3 Minute World

It takes more imagination when everything’s remote control. Take a look at him now. On the cover of 3 Minute World we see our man Turner in stark black and white, lost in thought, oblivious to the flurry of the crowd. It’s a telling image of dislocation. A moment captured. A man unstuck in time, while the disc itself is a clock face frozen forever at 12:03.

This is a record obsessed with time and the fleeting nature of life. It’s there right from the opening track ‘Sunday’, a glorious bleary-eyed hymn to sloth with its hypnotic ticking clocks and chiming bells intro. Here Turner, echoing the spooky somnambulism of Lennon’s ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, encourages us to “lie in a dream if you wish” while warning us that “no one tangles with God”. It’s there on the haunting ‘You Won’t Mind’, a gorgeous mood piece possessed of a dreamy, ethereal quality when Turner sings “The clock made twice as much demands on you”.

On 3 Minute World Pierce Turner takes a disapproving look at a helter-skelter, topsy-turvy world “surging on full-speed to our tombstones”. Bemused and baffled by the rampant consumerism and lemming-like antics of The Crowd, Turner, not one to rage against the (time) machine, offers cataleptic life-saving alternatives: go for an aimless walk with the dog, have a few pints in the local. In Turner’s world, simply going fishing – “a minute takes forever, the clock has gone to sleep” – becomes a defiant act of self-assertion.

Though not directly conceptual 3 Minute World, with its sustained mood, unity of tones and dominant themes, can be seen as something of a concept album. It is a speciously unified work in the manner of Sinatra’s Songs For Swinging Lovers, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends.

There’s an open heart at work here. For an album obsessed with time it has a totally timeless quality. It will consume fifty-two minutes of your life but will take years off you. This complex and astonishing work is a breathtakingly gorgeous soundtrack to your wildest dreams. Dive in and you will surface in heaven.