Fake Turins
Words by Willow Shields, Featured Image is AI generated from Zoom call screenshot
It’s so cold in the house, but it's warm outside. It's fine, the man is coming to fix the boiler tomorrow, it's fine. I’ll just sit outside. It's fine, I'll just climb through the window, charger in hand, to plug my laptop in because it doesn't work, if I'm truly honest. It's fine, it'll be fine. Forgetting that I live next to an overground station and that trains are every five to seven minutes, it'll be fine. It's not as if it’s so screechy that the house prices on this side of the street are considerably lower, it's fine.
And it was fine, in the end. Because I was greeted by a smiling Dominic Rose of Fake Turins, albeit on Zoom - throwback am I right guys? - but it was, actually, fine. We talked about death, grief, birth, Pagan rituals, and most importantly: Fake Turins’ last ever show at Village Underground on the 8th of June.
So you find me, on a bench in the garden of my grandparents house, panning my laptop over to show Dom the trains going past while a lot of rambling and a lot of “I'm so sorry”s are falling out of my mouth. After complimenting the overgrowness of the garden and agreeing that gardens are the best, I asked him how he was feeling. He answered in relation to Fake Turins, “It’s been a whole change of pace since Turins announced their departure, we've all been moving off and doing different projects,” and moving onto the finality of the breakup/departure/soft death “I feel it looming in the distance, it doesn't feel quite as intimidating as it was before, but it's sitting there, the spectre of our past and maybe our futures as well.” I then asked him what the headline for the breakup is, he answered genuinely “Time changes everything. Time changes music. No creative project would be complete without acknowledging that, and therefore the end is built into the beginning.” “Something has to be given the context of its finality in order to make the rest of it seem fulfilling or worthwhile.” He then mentioned that a bandmate, Jess, is due to have a baby the week of the show so she won't be playing, “A change of life. It happens to everybody. So it happens to music, too”
The rest of this interview is (mostly) uncut and more or less a transcript of our conversation, I was taken aback by the genuine candour and intelligence that Dom spoke with - I hope that translates.
What is a Turin and how can one be fake?
I always have two answers, one is the maybe overly intellectual, the real answer, I had come up with some time ago. And then there is the slightly more authentic answer which is, the name of being a turin I really like being pluralised and the idea of something being not real on stage, kind of just highlights the inauthenticity.
A turin is, just to paraphrase myself just a little bit, it is the Turing test that Alan Turing came up with, he was exploring the idea of sentience in machines. Obviously it’s been a hot topic recently with the advancement of AI or large language models, so people have been saying ‘is the Turing test still appropriate’ but back when he came up with it it was “would you be able to ask, and have a conversation with a machine”. And if the human didn’t know it was a machine then it would’ve passed the Turing test. So they would’ve been seen as having an active sentience. And I loved the idea that if something is a machine, if something is releasing music into the void, we’re releasing records, we’re putting stuff online that you can listen to. But if you take it to the stage, if you try to re-represent online material, a machine, in its less digital interface then it becomes fake. We were always going to be inaccurate representations of our own material on stage. I very much appreciate that idea of questioning the authenticity of something, especially taking into account people’s desire to get on stage and perform in front of everyone else.
Have you watched Battlestar Galactica?
I have yeah, you know what, that’s actually… especially the sci-fi the philosophical side of things has been a big influence on my worldview. So certainly has come down to the creative enterprises as well and has changed the way that we write things or the way that we approach anything.
The birth / death story of Fake Turin’s, how did fake Turin’s begin? And how has it evolved through until the inevitable end?
All death is a rebirth. The beginning of fake Turin’s initially came from my dad passing away and me being confronted with what it means to actually live a life. Whether I’d actually made the right decisions in my life. Whether I’d been pursuing something that had no meaningful end. So being a part of the larger warehouse community, and friends having different music projects I decided I’d start bringing everybody a little bit closer together, as my personality as instigator. I’d bring people closer together, and we’d build a community where it didn’t have to be about the firm structures of a band, needing to play every single time with the same people. Having a manifesto which was about fluidity, change, and representation. That was something we really sought to put into the project. It’s quite hard moving forward with the same amount of people and the band gets qualified as an eleven-piece, there were almost a lot more of us.
I do like to think, at least in some sense, subverted the grain with the label, manager, booking agent thing because social community was first and foremost in what we were doing. It was about inviting people in, who would fit in to that. For instance Karl Johnson, our manager is a big part of that as well. Jed Morgans, Hideous Mink they are also a big part of our social fold. It became more about who could enter into our space collectively, rather than how can we reach into somebody else’s.
We definitely moved more towards the ossification of the project being a band and departed from it being a hive mind warehouse collective. We moved into something that I think was really beautiful, in the last year of our lives together as a band. Much like everything else, the band had to end in order to give space for new growth to move through the cracks of a project. The project of Fake Turins, I think, will always live on with us. Being the fire that forged us, maybe.
- Talking about how we both have dead dads. Offer each other condolences and then agree that most of the time condolences are pointless. -
I can understand the whole world view changing with that huge life event,
It absolutely is a complete cognitive shift, it does upend your entire life. A loss of any kind, particularly a parental loss. It does change the way you view things, you carry the grief with you which is at first the overwhelming body of grief and you feel completely comprised of it and there's nothing else to you but that sadness. And then you make space, and time gives you space, that’s the one thing we all know as well. One, that we’ll all die and two, that time gives you space. Eventually you become larger than the grief, the grief doesn’t subside, it stays the same but you can fill the space that time has offered you. To go back to the end of Turins, it became quite significant with this record that we’ve just put out, Inheritance, which was some of the earliest songs I’d written about my dad. It became quite significant to make sure that the ending allowed that space to grow around us, instead of encumbering us and making it feel like ‘this is it then, this is the end of everything’ it needed to feel like an end that was meaningful.
I got really into gardening and baking after my dad had died, I would put a bake on and I’d go and spend time in the garden. I’d go to my mum's house and garden. She lives in London, I’m very lucky of that, I’d go to hers and I was like ‘do you mind if I just take it over?’ and there was one particularly long flower bed that got the morning sun. I started freaking out at the very beginning when I started gardening because a lot of the plants would die, like I wasn’t good at it. I’d put them in the wrong place or slugs would eat them or maybe winter would come. I got really sad seeing them wilt and I realised how I was projecting my same fears of mortality onto these tiny, vulnerable plants. Somebody said to me at the time, ‘these plants want to live, you kind of don’t need to do much,’ and I think people who own a lot of houseplants know that as well, that less is more. They want to live, so you just need to give them the opportunity to live. And I’m so many ways that is the detachment from our insecurities of our own mortality, being able to just to exist. And then you realise you want to live as well, and we are all pretty much the same creatures in some way.
Do you have a podcast? Because I’d listen to it. I do have questions now, the first burning one is: is this Village Underground show a funeral for Fake Turin’s?
I’ve experienced funerals where sadness and grief is held at the forefront and I’ve experienced funerals where celebration is held at the forefront, so if it is a funeral I’d certainly want it to be the latter. Where all in conjoined celebration and accepting the melancholy that comes with that, it’s all part of that. The happy sad tears. Inside of the band we’ve joked that because it’s been so long since our last show, that our final show was in January and this is our reunion show. Maybe if January was our funeral, this is more of a super-delayed-Christian-mythology-thing where we’re coming out of the cave six months later.
A seance?
Yes! The erection of the ghosts of our pasts,
I don’t know why I’m picturing everyone in floaty dresses, dancing in candlelight round ancient stones-
Like pagan rituals? And also big Victorian dresses and the allure and grandeur of that - absolutely.
Going back to members of the band, the interchangeability of members, every drummer I know is in like 4 bands, Fake Turin’s were kind of the first band I saw doing that? Are you trendsetters?
Calling us trail blazers? It’s really interesting, you’re certainly right about the pragmatism needed to form in the musical sphere at all. That you need to have different projects, and then it becomes more about this socialised community where everyone’s interacting and performing in each other’s groups, and thriving in each other's groups. I love that, I love that as an etiquette that we all play in each other’s bands, that we can share the joys together, and it doesn’t become about one single person or group being able to Perdue just themselves. But yeah - when we started, there were a couple of other groups. I remember recognising that at the time. That there weren’t as many large scale bands that had a collective of members from other bands. At the same time we started, probably within the same month, a lot of my friends were doing the same thing. Not because of us, but because I think something had shifted in the culture, that we realised there was not the infrastructure to move up and support ourselves just as ourselves. And that we had to turn to the scene around us and other musicians and other bands in order to build our own grassroots infrastructure. It’s a far more effective way of moving forward through the musical career, as having this wrung of creatives that’s bound together by this creative consciousness that we all tap into. And every one of those being able to pursue collectively moves the machine, rather than all the players at the top. It’s not down to them to choose where we go, We as the creative mass get to choose.
Would you categorise that as the fake Turin’s mentality, “we are for the masses, not… whoever”?
I would like to say so, yeah. Obviously I’m just one person involved in the greater collective. But I do think that is certainly been a shared ethos of ours, that being defined by an industry that is separate from the music transcendence that we all like to dabble in. To be defined by that is to be static. It was more than the music itself but the shared experience. Being able to meet new people and change your world view, I’ve been astounded by some people that we’ve met on tour, being able to say things or portray things I wouldn’t have even thought about, and being able to give this breadth of experience. It really is a privilege actually, to be able to have been involved in music in such a way.
Are there any world-view changing experiences, in particular, that you’d like to share?
One thing I’ve noticed with musicians… there is a frustrated creative impatience that we all embody. By the act of writing, you wanna get it out you wanna do all these things. Were always trying to catch up with ourselves and pursue and aspire and get the next bit. One thing I’ve learnt from a lot of musicians, is patience. The zen-ness of it. I was at the Victoria in Dalston, they used to hold these garden shows and I was speaking to somebody, and he had spilled a beer all over himself, and I remember being completely blown away by the fact that he was like ‘well, can’t change this immediately, this is how I am’ so he just sat in this puddle of beer, ‘there’s just nothing I can do about it’, he wasn’t upset, he was at complete peace with the fact his trousers were utterly drenched. He didn’t even get himself a new beer or anything, he was just like ‘well, nothing I can change now.’ And just that mindset - I’ve seen that across so many different people, being able to say ‘we’re all just leaves in the wind, we’re all just moving to where things will take us,’ surrendering and perhaps sublimated to this greater movement. At the end of the day things happen, so why not just embrace them and live the experience of them. That’s something I’ve been taught.
We then go on to ramble a bit about the music industry, why we hate it, why we love it, Dom clarifies that the band pushed for Village Underground to be their seance show because they have a love for it as a place, a space, somewhere to hold musical communion. We agree to see eachother there and then we say goodbye. Be sure not to miss Fake Turins final departure, say your goodbyes, say hellos to new friends, celebrate a life and look forward to the future - Thursday the 8th of June at Village Underground, see you there.
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