Folk - Steve Turner

The first thing Steve Turner, one of the country’s foremost concertina players, tells me, on the phone from his car in the Midlands, is that he has got bronchitis, and may not be able to make the gig. He’s pulled off the road for the call and is not, you can tell, in the best of moods. But he warms to the task, telling me how he inherited his love for the instrument from his grandfather, how he has a particular love of Napoleonic ballads, and how he is now back in the swing of the folk scene after thirteen years in the wilderness.

I’m particularly interested in the ballads, and ask him, naively it turns out, who translated them. “They weren’t in French,” he says. “They are mainly Scottish and Irish. The Irish ones are actually pro-Napoleon. They wanted him to beat the English and liberate them.” Steve also plays the cittern and the mandolin in his set, and it was his love of musical instruments that influenced him to quit the scene, and enabled him to rejoin it later on. “I took to selling instruments, and I started doing that full time, because playing 160-180 folk gigs a year wasn’t enabling me to live in the style to which I wanted to become accustomed,” he says. “Now I own two violin shops, and am playing folk part-time. Which enables me to cherry-pick the gigs I want to do.” Lewes is one of his favourite venues, he tells me, so I let him off the phone, the better to get better in time. AL