Royal Bastard

A former child actor, teenage pop prodigy and composer of avant-garde soundtracks for filmmaker Derek Jarman (also recommended: his score for Jarman’s 1986 film Caravaggio), Simon Fisher Turner enjoyed a parallel life on él Records as foppish dandy The King Of Luxembourg. Having been in show business with varying levels of success for most of his life (he was also briefly in The The with Matt Johnson), Turner threw himself into the make-believe world created for him by él’s Mike Alway, selecting his new musical persona from a list of characters presented by Alway and dressing up in a full suit of armour. 

Turner also chose the songs that made up debut LP Royal Bastard from a longlist of covers suggested by Alway. Paired with Turner’s wispish cut-glass vocals and Louis Philippe’s baroque arrangements (bass guitar had been banned from the sessions for reason unclear, so bass clarinet features prominently) they made for an inspired combination that frequently on paper really shouldn’t work: The Television Personalities’ “Picture Of Dorian Grey;” “Valleri” by The Monkees; and most radically “Poptones” by Public Image Limited, in which Lydon, Wobble and Levene’s excoriating post punk is transformed into a beautiful pastoral escape. Follow-up Sir, with most of the material written by Turner, is equally magnificent.