Pierce Turner (b. 1956) is an Irish singer-songwriter.
Turner grew up in the port town of Wexford, where his mother ran a record shop and led her own band. Like all his siblings he was classically trained, and his fondest early memories are of singing in the annual plainchant festival. By age seven, he was a member of a traditional Irish tin-whistle group, and at eight, he was playing in a brass and reed orchestra.
His first professional job was as a musician with the pop showband The Arrows. He later moved to New York and formed The Major Thinkers with fellow Wexfordian Larry Kirwan (now the frontman of Black 47), and recorded several acclaimed albums.
His first solo album, It's Only a Long Way Across (1986), was produced by American avant-garde composer, Phillip Glass. and was nominated for the U.S album of the year on the New York Music Awards He went on to make two more albums for Beggars Banquet: The Sky and the Ground (1989) and Now Is Heaven (1991). The latter was released to great critical acclaim, with Hot Press dubbing him "Ireland's greatest living poet", and he was voted Irish Solo Performer of the Year in the Hot Press Awards by a panel drawn from the national media. This album was produced by the legendary John Simon -Leonard Cohen and the Band
In 1998 Beggars Banquet released a Best of Pierce Turner compilation. In June 2001, 3 Minute World was released, Hot Press giving it a 12 out of 12, while Tony Clayton-Lea of the Irish Times described Pierce as one of the most important Irish artists of the last twenty years. Meanwhile Pat Kenny pronounced "This man's a genius" on his national radio show, as Turner set off on a tour of over seventy private houses in Ireland for what he has called his "Parlour Tour" with London-based Wicklow film maker Colin Murnane for a documentary, The Song For The Year (2007).
Other songs by Turner were featured in the film Snakes and Ladders, the HBO hit show The Wire with his version of "Dirty Old Town" and Christy Moore recorded Turner's songs "Wicklow Hills" and "Musha God Help Her". Moore's 2004 box set includes the track "I Love the Way Pierce Turner Sings".
In 2005, just as Turner was about to release his album, The Boy to Be With(as featured in the documentary The Song For The Year), "Wicklow Hills" was voted among the top twenty-five Irish songs of all time by Today FM in a nationwide poll. The Boy to Be With also includes Turner's tribute to the late Irish bluesman Rory Gallagher.
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