of broken affairs inspired by and aspiring to the great European cinema of the 50s and 60s: It's Raining Today watches from a train window as the girl walks away; The Amorous Humphrey Plugg dreams, pissed, semi-conscious, of the adoring women he'll never meet while the "telly" and family life conspire to swallow him whole; Angels of Ashes and Boychild, floating on the dense, delicate, Sibelius-influenced arrangements of Wally Stott, are ultimate tales of escape, from home, from life. The scope of this new pop – presented by Cope just as new pop was starting to dominate the charts – is ridiculous, unprecedented.

It certainly worked for me as a 16-year-old in suburban Surrey with a view across the rooftops of Purley. With Cope's kind help I then discovered Forever Changes, Goodbye and Hello, the original harpsichord-led Walk Away Renee. I was on a trip, like Billy in Plastic Palace People, at school by day but able to escape every night into a world of music I had never heard of or read about. I feel bad now that I couldn't go beyond a certain point with either Cope or Walker's own music (Peggy Suicide and Climate of Hunter were respective lines in the sand for me), but Fire Escape in the Sky has it all, an artefact that is a distinctive blend of pop fandom, mystique and skyscraping ambition.

You can write your own review of this record on our brand new album pages: once you're signed into the Guardian website, visit the album's dedicated page.

Or you could simply star rate it, or add it to one of your album lists. There are more than 3m new pages for you to explore as well as 600,000-plus artists' pages – so if, for example, you prefer the freakier sounds of Tilt, or are more attuned to the sound of Scott Walker superfan Jarvis Cocker's solo stuff, then simply find their albums and get to work …