old interview in regents park
SIMON FISHER TURNER
Simon Fisher Turner has a love-hate relationship with technology.
We’d arranged to meet under the clock at Marylebone Station, but were
both distraught to discover that all this amounted to was a tiny digital
rectangle.
When I reveal my minidisc recorder, Turner mourns the fact that he’s
still grappling with an outmoded DAT format. For a sound-artist who’s
very essence is the capturing and subsequent manipulation of found
audio, this comes as something of a revelation.
Turner’s preparation for his imminent tour involves dusting off his
old cassette archive of recordings that he made on location during the
filming of Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986), The Last Of England (1987)
and The Garden (1990). Turner was the sole provider of soundtracks for
Jarman’s movies, beginning with an early set of Derek’s Super-8 home
movies. Perversely, Simon is transferring what frequently amount to
distortion-overloaded tapes onto the clean hard disk heart of his
laptop.
After rejecting a whole host of eateries as being too loud and
crowded, too full of cutlery clatter and chattering overspill, we head
for Regent’s Park. To the dedicated sound recordist, even a supposedly
silent lakeside bench is awash with the distracting possibilities of
background duck clucks, huffing joggers and low-flying ‘copters.
Turner’s five-date tour is subtitled 5th Quarter Of The Globe, the
locally-known name for Dungeness, on the Kent coastline. This was where
Jarman spent his final years. “I don’t know what period the name comes
from, but it’s old,” says Turner. “It’s like a shingle bank that sticks
out into the Channel. It actually has more sunlight than anywhere else
in England, per annum. It looks completely empty, because it’s shingle,
but, in fact, it’s an incredible nature reserve. There’s a wildlife
sanctuary there, birds use it a lot. There are lakes everywhere. It’s a
shingle desert, but in amongst that there are very rare flowers, and of
course, the nuclear power station, sticking up like a sore thumb, rather
beautifully at night, all lit up. It’s a very odd landscape…”
Turner’s initial involvement with Jarman was quite basic. “I needed a
job, and started making sandwiches and driving him around. I didn’t even
know who he was. Turned out he’d just finished this film called Jubilee.
It was a case of being in the right place at the right time. The Tempest
was happening, and I was in the office when he got the money. That meant
we had to start filming in six weeks, so somebody with a clean driving
licence had to have a van and start collecting props.”
Turner used guitar, bass, a radio, an old WASP synth and a box of
cassettes. He was already in thrall to the collage techniques employed
by German bands Can and Faust. “If you didn’t know what you were doing,
you had to say you did, just pretend, and ask. It was pretty much
informal. But then, we all learned, and the next time, you knew how to
do it.”
Turner has amalgamated his scores, turning the themes into an
extended suite for strings, voice and his own playful interventions.
“The evening’s programme is based specifically around the string parts.
Films tend to want strings, really. It’s a chamber piece. We’ve selected
string parts, some guitar parts and some harp pieces, and they’ve been
re-arranged. They come from me, originally, and then they were arranged
by other people for the films, and now they’re being re-arranged.
They’ll go further forward. I’m playing a bit of laptop, a bit of
mandola, a bit of piano. I’ve got into a state where I’m hardly using
instruments at all, but it’s nice to have them there. I just like to
play, to make
things up. I’ve got a bank of sounds. I’ve taken sounds from all the
films, bits of dialogue, sound effects, people singing in pubs. When
Derek was making these films, I tended to tape everything. I’m going
back to my original location tapes of the filming. Derek talking in his
apartment, or down in the cottage, or Derek’s kettle boiling. All to do
with Derek. I’m working with about 30 cassettes. Some of them are such
bad quality that I’m having to regurgitate them in a different way. I’m
just underpinning the strings.”
Despite his problems with the virtual realms of digital recording,
Turner has immersed himself fully in the world of laptop composition,
developing his SFT persona with a series of albums on the Mute label.
Whereas the Jarman soundtracks are usually concerned with a
classically-styled chamber ambience, SFT’s recent work has shunted
sideways into a fractured collage-zone, obsessed with altered
electronics and jagged edges, sudden shifts of sonic space.
Even though this music might sound like a radical shift, Turner’s
working methods remain very similar in concept if not technique. “When
we were making Caravaggio, I was taping the shooting by accident,
really. Running around talking to extras, the make-up department.
Although it was set in the 17th Century, there was a modern element in
it of motorbikes, trains, jackhammers and lots of building sounds. It
made sense for me to
tape these sounds. I was using a mono cassette recorder. When we came to
the soundtrack, we used modern sounds anyway. There were modern sound
effects from Italy, as well, which Derek had recorded with the sound
editor. By doing that, you actually record things that only happen when
you’re making a film. For instance, when we were shooting Edward II,
there was a scene with about forty policemen, with riot gear, batons and
shields, and so after filming the scene, Derek would say, okay, let’s do
one for Simon, so I’d have a sound recording of everybody hitting their
batons. I was able to get exclusive sounds from the workings of the
film.”
Compared to the present-day Hollywood obsession with precision
digital editing and time-coding, these old 1980s beginnings seem rather
quaint. “Even when we started,” says Turner. “Nothing was synched to
pictures. There were no numbers to guide us. We had to get it roughly
right, we couldn’t do anything really accurately.”
Melanie Pappenheim completes the line-up for this tour, a singer
who’s familiar for her work with Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman. “I’m
not going to say anything to her, really. She just does what she likes,
which is what it was like working with Derek. He didn’t have to say much
in the end. We just knew we had to get on with it. He’d come up with
lots of ideas, and I’d ignore them,” laughs Simon. “Or to do the
opposite of what he said was always quite a good idea. The idea was to
plant a seed, then let you get on with it, and be surprised. He loved to
be surprised. I’d make up a cassette for him, and he’d say, oh, don’t
worry about it. Wait until the dub. If I don’t like it, I don’t like it.
There’s nothing I can do about it. It’s too late. If it’s no good, we
won’t use it. He was very sweet, like that!”
Speaking of Michael Nyman, Turner remembers their friendly rivalry,
back in the 1980s. “I think we all loathed each other,” he laughs,
remembering how they’d invariably end up seated next to each other at
film festival banquets. “There were two different camps, two different
kinds of people. Completely the opposite. Greenaway seemed so organised,
so structured, compared to Derek’s free-form film-making. It came
together in the editing…”
Alongside Bryars, Nyman and Brian Eno, Turner was a member of the
Portsmouth Sinfonia, appearing on their live album. The whole point of
this venture was that players were forbidden to use their favoured
instruments, forced to grapple with an unfamiliar beast. “We had a choir
who couldn’t sing and a conductor who couldn’t conduct. It was
beautiful. Somebody’s trying to resurrect the Portsmouth Sinfonia. We
had a talk about it late last year. I think it would be a jolly good
idea! The great thing about the Sinfonia was that you had to attend at
least two rehearsals, and after the first one you weren’t allowed to
laugh. The idea was, even if you couldn’t read music, you had to at
least attempt.
Basically, it was an orchestra of people who were actually trying to
play properly.”
Turner’s musical education came at an early age. “I was sent away by
my wicked parents to a boarding school when I was seven. My dad was a
sub-mariner and my mum was a mum. The school had a good choir and I had
a semi-serious attempt at a musical education. I had a great piano
teacher when I was 14. By then, I was at ballet school, really full of
empty rooms with pianos, bars and mirrors. I’d zip in and play the piano
for
hours.”
Turner seems slightly alienated by the overly cerebral approach. “I
left school when I was 17. Does that stop me being intellectual? I’m
inquisitive. We were always inquisitive. Derek would say, ‘I’m doing a
film about Caravaggio’, and I’d say, ‘who’s Caravaggio?’ ‘I’m doing a
film about Edward II.’ ‘Well, I don’t know anything about Edward II.’ It
was always learn, learn, learn. Down to the bookshops, down to the
National Gallery. ‘Oh, I see what you’re talking about!’”
By the time of 1993’s Blue, Turner had completely honed his craft,
bearing the huge responsibility of shaping this image-less film’s blank
blue screen with music, speech and silence. “I was a controller for
Blue, just trying to make sure it all worked. It was very difficult,
because there was no image. Derek wrote all the words and it turned out
to be
more about him, and his illness. It became very personal. They recorded
the dialogue, and it only came to 23 minutes, so we had to place it with
silence, and fill the gaps, really. It was a pleasure to do, very
uplifting. It wasn’t a sad thing to do, it was very positive.”
With all of his subsequent soundtrack work, Turner has noticed that
directors are often to be found breathing down the back of his neck in
the studio. “Apart from Mister Mike Hodges, who I’ve just finished
working with. A lot of freedom. He just lets you get on with it, but
he’s got lots of ideas.”
Turner has problems when it comes to translating the music of his
recent Mute albums for live presentation. “It’s pretty difficult to do,
as it’s all made in the studio. The only way to do that live is to have
elements on a computer and play along something completely new. I’m not
interested in re-creating my albums live,” Simon concludes.
Despite this outlook, SFT was in Singapore a fortnight ago, playing
two gigs with jazz reedsman Gilad Atzmon and drummer Asaf Sirkis. “I had
a piano and a Fender Rhodes, tape back-ups and the laptop. Completely
improvised. I was asked to do some music for a documentary about Israel.
Number one, I knew nothing about Israel, and number two, I didn’t know
any Israeli musicians. So, I phoned up a music fixer in Tel Aviv and he
said there’s a bloke in England, if you can get hold of him, he’s your
man. Gilad Atzmon, he was top of the list.”
Between 1969, when Turner made his teen debut as a Jonathan King
protege, up to the late 1980s, when he was producing albums as The King
Of Luxembourg, a vocal/guitar, singer-songwriter approach provided the
main thrust. “Now, I don’t like the electric guitar. I thought of an
electric guitar the other day. I’ve just gone off guitars completely,
from being a complete guitar freak when I was a kid.”
For his next Mute album, SFT is trying for yet another unpredictable
direction. “I’ve been recording pianos for quite a long time now, just
pianos all over the place. My favourite so far has been playing in piano
shops. You’ve got me playing in the foreground, and then other people
playing in the background, which I really like. It comes from a
frustration of not knowing what to do next. If I could write intelligent
political songs, I’d probably be doing that now. I have problems with
words, because I can’t really articulate what I feel, intelligently. I
babble, and it doesn’t come out right. I don’t sound convincing at all.
I’ve got a weedy, rather soprano-ish voice. I don’t sound like a man, to
start with,” he titters.
Turner is even having problems with his DAT life. “I used to tape
things all the time, but I find myself taping things less and less,
because the world seems to be sounding the same all over. In Singapore,
the most interesting thing I recorded was a zebra crossing. That was
great, the one good thing I got from Singapore. I heard nothing, and
I’ve always got my ears open…”
Our conversation ends when hope arrives in the form of a passing
schoolgirl party, bringing a cross-cutting clamour that alerts Turner’s
ears to the possibilities of recording usage. I’ll send him the tape…
