The Late David Turpin

In late 2019, David Turpin released Romances, his long-awaited new album as The Late David Turpin.

The result of three years of collaboration with over 60 singers, musicians and producers, Romances sees Turpin divide lead vocal duties among no fewer than ten special guests: Elephant, Bear Worship, Xona (Xo Mo), Adam Matthews, D. McCabe (formerly Jon Dots), Gar Cox, Samyel, Jaime Nanci, Martin McCann (Sack) and Conor O’Brien (Villagers).

In a seemingly perverse twist, David has cast his suite of romantically-fixated after-hours love songs entirely with male lead vocalists.  As he puts it:  “Our culture has a tendency to denigrate anything it perceives as romantic, implicitly because it denigrates anything it perceives as feminine.  I wanted to take subjects and styles associated with the ‘feminine’, and put men into those positions, to see if things might happen that are unexpected, or disquieting, or erotic”.

The result is a lavish, contemporary pop record that is also unabashedly queer.  It sighs, swoons, and melts down the myth of the ‘masculine’, one misty slow jam at a time.  The songs are shaped for pleasure, but loaded with signifiers taken from mythology, cinema and literature – reflecting, in part, the way queer audiences sift through popular culture for hidden meanings and objects of heightened significance.

The unusual format of Romances – in which David ‘cast’ singers to pre-written material – was influenced by David’s burgeoning career in film over the six years since his last music release (2013’s We Belong Dead).  His first feature as screenwriter – the gothic fantasy The Lodgers – premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2017, and was subsequently acquired for worldwide release by Netflix; his second, The Winter Lake – which stars Emma Mackey (Sex Education), Charlie Murphy (Peaky Blinders) and Michael McElhatton (Game of Thrones) – is currently in post-production.