Singer David Turpin’s back and he’s ‘late’

After a four-year hiatus, Dublin songwriter, David Turpin, returns this week with a new album, We Belong Dead. He now trades as The Late David Turpin, a wry nod to the fact that, in late 2011, he briefly lost his heartbeat following a swimming accident.

Thu, 12 Sep, 2013 - 01:00

Padraic Killeen

“It’s sort of ambiguous whether I was in deep, deep shock or clinically dead, but I went 28 seconds in between pulses,” says Turpin. Turpin’s new album is lush, unforced electro-pop and features guest performances by Cathy Davey, Conor O’Brien (Villagers), and electro act, Hunter-Gatherer.

Turpin’s vocals have a remote, narcotic, and conversational quality. “The way I sing is the way that comes naturally to me and it’s not a pose,” says Turpin. “But I am very attracted to distance and to a removal from things. And I’m interested in hypnosis and the idea that, as a singer, the words just travel through you. It’s just the shape and the feel of the words in your mouth, and that is music enough. There’s nothing more beautiful, and more mysterious, than the human voice. I’ve listened to a lot of Laurie Anderson records and I’ve seen her perform a number of times. There’s a coolness in her delivery and a detachment, and, yet, the fact is it’s a human voice. And that carries so much meaning and such emotion.”

The songs on We Belong Dead explore the edges of human experience, as it bleeds into the animalistic or natural world. (On one tune, ‘Bird and the Beast’, Davey sharing vocals with a braying donkey.) What drew Turpin to these themes? “Several things,” he says.

“I think the right and proper themes for a pop record are love and sex, and those are things that we often relate to animal imagery. There’s that idea that being in love, or having sex, returns us to an animal state: a physical or instinctual state. Obviously, it doesn’t, but that’s the romantic notion. I also became really interested in the idea of human extinction.

A friend took me to see Tempelhof Airport, this abandoned airport in Berlin. They just shut it off in the ’80s and, even in that amount of time, the runways have cracked, grass is growing through, and the building is throbbing with cricket song. It really made me realise that when we go, it won’t take very long for nature to return — provided we leave any nature when we go.”

Human song will be to the fore during The Late David Turpin’s show in Smock Alley on Sunday night. Featuring a choir and surprise guests, the concert is programmed as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival. (Turpin played an acclaimed show as part of the same event last year).

“People talk about me as an electronic musician, but I think that the defining thing in my music is the way I use voices,” says Turpin. “So, I really put the voice up front in this live show. We’re in Smock Alley, which was a church for a century, somewhere along the way, so there’s almost an occult, magical quality to it.”