OUT OF THE BLACK

This whole 'female-singer-songwriter' thing really pisses me off. You never hear people talking about male singer-songwriters in the same way, do you? I think journalists should get their fingers out and come up with a better description."

Juliet Turner is in fighting form this morning despite suffering from a nasty throat bug, doubtless brought on by a combination of a hectic live schedule and heavy promotional duties for her new album Burn The Black Suit.
Ensconced in the relative calm of the Shelbourne Bar while the May monsoon season erupts outside, she has good reason to be this confident in herself. The album, the long-awaited follow up to her 1996 debut Let's Hear It For Pizza, has entered the Irish charts at number 15. 'Take The Money And Run' the catchy and uncharacteristically effervescent first single to be taken from it has been widely play-listed. The album has also been hailed by critics as the one that might do it for her, internationally.
"I'm very pleased with it," she states. "It's been four years in the making and it's turned out the way I wanted it. It's not necessarily the album I've always wanted to make I don't think it's my Blue album," she says, referring to Joni Mitchell's classic. "It's a step towards something else, I don't quite know what, maybe a more crafted form of songwriting or something a little bit more adventurous."
Apart from the more pop orientated
melodies on Burn The Black Suit which signal a clear move away from the folksy origins of its predecessor, the album boasts a full-blown production with an impressive list of musicians helping out.
"It was a definite choice to do it that way," she says. "Pizza was very stripped down, mostly guitar and vocals. Having been around the block a few times since then I just knew that if I wanted to get played on the radio I had to do something a bit more polished. I also wanted it to be more upbeat. It was getting a bit ridiculous at times especially during gigs. I'd look down at the front row and see someone with their head down on the table bawling their eyes out. Now they're up dancing at the front and I'm a lot happier with that."
Returning to the subject in hand, however, she has words of warning for those who would have her pigeonholed as yet another in a long line of self-absorbed, soul-baring chanteuses.
"I think it's probably fair to say that Pizza was your typical angsty, confessional debut," she offers. "But I had a lot of shit going on in my life when I wrote it. My brother had died and my dad was ill. I was trying to deal with that kind of stuff. I think I've moved on from where I was at when it came out. "
She rejects the suggestion that female artists tend to open their hearts and bare their souls more readily than their male counterparts.
"I just don't think it's true at all," she insists. "Look at David Gray, he's always baring his soul, isn't he? Obviously your gender is going to affect how you see things but there definitely isn't an even balance when it comes to criticism. You have to struggle that bit harder as a woman and you have to have a good voice. Personally I never thought I had a good voice which is why that hotpress Awards nomination last year really threw me. I was nominated as a vocalist and not as a songwriter. There actually wasn't one female songwriter in that category; obviously women aren't seen as songwriters."
Presumably then she wouldn't have had any truck with the Woman's Heart movement which seemed to dominate the scene in the early nineties.
"I don't know for sure whether I'd have turned it down," she ponders. "It depends what you do with it. I'd like to think it was coming from a human perspective rather than a female one. I admire what Siniad Lohan has done with her career both from a musical and business point of view. She hasn't kow-towed to anyone and she's done things the way she wanted to."

Turner has come a long way in a relatively short time. Growing up in the heartland of rural Northern Ireland, near Omagh, Co Tyrone, the 26 year-old originally came South to study English and history at Trinity College. After graduating in 1997 she opted to remain in Dublin, taking a day job while pursuing a musical career which had begun to take off while she was still a student.
Her debut album Let's Hear It For Pizza, which was released on a small independent Scottish label, came out while she was slowly building an audience. But it was her poignant rendition of the song 'Broken Things' at the Omagh Memorial service which brought her national and international attention. She later recorded the song for inclusion on the Across The Bridge Of Hope album alongside the likes of U2, Siniad O'Connor and Van Morrison.
Thanks largely to her manager Derek Nally, who also happens to be one of the most active promoters on the Dublin scene, Turner has probably done more support slots than most. Presumably this has helped her to hone her performing skills?
"It definitely has, but I don't tend to pick up much in terms of other artists material or how they write. I tend to watch the way they soundcheck and prepare for a gig. I'm usually stuck in the venue watching them and you pick up little things, like how they behave towards the people who work with them. Brian Kennedy, for example, is always professional towards the people around him. But I've seen some acts who are tetchy and it leaves a bad feeling in the theatre. Sometimes they were well known for it or they were ill or things weren't going well. But I think you've got to expect a standard of excellence from professionals."
Turner's lyrics are emotionally charged, direct and occasionally unnerving as anyone who has witnessed her live will attest. Obviously she sees them as a vital element in her songwriting approach?
"Yeah, for me the lyrics are what I struggle over most. All my creative energy goes into them. They're all story songs so it's important to me that they mean something. I nearly always start with my lyrics, though melody is important because it pulls you into the song.
"It's hard to know whether a song is good or not when you're writing it. Sometimes you read over them and wonder what on earth you were feeling because you forget, but I think it's better to leave it up to their own imagination. I saw an explanation for Brian Kennedy's Captured on a web-site and it wasn't what I thought at all, so it's better to leave it alone. The way I work I start off having something to say, you write your song and it takes you into the studio or in front of an audience that's the way it's always been for me."
In the absence of a major label coming on board Burn The Black Suit is released on Hearthis, a label set up by Turner and her manager specifically for the purposes of putting out the album.
"We just got tired of waiting around for somebody to offer us a big deal, she explains. "Obviously if someone comes along in the meantime with huge amounts of money I doubt very much whether I'll turn it down. But I've enough to do here in Ireland for the moment. This country has been good to me. It's a small market but that's good in that you can get your name out there and get your music heard quite easily. But you can't make a living gigging here in the long term. People will soon get sick of the sight of you. I'd want to get out as quickly as possible not necessarily to escape but just to expand my horizons."
An aspect to Juliet Turner that has rarely been touched on is her strong religious beliefs. She's a regular performer at Greenbelt, one of Europe's largest Christian festivals, which attracts 30,000 people annually to Cheltenham Racecourse. (And coincidentally or not, her debut album was recorded at 'Heaven' Studios in Scotland!)
"I'm never all that keen to talk about it because I have a strong view that your faith is your own business, she says. But I was brought up as a Methodist and it had a big influence on a lot of my attitudes to life, especially music. Susan McKay did an interview with me about that and a lot of it was about the whole thing about the joy of music and a Methodist upbringing.
That whole hymn-singing thing, I don't know if you know much about it, but that big joyful Harvest thing was important to me. I think it s similar to the gospel thing in the States where people have this strong faith, which comes out in the music.
"But where I come from, as well as people having a very strong faith, it's a big social thing. A lot of my friends are in the Church. So we went to church but we also went to discos and young farmers club socials. Sunday School you probably went to because your parents wanted you out of their hair on a Sunday morning but it got a bit boring so we left when we were about 13.
How aware was she of the religious divide in the North?
"You're very aware of the Catholic/Protestant thing growing up in the North, but you can't generalise anymore. There's a lot of different points of view up there now and there's a lot of people who, for example, are ashamed to align themselves to extreme Orangeism/loyalism. In the places I've been in America in Texas or LA nobody gives a shit about the North they wouldn't even have heard about the Omagh bomb. Americans are criticised for being insular, but they've a big enough country and enough to be worrying about.
"But I have to say the way I am at the minute is I'm not all that sure what I believe in and I'm not a churchgoer. I've always had a faith of some sort. It's always been churning around in my mind but I've never been that sure of anything. That's the problem with any religion when you start saying you know the truth one hundred per cent. I hate the whole crusading element.
Despite her insistence that religion and faith is largely a private matter isn't her association with something like the Greenbelt Festival a public proclamation of her views?
"Greenbelt is interesting and I've always been proud to be associated with them. It gets a lot of flak from the evangelical Christian community they see it as being far too left-wing and liberal. But they make a point of getting in non-Christian artists who might not share their religious views but who agree with them about the environment or world development or whatever. It's a very questioning festival you're not invited there to be told the answers you're invited to have a damn good think about what you believe in which I think is a good thing.
Getting back to the new album Turner says that it accurately represents where she is emotionally now.
I've kind of moved on from where I was before, she reiterates. I'm a lot happier and the title track is a metaphor for that. Black suits are seen as formal, conventional and in my head it became a symbol. To burn it was like putting aside mourning and convention and having a bit more freedom. It's exactly the way I feel at the minute."
Burn The Black Suit is released on Hearthis Records, distributed by Sony Music. Juliet Turner plays Vicar St. on June 15th