Of course, a lot of these ideas come from an imperialist history, developed at the cost of centuries of domination and subjugation. Turner is aware of this difficulty. “That’s the kind of the flip-side, yeah. I’m not Neil Ferguson, I’m not an apologist for that period in history but I would say I think in terms of general popular consensus, and this applies to a lot of western cultures generally, I do think there’s been a swing towards this almost self-loathing kind of thing where we’re constantly finding problems with our culture. Of course, imperalism was a bad thing and I’m not in favour of that to any degree but there seems to be commentators who are insistent that anything anyone who comes from a Western background does is neccesarliy bad and wrong and evil and shit. It’s kind of like, well actually, the concepts of constitutional liberty and parliamentary democracy which are generally considered to be good things, are products of our history and we should look at those things and celebrate them, in my opinion.”
As ever, Turner continues to wear his politics on his sleeve. He is forthright about what he believes in rather than what he does not, a refreshing change of tack from the more common negative outlook or passivity found in people today. “In terms of my sort of philosophies and my politics, I’m very much an Enlightenment enthusiast or a liberal fundamentalist or whatever you want to call it. In particular, in terms of politics, the idea of individual liberty and the ideas of the Enlightenment. I believe in Locke and Mill and Spinoza, independence, free-thinking and all those kind of things and I think they are important. I just think, in a rush to kind of counteract the chauvinistic racism of the 19th century – a good thing because that needs to be corrected – I think in that kind of stampede a lot of people lose sight of the things that are good about western culture, which are worth celebrating. To be honest, the idea of saying that any one culture is resolutely all good or all bad is manifestly a silly idea but that doesn’t mean we can’t look within it and find the good.”
There has been a long history of associating folk music, especially the American folk of Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie with Marxist ideas. Does that ring bells for Turner? “Definitely. I think when I was younger I kind of dallied with the whole Marxist idea but I have to say that I’m really not a fan of Marxism at all these days, not least because it treats people as cogs in a machine or a theory rather than as individuals which is something I find rather distasteful and historically has lead to a lot of people getting killed basically.”
As Turner knows well, folk music does have a history of attempting to engage in the issues of its day, more so than most musical traditions. “It’s not just folk music, there’s the whole sort of question of what kind of political role music can play,” he says, as philosophical as ever. “I’m way too old to believe that music can change the world but I do think that it can usefully comment on it. Music sort of annotating events as they happen is very interesting, that’s certainly what Dylan and others were doing in the sixties but I don’t for a second believe the social upheaval of that time was caused by Bob Dylan writing ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’.”
