It's Turpin Time

Why is David Turpin so obsessed with the supernatural?

“I just feel a connection with that imagery,” says the softly spoken singer-songwriter. “I find it very romantic. I remember growing up and just craving anything that was imaginative or magical and not wanting to hear all the time about other people’s crap relationships.” The 25-year-old pauses. “No disrespect!”
Would Turpin agree Haunted! is an altogether more upbeat-sounding record than his debut, The Sweet Used-To-Be? “Absolutely,” he says. “Maybe my next record will be all about things that aren’t on this one, all about sex and money and bling and stuff.”
A conversation with Turpin is a sometimes disconcerting experience. His speaking voice is remarkably low, and his eyes shift all over the place. When I ask a question he lapses into silence for a tortuous 30 seconds before answering.
He continues: “I was very young when I wrote a lot of my last record and I am now an adult. A lot of that record was written when I was 15 and 16. I think on a fundamental level it’s different because this record has a marked and conscious absence of sex and romance. I really made it in a spirit of there not being any bad ideas.”
One idea Turpin had was drafting in the help of longtime friends Cathy Davey and Villagers’ Conor O’Brien as guest vocalists. “I see it as a cast, a supporting cast.” he says. “They’re playing parts, they’re playing characters.”
From standout track ‘The Red Elk’ to the album artwork which Turpin – an accomplished artist – created himself, the young maestro clearly has a deep affection for animals.
“I want to emphasise that I love animals in an unsentimental way. I don’t want to 'baby' them. The beauty of nature is that it doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t see you, you’re nothing to it. I was thinking of a scene in Vertigo, the Hitchcock movie, when they go to the Redwood forest and one of the characters says ‘Here I was born. Here I died. And it meant nothing to you’. Nature is another world, like the spirit world. You can be standing right next to a horse and it’s in another world. Nothing goes on between the two of you and on some kind of level you’re always going to be separate.”
What about his live show? “I have a glamorous all female band,” he boasts. “I have one or two ladies on laptops and samplers and then I have anything from two to four backing vocalists and percussionists. It’s very much about the voices and the rhythms and the drums.”
He’s not under any illusions but that his music is an acquired taste. “My vocal, especially, is something that people seem to either really love or really hate. So I like to put vocals to the front of the live show, to say ‘This is what it is and you can take it or leave it as you chose.'”