Hold The Rail

Simon Fisher Turner is a musician, songwriter, composer, producer, and actor who has released somewhere in the region of 50 albums in his long and varied career.

 

The latest, Instability of the Signal, was released last Friday and was accompanied by a new single and video, Toast. Apparently this is the fifth single to date though I have managed to miss the previous four in the past three months.

Simon Fisher Turner “In brilliant blue pyjamas, with a garage full of props," describes director John Lee Bird, "this is what happens when two friends have two hours to lark around.”

 

Playing with handheld camera and standard video effects software, it's a good fit with the minimalist soundscape and almost childlike vocals.

 

"I love my comics

But it's not reading my mum would say

You need some Shakespeare

You need a classic

Proper books"

 

A slight spoiler/warning in that the featured comic, an issue of long-running pocket book anthology Commando, does not survive the making of this video.

 

A great song to start the week. 

My introduction to Simon - then minus the Fisher - came in 1991, via a couple of budget priced compilations on the Creation label. Both A Palace In The Sun and American Pensioners On Ecstasy featured the same song, a 12-minute epic titled Dark Melt.

I subsequently discovered that Simon had been a child actor, including a role with Robert Mitchum in the 1971 remake of The Big Sleep, and a would-be teen pop idol mentored by Jonathan King. His self-titled debut album in 1973 featured several cover versions, such as this David Bowie classic.

My stumbling across Simon's music in 1991 coincided with my awareness of his work as a composer for films, notably the work of Derek Jarman between 1986 and 1993, from Caravaggio to Jarman's final work, Blue. 

 

Since that time, Simon has had a long relationship with Mute Records, who have issued many of his albums in the 21st century.

 

In 2020, Simon Fisher Turner collaborated with Edmund de Waal on A Quiet Corner in Time, Two years later, a reworked album built around the title track was released. Sub-titled (Exquisite Corpse), the premise is that an artist reworks the song before passing it on to another artist to do the same, and so on and so on. This is repeated nine times before the song, unrecognisable from it's point of origin, is returned to Simon Fisher Turner for a final de/reconstruction.

 

This is the penultimate track, Maps' remix of a remix of a remix of a remix of a remix of a remix of a remix of a remix. 

 
A Quiet Corner in Time (Exquisite Corpse) includes remixes by Nik Colk Void, Polly Scattergood, Alessandro Cortini and Yann Tiersen. It's available as a free download but a charitable donation to United24, the official fundraising platform of Ukraine, is requested.

Back to Instability of the Signal, one of the inspirations for the album is the writer Harold Pinter and two of his verses are set to music.

 

Democracy was published in 2003 and is four lines

There's no escape.
The big pricks are out.
They'll fuck everything in sight.
Watch your back.

 

The "Special Relationship" dates from 2005 and is equally blunt and crude in it's commentary on war (then specifically, the conflict in Iraq).

 
 
An unintentional rabbit hole, as I was initially drawn to the brevity and levity of Simon's latest single but the latter pieces resonate with the madness of the last months and years. 

Maybe I should have gone for this Toast or that Toast instead....