Q&A: David Turpin
Friday October 23 2009
Your new album is called Haunted. Ever had any supernatural experiences?
Have I ever met a ghost? Not that I was aware of at the time, so they must have been in a good disguise if I have.
So where does your obsession with all things ghostly and ghoulish come from...?
I don't know. Maybe some kind of spectre came and put it in my head while I was asleep...
Do you scare easy? If you hear something go bump in the night, do you immediately dive under the blankets?
I don't frighten easy at all. If I hear something go bump, I'll probably follow it around the house.
As is now standard practice for angsty singer-songwriters who wrote the album in a cabin in the middle of nowhere...
I went to the foot of the Blackstairs Mountains in Carlow. It was a little house with no one around for miles and miles. If you wanted to go to the shop, you had to set out at 2pm because it would be dark by the time you got back.
How long before cabin fever set in?
There was no cabin fever. There was a lot of wildlife, a lot of crows. At night, moths would come in the windows and sit on my face. I was never alone.
You unveiled your new record with a performance at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. Pretentious, mais non?
I always like playing in galleries. It was the sculpture hall of the Hugh Lane, which is a really beautiful room -- very Kubrick-ish.
'Erm, but not terribly rock and roll...
A lot of musicians nowadays want to break down the artifice -- that's an anathema to what I do. I really like being a 'thing' in the sculpture hall, a living sculpture, as it were.
Well, it gives a new meaning to Pop Idol. Anyway... we've been dying to ask you about the LP's sleeve shot. It's a picture of you on the back of a skeleton horse. How did you pull the effect off...?
I can't say how it was done. It's a piece of magic...
Heavens, you're a bit of a mysterious chap, aren't you?
I'm drawn to the imaginative and the fantastical. Maybe sometimes things that seem macabre... I don't notice they're macabre until I've done them...
You can say that again -- we've been checking out the shot of you cradling a doll on your MySpace page. Creepy...
The things about the doll is, I went to shoot pictures in a cellar in the house. And the doll was there waiting for me. I didn't bring the doll. She was just there.
Okay, now you're giving me the heebie-jeebies. Let's get back to your admiration of Kubrick. You contributed to the Lighthouse Cinema's exhibition of artwork inspired by his movies.
I've done a little drawing based on a scene in Barry Lyndon. It's after the Lyndons' child dies. The funeral procession is led by a sheep. I've drawn a picture of Lady Lyndon and the sheep. When I was asked to do it I was working very hard on the record. Kubrick films are very long. I didn't have time to re-watch them all. So I went back to a scene I remembered. I was eight or nine when I watched it at Christmas.
On your website, you list Margot Kidder -- aka the original Lois Lane -- as an influence. She had quite a tragic life...
I don't think Margot Kidder is tragic at all. I think she is beautiful. I admire and respect her. She was great in that film. I have no interest in Superman. But I think Lois Lane was really cool.
And you're also a big fan of the Bronte Sisters...
I like Wuthering Heights. A lot of people tend to think of it as wishy-washy. It's actually tremendously violent -- it's about the madness of love and sex and their destructive power.
You're not related to Dick Turpin by any chance?
I'm not entirely sure what the details are, but there is apparently a chance I am related to him very distantly.
Haunted is out now
- Ed Power
Irish Independent
