Free David Turpin Download
We're so lovin' David Turpin's album, The Sweet Used To Be at GCN Chambers. Here's a free download of one of our favourite tracks!
“It already sounds like one of the albums of the year,” the Irish Independent said about David Turpin’s dark and dreamy debut, The Sweet Used To Be, while Metro called it super-introverted fusion of Prince and Leonard Cohen.
"I was always interested in words - in stories and poems and spells," Turpin told GCN. "When I was a child I would draw pentacles in my copybook and think about how words were put together to make spells and nonsense like that.
"It sounds ridiculous to say I was a private child, because children aren't private. But I always seemed to have a shell around me even without meaning to. It was always my way to have a cloak around me."
His metaphorical cloak did not protect him from being bullied in school for being gay.
"The thing about being bullied that people never say is that it makes you mean,” he candidly confides. “It makes you resentful and it makes you want to hurt. You have to really work to not be like that. A good part of the album is definitely an attempt to not surrender to my desire to be mean. I don't know if I succeed at that, I'm sure you'll find someone who thinks I'm horrible.
"I always felt I could really work and devote all my creative energy into creating a persona where it would not happen, but I didn't really have the creative energy to waste on that. So, in a horrible sense, I chose it."
Despite the fact that Turpin is very much the serious young man, the album - with its lyrics about pain and redemption - comes across as oddly frothy, with light-hearted nods to the faux intensity of early '80s synth icons Kraftwerk and Gary Numan and the classical underpinnings of early '90s trip-hop outfit, Portishead.
"I'm trying to make something that is about secrecy and introversion," says Turpin, "but on the other hand, I'm also trying to make it entertaining. I'm very interested in pop and I always get seduced by this idea that I'm making this big, like ring-my-bell style pop single.”
The Sweet Used To Be is currently on release. Download the track, Nobody Knows here.