COVER STORY:Juliet Turner is studying clinical speech and language studies at Trinity College, Dublin, as well as touring and promoting her new album - her first in four years. And she's on another journey. . . a spiritual one, writes Roisin Ingle
JULIET TURNER'S breakfast is going cold as the singer explains her interest in the anatomy department at Trinity College, Dublin. It's probably not the best subject to discuss over breakfast, but her respectful appreciation of those who donate their bodies to science is engrossing, even over poached eggs.
She has been spending as much time in the department's "beautiful" ampitheatre lately as she has on the musical stage, since embarking on a clinical speech and language studies degree two years ago. It's not as much of a departure as it might first seem for a woman whose capacity for insightful, honest and soulful communication shines from each song on People Have Names, her latest album.
"I just love the atmosphere there," she says of the department, which is located on consecrated ground in the college. "There is no way you could ever tell from pictures or diagrams what the body looks like on the inside. To be able to strip it all away to see exactly how the body works is incredible and the fact that these people have donated their bodies makes it a huge privilege."
Having said all that, she admits to panicking in a recent anatomy exam, which she says she just about scraped through "by the skin of my teeth". "It's as bad as doing your driving test," she grimaces. The examiner was testing her on the heart area, pointing at a descending aorta in the cadaver. "I panicked and said it was the trachea and he gave me a look that said 'surely you don't mean that?' and I said 'no I didn't mean that!' but it's so nerve-racking you just panic."
Returning early in the morning from a gig the night before in Cork, Turner is hungry when we meet up, ordering a hearty breakfast in her local coffee shop in Dublin's north inner city. There is a lot of catching up to do, so a good portion of the meal will end up in a doggy bag which she takes home, perhaps to be shared with the wonderfully-named Gentry Morris - he is supporting her on the tour, and is currently sleeping on her floor.
It's seven years since I last sat down with her in Belfast to discuss the success of Burn The Black Suit,her second self-financed album, and the one that put her on the radio playlists with catchy hits such as Take The Money and Runand gems such as Belfast Central. The album scooped her a Meteor award and marked her out as an artist to watch.
The farmer's daughter from a village near Omagh, Co Tyrone, who proclaims her Northern Irish roots in every heavily-accented syllable of her songs, has been hard at work since then. There was a signing by a UK label, another album, Season of the Hurricane, which was championed by Terry Wogan, and a live recording. Both did well, although she parted company with the label. She has gone back on her own for her latest offering, the songs benefitting from their four-year gestation period, during which she carved out the beginnings of an alternative career for herself.
"I'd been talking to people about it for a while," she says of the decision to go back to college, which surprised some in the industry. "I probably bored the knickers off my band and people close to me, but I don't think anybody really thought I would do it . . . then it came to the crunch time in January 2006 and I had to fill out the CAO form and I just thought 'I am going to do this'. "
It wasn't as though she ever considered giving up music completely - "I could never do that" she says - but touring with her last album in the UK gave Turner a glimpse of what her music career held in store and she didn't like all of what she saw.
"With Burn the Black Suit everything was so new and so sparkly. I arrived on the scene out of nowhere with this accent and these three really strong singles and it was exciting. With Season it was an insight into what it was going to be like if I decided to do this forever. This was going to be my career. I realised I didn't want to be on the road all the time. I was a bit bored," she says, adding that an intense drive to succeed combined with the pressure to be "constantly creative" brought out the very worst in her.
"At the start I was very driven by my career, this thing I had landed into. I felt that I had to work as hard as possible and take every opportunity. I felt quite privileged to be in that position so I had to show I was grateful," she says. She says she became "cranky" and "upset" and "stressed" and "uptight", but at the same time is anxious not to sound like a moan.
"I didn't like what I had become. I am quite afraid sometimes of what other people think and that's a pressure, especially when you are a writer, because you are always going to come up against that. Basically, I wanted to be more chilled out and less cranky," she says.
When she went to Trinity to study as a teenager, speech therapy was her first choice, but she only lasted a term before changing to English. "I always had the idea that I would go back to it. For the first term I was really nervous doing things like phonetics, which I had struggled with the last time," she says, adding that her career in music had obviously sharpened her ears because she found that subject less difficult this time around.
But she did struggle. "I think because I wasn't really settled in to this new life. I was still gigging and seeing a guy in the North so I was up and down a lot," she says. "The rest of my class are super-focused. I'd be sitting there and they would be trotting out answers and I'd be thinking how do they know that? Then I discovered they actually went home and read the textbooks, which hadn't crossed my mind."
Things shifted for her when she learned about the four levels of competency. "You start off where you are unaware of your own incompetence, which is when you are at your most dangerous," she explains. "Then you become aware of your incompetence. The next stage is being aware of your competence and then the best stage is when you are unaware of your own competence and that's when something comes so naturally you don't even have to think about it."
She knew she had achieved that fourth stage in her music career. "All that came naturally, but in college I went right back to total incompetence. Then, getting a grand total of 17 per cent in a physiology exam, I reached awareness of my own incompetency, which was humiliating but interesting at the same time, and it made me realise I was going to have to work," she says.
If her 17 per cent grade was the wake-up call, a placement with a L'Arche community in Ireland provided inspiration and a broader vision of where her degree might eventually take her. She came across L'Arche in writings by Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen and was interested in the philosophy behind the community. "The idea is that everyone there, whether volunteers or intellectually or physically disabled, has something to contribute and every contribution is equally valued. They believe everyone is called to L'Arche, even if you think you are going there to help, you come out with a whole range of different things," she says.
There's a line in the gorgeous title track of the new album People Have Names- "People have souls that are turning to gold" - which is inspired both by her time with the community and a "journey of faith" she has been on over the past few years.
"I am the kind of person who wakes up in the morning and goes 'argh! Is there a God?' that would often be my waking thought," she says with a smile. "It's partly my upbringing" - she was brought up in a Methodist family - "not necessarily my parents, but the North is steeped in religion and it's hard to get away from that. I would be the kind of person who asks a lot of questions. I am looking to find some way of living in the world, and a lot of that questioning is on that album if people care to listen."
In the same breath she worries that the lyrics on People Have Namescould sound "incredibly cheesy". But they don't, as a matter of fact, they sound authentic and pure, the work of someone trying to tell people's stories that "never get told". "I am always a bit wary of talking about this because the truth is I don't have any answers, or some days I do and then I don't," she says. "But going to L'Arche was part of this journey of faith that I've been on. People don't go there and become saints, you go there and realise how much work you have to do, you get more in touch with your own failings. The other thing is, I don't think I've ever laughed so much, there were people there who were hysterically funny in ways that you just would never consider. I also enjoyed the whole community side. I was made to feel so welcome."
The songs on People Have Namesare softer and less acerbic than on other albums, and less autobiographical, too. They are inspired much more by other people's experiences - her sister working in a late-night supermarket, a friend's fears about impending parenthood, an art collective in the Czech Republic - than her own. "I wrote these songs for myself. I was lucky to find Keith Lawless, the producer on the album, who was willing to work at the pace I wanted to work, and he is just really kind and gentle. I have this flaw where I will be picking at what the musicians are doing, saying 'I like this, I don't like that', but it wasn't like that this time, in fact, I wasn't there for a lot of the recording because of college and I just really liked what they had done," she says.
Her more pugilistic side hasn't disappeared, though. She joined the boxing club at Trinity and is still prone to the very occasional rant, which fans can follow on her website. The last one, about the lack of equipment for speech and language therapists, was written in the early hours of the morning when her fuse had been shortened by the break-up of a short relationship.
"I've decided I am going to stay single for the next two years because relationships are a bit of a waste of time and I tend to pick the wrong people. I pick them because I think they might be interesting not because they might be compatible, so it doesn't work." she says.
Turner seems to fare better when picking support acts - a quick visit to his website reveals Gentry Morris to be a musical treasure, while Duke Special and KT Tunstall have both opened for her in the past.
"I think a lot about who supports me because Brian Kennedy gave me a chance in the early days and also it's such a joy to go on after somebody really good," she says, before heading off to embrace the ever-changing anatomy of her life. There's a summer of gigging ahead, followed by an autumn of textbooks, not to mention that ongoing journey of faith. She wouldn't have it any other way.
Juliet Turner's new album People Have Namesis out now on her own label, Hear This! records. She plays the Station House Theatre in Clifden, Co Galway tonight and Sandino's Café Bar in Derry tomorrow. See julietturner.com.