A Pierce Turner song is for life.....,

By Liam Fay, Hot Press

.......not just for Christmas. A Pierce Turner album can become more cherished than any other inanimate object, and a good many animate ones too. Resistance to his passion is futile. A bulwark of cool ain't worth a Dixie dollar. Compared to Turner, the rest of what they call Celtic Soul is so obviously fake you can almost see its price tag.

One Friday afternoon a decade ago, I stumbled upon a vinyl copy of his first solo album, It's Only A Long Way Across, in a bargain bin in Golden Discs on North Earl Street in Dublin. I'd never heard of Pierce Turner but, fortunately, I'm a man with an unslakeable thirst for new experience, especially when it comes with a sticker price of £4.99. I bought the LP, tucked it under my oxter and headed for home.

It was the autumn of 1987 and there wasn't a lot else for music fans with functioning ears to do so I spent the weekend listening to the album over and over. I was quickly besotted. I swallowed the record whole, hooklines and singer.

The two tracks that most immediately floored me were 'How It Shone' and 'Orange Coloured Sun'. I'd describe these immaculate songs as operatic if I didn't regard the term as a vicious slur. Like all of Turner's best material, they're more like movies for behind the eyelids; sweeping, widescreen epics, backlit with nostalgic reverie and inter-spliced with hand-held moments of chilling reality.

I'd never encountered anything like It's Only A Long Way Across before. I doubted if there had been anything like it before. This glistening, dripping, bittersweet symphony of grit and gilt, of swagger and pathos. Though I've known the album inside out for ten years, there are notes on it that can still sneak up behind me and pierce my heart like a lance.

It was really brilliant, boy. I'm not coddin' though. I'm not coddin' though, no, no. It was really gorgeous.

Words spilled out of the speakers in torrents, each one sounding freshly-minted, each one sung as though it were a song in itself. Turner rejoices in his use of language in the same way that a sculptor rejoices in stone. He can wring a syllable 'til it shrieks.

Shreds of Latin, gobbets of Gaelic, shards of slang, home-made locutions, snatches of oy oy oying -- Turner plucks them all out of his top hat and gets them hopping like conjuror's bunnies. His voice is a truly remarkable instrument: a mellifluous Irish brogue laced, buckled and polished through a lifetime's feeding on a staggeringly disparate range of musical genres, from '60s pop to choral oratorio to what I suspect could well be the yodelling of Lebanese goatherds.

His Wexford accent, however, is clearly a sham. I've been to Wexford. Nobody who lives in Wexford speaks with a Wexford accent as strong as Pierce Turner's.

In 1988, following a devastating litany of unlucky breaks and personal tragedies, my life hit rock bottom; I became a professional music writer.

It was now my daily duty to spend interminable afternoons in dim bars with even dimmer musicians, putting questions to some of the dullest people of my generation. Worse still was the fact that I was contractually obliged to sit there and listen to their replies. I totally jest, of course. Well, I jest slightly, anyway. One of the tangible benefits of my years as a staff journalist with Hot Press is that I got to meet, and to know, Pierce Turner who returned to Ireland regularly from his New York exile.

Turner's work brazenly sets the cat among the pigeonholers. It is far too graceful and fleet-of-foot to ever fall into any single category. Yet I revelled in the fanciful belief that, by talking directly to its author, I might get some sort of cerebral definition for his astonishingly visceral music. Fuhgeddaboudit, as they say in Noo Yawk. Definition? I don't think Pierce Turner knows the meaning of the word. He grew up in the port-town of Wexford where his mother ran a record shop and lead her own band. Like all his siblings, he was classically trained. His fondest early memories are of singing in the annual plainchant festival. By seven, he was a member of a traditional Irish tin whistle group ("No drums, no guitars, nuthin', just melody, melody, melody," he recalls fondly). At eight, he was playing in a brass and reed orchestra.

His first professional job was as a musician with a pop showband called The Arrows. The Major Thinkers, the outfit he co-formed in New York (with fellow yella belly Larry Kirwan) were likened by the legendary critic Lester Bangs to psychedelic '60s garage-band The Seeds. And his first solo album was produced by American avant-garde composer Philip Glass. Join the dots there and see what you come up with.

The first time I interviewed Pierce was on a transoceanic line to his apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side. For the duration of our conversation, he thought I was somebody else (it's a long story!). But it was as it should've been. Misunderstandings lie at the very core of what Pierce Turner is all about.

He positively basks in his ability to pick things up bass-ackwards and transform them into something novel and peerless. If talent borrows and genius steals, Pierce Turner embezzles through a complicated and untraceable series of off-shore accounts.

He loves kinks and quirks in music, gnarled knots in the grain. I remember him rhapsodising once about how certain tribes of Native Americans purposely weave flaws into their carpets, in the belief that the eye grows tired of perfection. I have seen him slump with despondency when he hears yet another young combo slavishly aping the conventions of an established rawk style.

Singers and songwriters should sing and songwrite about their own lives and in their own accents, he contends. It's the only way they'll ever produce anything unique.

Turner proved his case conclusively in 1989 with The Sky And The Ground, an unforgettable carnival of highly-charged tunes and freighted words. Pop and plainchant, Brian Wilson and Sean O'Riada, 'Walk On The Wild Side' and 'Faith Of Our Fathers', the album features more feverish couplings that you'd find in a dozen Bronx bars on Saint Patrick's night.

The Sky And Ground is searing, soaring, poignant and funny, simultaneously universal and more intrinsically Irish than anything that has ever been conceived on the auld sod itself. But, hey, don't let any of that put you off.

Thus far, Pierce Turner has released only three studio albums and one live compilation. As for hit singles, he's had a nice round number. Zero. And yet, he has already created what I confidently believe to be one of the finest bodies of work in contemporary music. Tragically, it is also the most neglected.

"The only thing I have going for me is that people like what I do," Pierce jokes, with neither bitterness nor rancour. Born without the gift for avaricious self-promotion, Turner has undeniably lost out in a business where bad manners are often confused with creativity and where commitment to what you do is deemed an outrageous eccentricity.

The record industry has let him down. The music press has let him down. Most of all, the idiot beast that is contemporary radio has let him down (you can't really blame the poor deejays though -- those big earphones probably cut off the supply of oxygen to their brains). Fortunately, Pierce Turner has a talent that couldn't play dead even if it was cremated. He thrives on adversity and has written some of his greatest songs at his lowest emotional ebbs.

His extraordinary determination and strength to prevail crackle like static through his 1991 magnum opus, Now Is Heaven.

Today, the mere presence of that album in my CD rack continues to leave me feeling caressed. 'Zero Here' and 'All Messed Up' are a balm to my bruised and battered spirit. 'Moonbeam Josephine' is a 4 minute 27 second masterclass in the spiritually rejuvenating power of an intoxicating pop chorus.

What sustains Pierce himself are his concerts. He is an awesome live performer. His grip on an audience is so tight he leaves fingerprints. After you've experienced one of his shows, all else seems like the put-put-put of a prairiebilly's tractor on the way to the local Line Dancing bar.

The compilation that you've just bought is an exquisite encapsulation of Pierce Turner's genius. If it's your introduction to his work, I guarantee that you'll soon be carrying snapshots of it in your wallet and showing them to other people when they start showing you photographs of their children. If it's the renewal of an old friendship, you'll be scouring back through your old albums by nightfall.

Were record shops to value their merchandise the way gemstone jewellers do (and they should, you know), they'd stock only mock-up copies of this collection on their shelves and keep the real stuff locked safely away in vaults, beneath 50 feet of steel and concrete.

Yes, it is that precious.

Liam Fay
Dublin, September 1997

Liam Fay is a highly acclaimed music critic for Hot Press magazine, Ireland's premier national music paper. He received the ESB National Media Award in 1996.

Listen to some of the tracks from
the compilation in real audio.

Renowned music journalist, Geoff Wallis, who is currently writing the Rough Guide to Irish Music cites The Best Of Compilation c.d. as "one of the Top 20 Irish recordings of all time."

Read Geoff's Interview with Pierce.

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