Burning desire

The waif-thin, supermodel-tall figure of Juliet Turner – all six feet and one inch of her – arrives into the Library Bar of Dublin’s Central Hotel (former workplace of Des Bishop) looking ever so slightly harried and aggrieved. The Tyrone-born singer has just come from the RTE studios where she was due to perform a couple of tracks from her just-released new album Season Of The Hurricane on the Gerry Ryan Show. Unfortunately for her, Bertie Ahern was also a guest on the show, and the talkative Taoiseach wound up somewhat stealing her Hurricane’s thunder.

“He went on for ages – much longer than he was supposed to,” she complains, in her pronounced Northern accent. “He just wouldn’t shut up. So my whole thing got cut back and we wound up recording the session rather than playing the songs live.”
“Not to worry,” hotpress reassures her, “they’ll probably broadcast them tomorrow.”
“I suppose so, yeah,” she sighs, still looking fairly unhappy about it. “I guess these things happen and it’s not really the end of the world. I was just really looking forward to doing it live.” Then she brushes her flame-red hair back off her face to reveal twinkling and intensely bright blue eyes, and grins widely. “I’ll tell you one thing though – he’s definitely lost my vote!”
Political hiccups aside, she tells me that she’s really enjoying being back on the promotional trail (she’ll be playing an in-store at HMV straight after this). “It’s really nice to have a new album out and to find that people are still interested,” she says. “I was half-expecting for people to have forgotten all about me, but luckily that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
It’s certainly been quite some time since Turner last seriously sought our attention. The Alastair McMillan-produced Season Of The Hurricane is her third album, and her first release since 2000’s best-selling Burn The Black Suit (which shifted a very respectable 50,000 copies in Ireland alone). However, although she hasn’t put out anything new in almost four years, she definitely hasn’t been resting on her laurels.
“I’ve been busy,” she insists. “I haven’t really stopped. I’ve been quite lucky because I wouldn’t be the biggest pull in the world in Dublin. I mean, I can get a good crowd, but I also have a really good following down in the country as well. So I can go down and play in Cork and Kerry and do wee gigs up in the North also. So there’s definitely enough work to keep me going.
“And I was trying really hard to just get a footing in the UK. And I think that was really good for me, because it went back to being the way that it was when I first started out in Ireland. You know, playing all the backwater gigs. And playing on my own, doing loads of supports, as well. I toured with Joan Armatrading last year and Roger McGuin as well. So just that whole thing of starting again and trying to build up a small fan base. So that took up a lot of time.”
Did you find it hard going back to square one in the UK?
“In some ways it was really good and in other ways it was really disheartening. I think the thing I hated the most was just being really lonely on the road, and it just being me without any band at all. I’m not great when I’m on my own on tour. I get really lonely and I end up feeling that it’s all more hassle than it’s worth.”
Are you a solitary person generally?
“Well, I like my own company very much, but I hate that feeling of going on the road and not seeing anybody you know for about three weeks. I don’t mind my own company at all. I spend a lot of time on my own but it just gets to a point where you’ve had enough and everything becomes really distorted and you don’t have any sane thoughts anymore. So it’s good to have somebody you can have a laugh with.”

Maybe she’s just in nervous interview-mode, but laughing isn’t something that seems to come particularly naturally to Turner. Not that she doesn’t have a sense of humour, just that her Ulster Methodist upbringing has given her a quiet, dignified and somewhat reserved manner. It’s not that she’s uptight, just that she’s obviously very serious about what she’s doing. She admits to having a “strong northern streak” and the kind of work ethic that’s not especially common in music circles.
The work ethic isn’t surprising, given her background. She grew up, far from the madding crowd, on her father’s isolated dairy farm in Tummery (pronounced ‘Chum-ry’), about 12 miles outside of Omagh.
“It was a good place to grow up,” she says. “I had a lot of freedom. And I do miss that. It’s quite interesting because I was talking to a friend of mine recently, who comes from a farming background as well. And we’re both in our thirties now and we have this kind of surprised feeling that we’re both living in semi-detached houses and we don’t have acres of land around us. Because that was something that we all took for granted growing up – somehow we just assumed that would be the kind of life that we would have. So having a bit of a back garden – and that’s it – is a bit weird.”
Her new house is in Co. Meath, and was bought with her Burn The Black Suit royalties. Most Irish singer-songwriters would’ve undoubtedly blown the cash on a string of lost weekends, but she says that having financial security and being self sufficient is extremely important to her. Music is very much a career to her, rather than a vocation, and the idea of starving for her art holds little appeal.
“Financially, I’m pretty secure at this stage. And that’s pretty much totally from album sales and just from gigging. It’s the same as everything else – I make a living from it. I’m not stinking rich by any means. But I’m quite practical that way. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t make a living from it. Otherwise you’d be back living with your parents and going to dad for handouts and that’s not the way I want to live my life. At the minute I’m doing okay.”
It’s a decidedly practical, non-bohemian approach. She says that she had no great ambitions of becoming a professional singer when she was growing up. Instead, the music business was something that she gradually drifted into. After finishing school, she went to Trinity where, having considered a course in speech therapy, she eventually wound up doing her degree in English and History. She gigged just for the love of it during her early college years – mostly playing pubs and parties – and then, encouraged by her friends, she recorded her folky debut album Let’s Hear It For Pizza in 1996.
Despite boasting a title that Phoebe from Friends would’ve been proud of, her rough and ready debut garnered her a certain amount of critical praise. It was far from the greatest Irish album ever recorded, but most reviewers agreed that the young singer with the undisguised northern accent (her singing voice unashamedly does for Tyrone what Damien Dempsey’s does for Dublin) showed serious potential.
“I left university in 1997 and didn’t turn professional until 2000,” she recalls. “That was when I realised that I couldn’t work and go into the studio and make an album. Up till then, I always supported myself with part-time jobs and things like that. And then with that and doing gigs on the side it gave me enough money to get by. You know, I’ve worked in Dunnes and in second-hand clothes shops and all that kind of stuff. It’s kind of weird to think though because I don’t know what I’d have done if music hadn’t come along after those years in college. But music was just there afterwards so I went for it.”
She didn’t go it totally alone though. She’d met her manager, respected music promoter Derek Nally, in 1997 when a member of the band she was playing with gave him a copy of Pizza. Suitably impressed, Nally began offering her support gigs in Dublin, and eventually decided to become her manager.
“Derek was ideally positioned,” she says. “He got me loads of supports right from the start. And he’s very savvy about the whole business – he knows the music business inside out. And he’s really honest as well. I’ve worked with him now for seven years and we just get on well. He’s been really good to work with.”
Does he protect you from the sharks?
“I would say to a certain extent that I’m protected by him,” she agrees. “We have the record company together and he’d run all that side of things. But at the same time, there’s never a decision that’s taken without me being involved. I see all the paperwork, all of that. So I would try and keep an eye on things as well. It’s stupid not to. There’s no point in me closing my eyes to the business side of things. I always try to learn about things like that.”
A fairly serious industry player, Nally was connected enough to ensure her a steady stream of prestigious support slots. The first gig he got her was playing with Sean Tyrell in Dublin and, over the last few years, Turner has supported some of the biggest international acts on the planet – including such luminaries as Sting, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and Bryan Adams.
Did you actually get to meet Dylan?
“I did the bill with him in Kilkenny, but no, I didn’t meet him,” she says. “What would you say to Bob Dylan really? And also I didn’t have the best gig that day. When that happens, it really gets me down and I don’t really want to talk to anybody. Even if it is Bob Dylan! So I was just in a big sulk that day.”
How about Bryan Adams?
“I met him, yeah. He’s tiny! He was really, really nice and really, really friendly. Very chatty. And very handsome. But whenever we were getting our photograph taken he made me sit down in a chair so I wouldn’t be towering over him. So he didn’t make me feel very feminine.”
Sting?
“Sting was lovely. Very nice. A really approachable guy who made an effort to come and say hello, and say I had a nice voice and that kind of thing. Joan Armatrading was a really interesting character. She just very much kept herself to herself and was very private. She did her gig and that was it. That was the only part of her you saw really, you didn’t see any of the personality behind that.”
Despite all of these impressive international connections, Turner’s always been regarded as a bit of an outsider on the home music scene – seeming too straight for the indie contingent, and yet somehow too left field for the Mary Black lovers. She’s not so much middle-of-the-road as on a different road entirely. It’s highly unlikely that you’d ever see her sharing a stage with The Frames or out on the piss with The Revs.
“Personally speaking I don’t hang out in the musical community,” she says. “But I had a really good chat with Gemma Hayes one day. We just sort of met up and had a really good chat about being in the business generally, and being a girl, and how was it having a band, and all of that kind of stuff. It was really good to compare notes with her actually, I really enjoyed having that chat.
“But no, you see, I don’t live in town or anything. And then the other thing as well is that I’m not very good in pub situations. I just don’t enjoy the pub culture. I don’t mind going out on the odd night but the whole pub thing generally just isn’t for me.”
Did that come from growing up on a farm, miles away from town?
“Probably, yeah. Because we were so out in the country – and also we were Methodists as well. You know, my dad would take an odd drink of whiskey, but drinking was never a big thing. It wasn’t like down in the Republic where that’s where a lot of socialising is done – people go down to the pub and hang out and have a chat, whereas it wasn’t like that when I was growing up.”
Do you drink now?
“Yeah, I do drink now,” she smiles. “But before I came to university the only alcohol I’d drink would be wine at meals. And it took me a while to get acclimatised to all of that. I just discovered then that drinking is actually really good fun. You get rid of a lot of inhibitions and you do loosen up a lot.
“To be honest, I was really quite intimidated by the whole pub culture when I moved down. It sounds really ridiculous but I could never see the point in going to the pub and sitting drinking all night and shouting over people and not being able to have a decent conversation. I’m more a dinner party person, daaaarling (laughs).
“No, I don’t mean to sound snobby and I’ve often wished that I did enjoy it more, but I just don’t. And so I think in some ways it’s a bit of a disadvantage because that’s where a lot of people do their networking – in the pub. They just meet people there, but I’ve never really lived my life that way.”
Have you ever tried any drugs?
“I don’t do drugs,” she states, matter of factly. “I’ve tried hash and whatever, and it just made me totally paranoid. No nice effects at all – I was just paranoid. So I won’t be trying that again. So I suppose I am quite clean-living.”
If you don’t hang out on the music scene, who’re your friends?
“Well the problem is they’re all scattered around,” she sighs. “I have a few close friends where I live and I see them from time to time. I’m still quite close to a lot of my college friends but, again, they’re all scattered around – living in places like Canada or wherever. And then there’s friends in the North.
“So generally what happens is I tend to see them whenever I’m in their area or when they’re in my area. But I don’t really hang out with people as such either. But hardly any of my friends are in the music business so they’re quite normal – all married now, with houses and families.”
Would that be an ambition of yours?
“Well, I don’t think it is, because had it been, then I’d probably have done it by now,” she says. “This job’s not great for having long-term relationships because you’re not there, because you’re away so much gigging and whatever. Even to put up with the lifestyle, I think you’d have to find somebody who’s quite understanding and there has to be a high level of trust as well. But I wouldn’t rule it out! If I met somebody gorgeous and fell head over heels then I might go for it.”
What if you had to sacrifice your music career for it?
“Yeah, it wouldn’t be that great. But would you really have to sacrifice it? If it was the right person, you wouldn’t have to because they’d understand. I tend not to think about it too much. If it happens, it happens, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. The idea of being single for the rest of my life doesn’t bother me, because I’ve got my ambitions now.
“I always wanted to own my own house and get myself a mortgage and pay my own bills and be really independent. And I don’t get lonely as such too much – except when I’m on the road and I’m not seeing anybody. I quite like it actually. Like, I wouldn’t be devastated if I never had a ring on my finger.”

This independent-minded and rather ambivalent attitude towards love and marriage will come as little surprise to anybody who’s ever paid close attention to her lyrics – including those on the new album Season Of The Hurricane. Although Turner’s tuneful and upbeat melodies would seem to suggest daytime FM sweetness and light, a closer listen often reveals some blood on the tracks and some spite in that light. If she sounds like she’s got it all together, it’s only because she’s singing from the eye of the storm.
“The title came from the whole idea of the hurricane almost being a symbol partly for what’s been happening to me personally, but also what’s happening generally in the world,” she explains. “And that whole idea of a lot of securities being taken away and things you take for granted being taken away. And things ending but also the way things like that can act as catalysts to push you on to something new and something better.”
She quotes the words of Nick Cave in the liner notes: “Just as it is our task to move forward, to cast off our past… In short, to forgive ourselves and each other, the song holds within itself an eerie intelligence all of it’s own – to reinvent the past and to lay it at the feet of the present.”
It’s obvious that some of these songs mean a lot to her personally, though they’re more universal than naval-gazingly intimate. As Niall Stokes put it in his review last issue: “She moves from sombre, introspective and self-doubting to confident, euphoric and expansive. She takes the listener on a journey through the maze of her own feelings and ambitions, anxieties and aspirations.”
She tells me that she mostly writes her lyrics during the daytime. She’s a serious rewriter and editor and they can often take quite some time to finish. “Sometimes you start writing a song – especially if it’s coming from personal experience – but you have to wait for your life to finish it. You know, you start with the idea but you’ve still got some way to go in your life before you can resolve it. It’s quite interesting that you just have to wait. I mean, that song ‘Vampire’ was hanging around nearly two years before I could finish it.
“What happens is you get the germ of an idea and maybe it comes from something that you’ve experienced. But then it just kind of takes off and you use a bit of poetic license here and there – or not, as the case may be. I mean, ‘Vampire’ just came from a dream that I had about vampires. And I just went and had a flick through dream dictionaries and that sorta thing, and that whole idea of sexual oppression was just very interesting to me.
“And in songs like ‘No Good In This Goodbye’ that came pretty much from straight experience really. But on this album I didn’t want to be so specific in my lyrics. In Burn The Black Suit you’ve got songs like ‘Rough Lion’s Tongue’ and ‘Theatre For The Broken’, and those songs really trigger off memories for me and experiences, but maybe they didn’t really hit a chord with other people in the way that they did for me. So on this album I definitely tried to be more simple in the way that I wrote. Because some of the experiences that I was having when I was writing that album was stuff that my other friends were going through as well.”
The lyrics on ‘No Good In This Goodbye’ are loosely based on JR Lowell’s poem ‘True Love’ (“There was no love as ordinary as ours/We walked hand in hand through this workday world/And the swiftness of your leaving caught me by surprise/There is no good in this goodbye”), and she also quotes Herman Hesse in the liner notes.
“I had a few qualms about that afterwards because immediately it was printed I was wondering was it a bit schoolgirl-ish, you know the way people put poetry on their files at school.”
Do you read much poetry?
“I’ve really started to get a huge amount of enjoyment out of it over the last couple of years. In school I was a big admirer of certain poets like Hopkins, but nobody else really caught my attention until I started reading Louis McNiece. I find that I’m really into a lot of the stuff that he’s talking about. He’s really hitting the spot at the moment.
“And I’m kind of reading books like 101 Poems To Get You Through The Night, which sounds really corny, but there’s some great stuff in there. I’ve been dipping into that a lot. And then the Hesse poem, I just really love it. If you ever get a chance to read it in its entirety, then do. It’s just incredibly inspiring and hopeful.”
Do you believe that art can save the world – or at least somehow change it for the better?
“I think so,” she affirms. “I think that if you have an appreciation of beautiful things then you’re less inclined to destroy beautiful things. Whether that’s relationships or literally physical manifestations of art. I also think that, in some kind of weird way, even beyond an appreciation of it, if you’re actually creating in some form – whether it’s writing poetry or painting or whatever – it does something for you as a person. It makes you freer, more content in yourself.”
Does Juliet Turner ever want to be seriously famous? Chased down the street by photographers?
“No, not really,” she says, shaking her head. “And the good thing about my photographs is I don’t really look like that in real life. I have great make-up artists. I certainly don’t look like my photos. I mean, it’s me and there’s no airbrushing, but it’s amazing what good lighting and good make-up can do for you. And also an assistant waving a big sheet of polystyrene making waves for your hair to blow! So I don’t have that in real life. So that’s the good thing – nobody really recognises me.
“And then, of course, the other thing is that people occasionally tend to go, ‘Oh yeah, you’re her. You’re that girl that I’ve seen on TV. You had that song… em, what is it again?’ They know you but they don’t know anything about you. That’s not particularly flattering.”
How would you feel if this album suddenly went really big and you started to find your personal life coming under tabloid scrutiny?
“It would bother me, but I do think there are ways to keep it under control,” she says. “I mean, it was weird after I played at the memorial service for the Omagh bombing [in 1998, Turner famously played a stunning version of Julie Miller’s ‘Broken Things’ at the Omagh memorial]. I had a taste of what it would be like then. You know, people really trying to poke in and ask questions and take things out of your control, but I’d a very strong idea about how I wanted to handle things there and I’ve always stuck to my guns about that.”
Even though you were asked to, you didn’t release the Omagh song as a charity single…
“No. People would always be at you to sing the song at gigs and talk about it in interviews and I’ve just never done that.”
Where were you when the Omagh bomb went off?
“Oh, I don’t want to talk about that,” she snaps, looking somewhat annoyed. “It was a long time ago now and it’s not really relevant.” She hurriedly takes a sip of water and moves the conversation on. “But as far as the fame thing goes, (a) I don’t think it’s very likely and (b) there are ways to handle it. You just keep yourself private and you don’t do interviews unless you’ve got an album to promote. Just keep things as simple and as dignified as possible – and don’t shag anybody who’ll sell your story.”
So you wouldn’t do something like I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here?
“No, no. I wouldn’t. I really admire Kerry MacFadden for that because I think she’s really natural – she farted and belched, but you never felt she was farting and belching to come across as natural. I thought she was really good and she deserved to win. But it wouldn’t be for me.”
She suddenly looks a little guilty for snapping. “The reason I’m edgy about the Omagh thing is because people ask the wrong questions,” she explains, apologetically. “They ask these stupid things like ‘how did you feel at the memorial service?’ What kind of a stupid fucking question is that? They never ask how are things up there now or how are people the people of Omagh recovering and taking a step forward? They’re only interested in the music thing and my perspective, which isn’t really relevant. All I did that day was get up and sing a song. And I didn’t even write the song. I wish people had more interest in what’s going on there.”
How do your folks feel about your choice of career?
“Brilliant! They’re extraordinarily proud. My mum reads my website all the time [www.julietturner.com] and gets a great kick out of the nice comments. And then she’ll cheer me up when there are horrible comments.”
Do you get many of those?
“Yeah, sometimes,” she grins. “I tend to leave them up as well, because people are entitled to their opinions. And usually you find that if you get a horrible comment and leave it up, another seven people will go on defending you and calling them ‘wankers’.”
What’s been the most hurtful thing written?
“I think when I did the Van Morrison gig last summer in Killilay. Me and my band put a lot of work into it. We were out doing new material and we were doing it in a different way, it was a lot more ballsy than it had been previously. And we worked so hard for that gig and I put so much effort into getting the band together. And then I got this thing on the website…”
She pauses and grimaces before continuing. “It was just because I tried to get people up on their feet at one point in the gig. There were people there with their tartan picnic rugs and their champagne bottles, and they didn’t want to get up. Which is fine. But this guy came on the website and basically said that I had my head up my arse and who did I think I was telling him to stand up. And I just thought of all the work I’d put in, and I just thought, ‘Ah, you wanker – you don’t really know what’s going on behind the scenes and my head isn’t up my own arse! I’m just trying to put on a gig for your entertainment. So fuck off!’
Are you aware that you have a huge gay following?
“So I hear!” she laughs. “I was only really aware of it in Ennis and in Galway. Maybe because I got chatted up quite a lot down there by girls. I wasn’t aware of it anywhere else.”
Have you any interest in girls?
“No, not really,” she laughs, looking slightly shocked at the question. “No, I don’t. I mean, I don’t have any homophobic tendencies or anything. The girl who chatted me up in Galway was really beautiful and I was really quite flattered. And she was so persistent as well, that was the funny thing. I was saying, ‘No, I’m seeing somebody else’, and she was going, ‘But you’re not really in love with him’. And I’d go, ‘Ah, actually I am!’ It was like being chatted up by a bloke really. But I’m not gay. It would probably make me more intriguing as a person, but no. Sorry!”
Although Turner has played the usual Irish band stop off points of New York, LA and Austin, she has yet to properly tour the United states. Season Of The Hurricane is only being released in Ireland initially, but is America a nut she hopes to crack at some future point?
“I’m not too sure about that,” she says, pulling a face. “It’s alright if you’re going over and spending two weeks in the one city, but the whole idea of going over, getting on a tour bus and trawling around loads of wee places doesn’t appeal. I could maybe do it once because I’d find it interesting, but otherwise no.”
Maybe that’s just as well. The Yanks might find the sparky northerner a little too hard to handle...
“When I played South by South West, I did a radio gig in Austin which was quite funny,” she recalls. “It was this really wacky show, which you wouldn’t expect because it’s right in the middle of the bible belt, but it was just this mad show. I can’t even remember the name of the DJs who do it, but just before I went on they had this dominitrix and they were doing some kind of live webcast.
“It was really quite extraordinary. She came out of the studio, just as I was going in, in the high heels and the whip and all the rest. And then I went in and they immediately just started into me going, ‘Oh you’re Irish – you must be always drunk, and are you all still shooting each other over there?’ And I said, ‘Are you guys all still really obese and sleeping with guns under your pillows?’ And there was just this dead silence. And then all these people starting ringing in to complain about me. It was really funny. I couldn’t believe their attitude.”
Well, it’s not all that surprising – just look at the insane furore over Janet Jackson getting her tit out during the Superbowl!
“Well, I think that was definitely planned, because she had a star over her nipple,” she says. “So I thought it was a bit of a cheap publicity stunt. But who gives a fuck? I mean, breasts, like? I look at them every day in the mirror, who cares? Hers might be a tad nicer, but who cares really? It’s stupid stuff.”
Would you have any qualms about using your own sexuality to sell albums?
“Well, that’s kind of a tricky one,” she admits. “Because when I started out I used to go on stage with really grubby hair and an old shirt and a pair of jeans and trainers. But now I find that, especially with women, you can work it to your advantage. You go on stage and you look nice… and the better you look, the more it helps your career. Unfortunately, it’s true. But there is a point where… again, for myself, I wouldn’t go over it.
“But then, who knows? If you look like Britney Spears and have that kind of raw sexuality about you, then why not exploit it to your advantage if you’re comfortable with using it? Of course, if you’re a woman you want to be admired or whatever – and I definitely have a bit of that in my character as well – but at the end of the day I don’t really think I’d be comfortable revealing my breasts. It’s not tied into the kind of music that I write either.”
Though, having said that, some of your lyrics are quite sexually explicit. Take ‘Vampire’, where you sing, “And she pulls him so deep inside her/that he’s afraid he’ll divide her.”
“Yeah, but that’s not a typical line from me and I agonised about that one a lot,” she says. “I’m still not madly comfortable with it. But it’s not actually the sexual act itself that intrigues me, but more the whole kind of power trip that happens between men and women. At the end of the day, that’s what makes it really interesting. It’s not the sex, it’s all the little power plays and jealousies and insecurities.”
And is Juliet Turner the jealous type?
“I’m pretty possessive,” she admits. “I don’t know if I’ve got better that way but I do have a jealous streak in me for sure. And I wouldn’t be the most secure person in the world either. But what are you gonna do? You just get on with it and hopefully meet someone who doesn’t pander to it, but understands it. It’s definitely there, though, this whole darker side that I have.”

[photo: Roger Woolman]