album // Sex Appeal : Simon Turner versus The King Of Luxembourg
Despite scant sleevenotes, this Richmond / Cherry Red CD appears to cover singles and B-sides released by Simon (lately Fisher) Turner from his period as a 'child star' under the direction of disgraced pop mogul Jonathan King, and the frankly baffling releases issued under the alias The King Of Luxembourg.
Twelve tracks come from Turner's early pop career. According to his biography, Turner released an album in the 1970s, which consisted of covers, and where he describes his voice as 'weak'. It's not clear if these twelve rather charming pop rock tunes represent that entire album. Positioned as the UK's answer to Donnie Osmond by King, the twelve tracks aren't slushy pop rubbish, but appear largely representative of the music of the 1970s - as such we get bursts of T-Rex glam, soul and country-inflected rock. I find it particularly difficult to imagine Osmond belting out a line like 'I'm pushing you all off the white cliffs of Dover' on King's own '17', or upsetting a legion of kiddie fans by singing 'I'm never getting married' on 'Love Around'. It's also very cleanly produced, and doesn't sound like there was a lack of budget available for the recordings, as many tracks feature that staple element of seventies music, a full string and horn section. My personal view of Turner's vocal here is that it sounds surprisingly assured. It does, however, drive me nuts about how this can be the same Simon Turner that just a few short years later would already be composing for soundtracks - the Cherry Red album The Many Moods Of... includes a highly accomplished score from 1976. I genuinely find this quite kitsch and enjoyable.
I find the King Of Luxembourg tracks slightly more difficult. Around this time in 2003, when I was getting this site off the ground, I picked up an old Cherry Red compilation CD during a full-on charity shop trawl; it featured KOL's 'Trial Of Dr Fancy'. It's lo-fi Spanish guitar inflected sound, and vocals from the Bowie school of singing had me scratching my head in wonderment, but I passed it of as a misrepresentative example of Turner's work. I was wrong, it would seem, as the tracks here confirm: this is a collection of straight-up pop made using conventional rock instruments (virtually no synths here guv), occasionally sounding like a Mediaeval lyre-strumming bunch of gypies, at others like a falsetto folk group (Sparks covering Simon & Garfunkle?), and on tracks like 'A Picture Of Dorian Gray' sounding like 1980s rock in the vein of The Smiths or The Cure or even The Pixies. 'Lee Remick', with its sixties guitar and poppy chorus harmonies sounds somewhere between The Beach Boys and The Kinks. It just doesn't make any sense, particularly given Turner's concurrent soundtrack work for Derek Jarman. It was the 1980s by now, a decade famous for all sorts of quirky genres and the development of indie label pre-eminence; I just can't fathom the niche that this fits into at all - check the oddball re-reading of PIL's 'Poptones' for an example. Turner's versatile vocals - which are here proven to be suited to many styles and genres - save the day here; furthermore, his mastery of musical structure extends here into pop territory, so who says eclecticism has to be a bad thing?