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Newspapers and Magazines written for include: The Observer |
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A village hall in Rostrevor, Co Down, but it could be anywhere in Ireland. Inside, Juliet Turner, as she has done in a hundred such venues over the last couple of years, is captivating another audience, devotees and the curious alike. Her voice tender and vulnerable, teasing out songs of rare emotional honesty or assured and powerful, belting out infectious rockers or sassy jazzy numbers; warm and melodic on deceptively sweet pop songs, her phrasing emphasised with a distinctive, undiluted Tyrone accent. That Juliet Turner is bound for bigger things, everyone seems agreed, but just where her strikingly original talent will take her is a little harder to predict. This is something of a watershed for Turner. Having already made a huge impact with her rendition of 'Broken Things' at the concert for Omagh, her second, barely-promoted CD, 'Burn the Black Suit' (released on the small record label she runs with her manager) has already gone double platinum in Ireland. A few weeks ago she became the first signing to East West Records since David Gray and their first Irish act since The Corrs. In October there's a headline gig at the Point in Dublin and in November, when 'Burn the Black Suit' is released in the UK, comes the first major test of how such a category-defying artist will be accepted by a mainstream global audience. When we meet at her Co Meath home, Turner, fresh from supporting Bob Dylan in front of thousands in Kilkenny, is adamant that the warmth and intimacy of the smaller concerts will not be sacrificed to the demands of success - should it come. "People think that when you get signed to a big record company, that you're going to be a popstar," she says. "I'm never going to be that kind of person, even if I get that successful. I'm the kind of musician that likes to chat to people, tell stories about the songs. I'd like to carry on playing a big stadium gig like the Dylan one, then a tiny place in the middle of nowhere." The publicity photo promoting the Rostrevor concert showed a be-spectacled Turner, hair cut short, looking rather stern and forbidding. In person, she is nothing of the sort. Tall, reddish hair now worn longer, she is down to earth and fun, despite the effects of a "good weekend" (we meet on a Monday morning). What she missed most when gigging became too intensive, she says, was laughter, and it's the ability to enjoy a good time she values most in her friends. Yet, she is clearly ambitious to succeed in her own terms and, one would imagine, no pushover if challenged in that regard. Born and raised in Tummery, a townland some 15 miles from Omagh, she recalls a childhood that was "idyllic in terms of us children being given lots of freedom, always running about, playing in the river or tearing about fields." The methodist influence was strong - both parents, her father, a dairy farmer, mother a primary school teacher, are methodists - but, she says, it was a liberating one. "There was a big emphasis on us girls (she has two sisters, her brother died a few years ago) having the freedom to do what the boys did. We were the ones putting on plays, singing in choirs, entering drama competitions, reading at the Harvest festivals. I suppose there was a lot of artistic expression, even though we would never have called it that." Though she wouldn't experiment with songwriting until coming to Trinity college (initially to study speech therapy, later changed to English literature and Irish history) she can now see the seeds of her future direction in her childhood. "My sister reminded me recently, that I was always the one in the family putting on plays, being the teacher when playing at schools or organising carol singing on the balcony. I was always trying to write poetry and stories. Though I knew it didn't quite hit the spot for me." Encouraged to be "feisty and independent, to speak our minds, we were never afraid to call a spade a spade", she was equipped to "kick against" the more conservative strain of Northern Irish society. Though there was little sectarianism in her immediate environment, she does recall the school bus where the five protestants sat in the front and the catholics at the back. "There was a catholic girl I was quite friendly with, I'd known for six months or so before we started school. Sometimes I went to sit down beside her on the school bus and talk. She always seemed to be uncomfortable and after four or five weeks she said, 'I don't think I should sit beside you anymore because they don't think it's a good idea at the back of the bus.'" The incident clearly left its mark. Later, in her teens, however, Turner found catholics and protestants mixing easily in discos and pubs in Omagh. "It wasn't really until I left school and bumped into people again and talked and realised they were exactly the same as you, just they wore different uniforms." Though the barriers and deeply entrenched views of Northern Irish society are reflected in her first album, 'Lets hear it for Pizza', released in 1996, Turner does not claim any sense of being an outsider either then or when she came south to Trinity. Indeed, she intensely dislikes the notion of artists as being different as much as she does the image of the angst-ridden singer songwriter. A sense of anger - her brother had died of a mysterious illness two weeks before she went to university and her father had suffered a stroke - however, does pervade the largely autobiographical first album. 'Edward', a memorably sharp account of growing up in Northern Ireland is typical. "It's funny, listening to myself talk about it now and reading that song which I wrote when I was 20 and I was so bitter and angry at a lot of stuff. Now I look back and see, like everybody looking back at home, you're much more reconciled to what happened and appreciate much more." She had been encouraged to write songs by Steve Stockman, a Presbyterian minister at Trinity who organised gigs, and who remains a close friend. "I just found I could put words to music and make people listen. There was a deep sigh when you know you could do that, to find that expression. It sounds melodramatic but I think it was something I had been searching for all my life." Recorded on a tiny budget for a small Scottish record company, 'Lets Hear it for Pizza', is still a powerful album, with the beauty of Turner's lyrics emphasised by the barest of accompaniement. "It's just lyric, voice and guitar," Turner says, "and the songs are so much more stripped down than the second album." For all the merits of the first album, and many of its songs remain favourites in her live repertoire, 'Burn the black suit' is a quantum leap in feel and approach. What happened? "I had got through an awful lot of teenage angst. I started to like myself as a human being and hang out with people who made me laugh. I just got happy, had a few successful love affairs," Turner smiles. "I also found that introspection is all very well because if you don't know yourself you can't know others very well but it is an incredibly dangerous thing to get too deeply into, especially when you're in a job like mine and a wee bit in the public eye and you are doing interviews and talking about yourself all the time. The scary thing is I had got to a point where I had lost curiousity about other people. There is a line in 'Theatre for the Broken' (on 'Burn the Black Suit') - 'Now my brash hope has dwindled into certainty and I no longer question why.' There was a big fear I would lose interest in other people and their stories. When I was writing the second album there was a definite attempt to get away from that." While an autobiographical element remains on the album, not least in the beautiful 'Belfast Central' and her account of a relationship with a pretentious, older man, 'Call me Green,' ('I could take a crash course in the Beatles, but there's love and there's trying too hard'), it's intriguing to see Turner take on a wider perspective. 'Queen on Canal Street', for instance, was triggered by seeing transvestites in a Manchester club. "Part of it was me imagining what it was like, asking questions. I sort of come at it from a religious angle. There's a line, 'They say, one day, if I conform I'll get to feast with the king, where is he now when I need him?' The whole things is, when I was growing up you were taught that life is really shit but as long as you do things right and you are good, you would get to see God at the end of it all. But that was never any use to me because I wanted a God who was going to be there when I needed him." With its three singles, the title song, the irresistibly eccentric 'Dr Fell' and the rocky 'Take the Money and Run', plus her duet with fellow Northerner Brian Kennedy on the Tom Waits classic, 'I Hope that I don't fall in love with you', getting airplay, 'Burn the Black Suit' took Turner to a whole new audience. While the lyrics remain as deft and evocative as ever, the musical approach is far more accessible. It's a trend that will continue for the next album, for which she is currently writing. ''I've got round to liking really simple strong melodies," she says, "and the next album will be even simpler melodically. The songs will be much more compact than they have been, really structured and not wandering all over the place. I realise now I can't change the melody line to add a few extra lyrics." Extra discipline won't compromise the distinctive personality of her songwriting though. "The lyrics," she smiles, "are getting a bit way out. One song is about vampires. Apparently, if you're suffering sexual guilt you dream about vampires." Turner is hoping to record the next, crucial, cd in the summer of 2002, perhaps to be released the following January, though she feels under no pressure to hurry it. Ideally she would like to test the material in one of the many small venues she has played over the last few years. "I'd love to turn up at a place like The Lobby in Cork or the Spirit Store in Dundalk and see what they make of the songs. If you can get up and play songs and see what a wee tiny audience make of them, if you can capture the audience with just guitar and voice, you know you have a really good song on your hands." Everything seems to be falling into place. A large following has grown up in Ireland and a much larger one surely awaits overseas. And, though the impact of the signing has yet to kick in, Turner is convinced East West, not the only big company to show an interest, are the one she trusts to guide her through the next stage. "I really like the people I met there," she says, "all my experience of record companies have been with people who talk things up and I have never been a fan of bullshitting. They (East West) are very honest about me being a bit difficult to crack because I'm not the average performer. They are taking time about the right way to promote me, whether as a pop artist or a slightly alternative angle and I appreciate that." One can only hope they succeed. In these days of bland, image-led manufactured pop stars, the world of pop can scarcely afford to ignore such an original voice. I just hope she doesn't forget about returning to Rostrevor. Juliet Turner’s latest CD, Burn the Black Suit, is out now, published by East West, buy it at Amazon. See also 'Frankie Goes to Hollywood' - an interview with notorious ex-criminal and author Frankie Fraser that appeared in the Sunday Business Post in October 1999. |
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The following interview with singer Juliet Turner appeared in the Sunday Business Post in September 2001.