AFTER 25 YEARS TURIN BRAKES HAS DONE SOMETHING REMARKABLE - THEY HAVE HIT A NEW PEAK

As they enjoy positive reviews and amazing fan feedback on number 9 Wide-Eyed Nowhere, it is worth celebrating Turin Brakes’ contribution to the UK’s music scene. The band is original enough to have their own unique place on that scene and have been going long enough to be influential in more ways than they probably realise. 

Sometimes as a fan, you can feel you know a band so well - beyond just the records and the stuff you read - you get a sense of how they’re really doing. This is either through hearing something special in the music, reading between the lines in the press, or whimsy - but that’s fandom. With Wide-Eyed Nowhere, this band of almost 25 years has done something remarkable - they have hit a new peak. Perhaps there is something ironic in that album title, you have to stop trying to get somewhere at all, just stay put and do your best work right here and now. 

Here’s the thing - Turin Brakes are well beyond the point where they neither need nor expect to have a ‘hit record’ (though I guess they wouldn’t turn the idea down) yet Wide Eyed Nowhere is a fairly commercial sounding record, full of radio friendly tunes. ‘Up For Grabs’ deserves a Radio 2 playlist slot, not that it will get one. ‘Isolation’ and ‘This Love’ would sit well on 6 Music. In-between, the album's 11 tracks maintain a super-high “all killer no filler” quality throughout. Something that comes as a bonus however, is the late 60s, early 70s feel of songs such as ‘Into The Sun’ (complete with Datsun!) ‘The Ride’ and ‘Rain and Hurricanes’. Those retro stylings fit the band like a warm Autumn tank top (look it up!).

Turin Brakes have arrived in a good place: permanently underrated by the music media but ever-more appreciated by their hard core fans. They do have some famous fans though. For one thing, the band is sometimes played on Dermot O’Leary’s Saturday morning Radio 2 show (so Dermot, play Up For Grabs then!). Gary Barlow is a long-term admirer and even invited the band to collaborate on Take That album The Circus. Best of all though, was Radio 2 occasional superstar DJ Robert Plant, who referred to the band as “The Magnificent Turin Brakes”. I hope Plant is spinning their new record with some satisfaction. 

Crossing the rubicon to longevity

Turin Brakes didn’t have to struggle for long before they tasted success. After Source Records released a couple of EPs, it was the NME that gave the band a break, declaring that "Turin Brakes inhabit a space which is entirely their own, fully formed and brutally emotive." The Optimist LP in 2001 gave the band a couple of minor chart hits, ‘The Underdog’ (Save Me) among them, and they were away. The band’s second album, Ether Song, came with a fuller sound and was a certified hit - number 4 in the UK Albums Chart and with hit singles too, including top 5 UK hit ‘Pain Killer’. 

As a creative force, Turing Brakes have continued to develop and mature since those early days, with each progressive album project offering something different to the previous one. Yet, like so many bands before them, and since, their commercial clout began to wane from their third album onwards. The band took a huge bet with their 4th album, Dark On Fire (a superb record in retrospect), backed by the weight of a major label EMI (albeit one going through some corporate shenanigans having been acquired by a private equity company). That bet crashed and burned when the album failed to make its mark. In the aftermath, so did Turin Brakes. Slowly but surely, the band rebuilt from the ground up as a self-managed independent band. 

I suppose I could argue that Turin Brakes crossed the rubicon to true independent, long-term success from the moment they released Outbursts in 2010 (their first independent release, distributed on Cooking Vinyl records) yet the band was probably still uncertain about whether it had a future back then. By 2013’s We We Here however, something had changed, with that album demonstrating a renewed creative confidence, especially in the songwriting. It was the first in a trio of sorts, with Lost Property (2016) and Invisible Storm (2018) continuing in a similar vein. 

Coming back full-circle to Wide-Eyed Nowhere, the idea of a band of 25 years, well beyond their ‘commercial peak’, making music at the top of their game, is truly inspiring. Olly Knights’ voice is sounding better than ever, writing better lyrics than he has done for a long-time. With Gale Paridjanian one of music’s longest-running underrated guitarists also on top form, what’s not to like? The best tribute I can pay though, is to agree with The NME’s assessment of 25 years ago, there is nothing to compare them to. On Wide-Eyed Nowhere Turin Brakes sound most like themselves and at the same time, never better. 

Olly Knights’ interview on The Art of Longevity is available on the archive here