No `pretty wee girl'

So often, singer-songwriters disappoint. In many ways they are a straight connection to the heart of intimacy, but their weakness is that they have the potential to confuse soul-baring with moaning. Narrative form is the key - when a singer-songwriter takes a third dimensional view of life it regularly makes for far more interesting listening.

The battle to be different is a tough one, however. The template for intimate lyrics and soul-searching was defined in the 1960s by the likes of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, two Canadians who captured an audience with desolate tales of beautiful losers and wan Los Angeles ladies. It isn't exactly fair, but every singer-songwriter worth their salt is going to be compared to a previous one. If the comparison isn't with Mitchell and Cohen it'll be with James Taylor and Carole King - or with Joan Armatrading and Neil Young. How to be distinctive, then?

"Some of my songs are lacking," says 26-year-old Juliet Turner. "Strong song-writing is an odd thing. It's really hard to know if a song is good or bad when you're writing it. The best ones are those that express exactly what I had intended when I started writing it. That Rough Lion's Tongue says everything I wanted to say. So does Belfast Central. Not because I think they're great songs, but because they say exactly what I wanted to say in an honest way. At the same time, I have affection even for the ones that don't work. They're like a diary. Some have never seen the light of day - they fail because they end up not saying what you want to say."

Over the past 12 months, Turner has peeked out from the curtains of obscurity to view an ever-increasing audience. She has supported virtually everyone from Ron Sexsmith to David Essex, and has honed her support set to a point where her songs poke you in the eye with their directness and integrity. Three years ago, she released her debut album, Let's Hear It For Pizza, the slightly silly title harbouring a nascent, if fairly predictable, song-writing talent. By her own admission, the creative and marketing strategy for the album was "arseways" - the 10 songs on the record were the only ones she had, and it was released before she had a barely discernible audience.

In Dublin to study English and history at Trinity College (following a failed attempt in the same college at studying speech therapy), Turner was quickly spotted by her soon-to-be manager, who, through his connections in gig promotions, Juliet Turner says she loves beauty and that her need to live in Dublin stemmed as much from a romanticised view of Trinity as it did from books and articles she had read about it.

"I suppose Dublin had a newness about it," she says seriously. "Dublin for me then had an atmosphere all of its own. It's faded now of course, and I don't feel it anymore either for Dublin or the South in general. It was a whole new country when I first arrived."

Indifferent to the city or not, Turner has worked hard to make a Dublin audience sit up and take notice of her. On stage, she sings fiercely emotional songs that make cheery audiences stop breathing for a few seconds, and she is one of the few Irish singer-songwriters I have heard in years to be able to express her feelings without veering into dreaded maudlin territory. The success of her performances lies in a type of shyness that stops short of being cute, and a way with lyrics that leave most of her contemporaries at the starting blocks.

"It isn't easy writing songs; in fact it's really frightening," she says. "I had produced what I considered were 10 good songs, and people seemed to like them. I wondered whether I would be able to write more like that."

Admitting to the premise that she could write potentially stale songs with similar themes - the bedsit angst syndrome that so many of her kind suffer from - Juliet experienced not so much a creative epiphany but a difference of perspective. A visit to Manchester's Canal Street - the city's Gay Village - opened up to her "a different world that sparked off different ideas aside from the usual love aspects of lyric writing. The first album was written from a very personal viewpoint. From Manchester I became more aware of asking questions, of being intrigued of what goes on in other people's lives. People who seem to live humdrum lives might not live humdrum lives at all - if you spend enough time thinking about it or getting to know them."

Her interest in Canal Street led into a marked interest in transvestism. Why? "Because I used to get mistaken for a man all the time," she replies bitter-sweetly. "I still do - not as much as I used to, but now and again. I got completely intrigued by it and how much I hated it happening. It used to throw me for days and make me completely insecure as a woman, inevitably, perhaps. Yet in Canal Street there was a whole section of men who were dying to be mistaken for women. One of the reasons why I hated it is that, when I was about seven, I wanted to join an Orange marching band. I had high hopes of holding the string on the banner on the Twelfth. It was quite a kudos thing for kids to hold the string, but I had short hair at the time, and the man in charge called me `sonny'. Even at seven I was gutted."

Image problems have shadowed Juliet from those days. She shows no regard for the record companies who attempted to contact her following her performance at the Omagh Service tribute concert, where her corkscrew-in-the-heart rendition of Julie Miller's Broken Things almost made everyone lose their composure. Or the record companies who feel she can't be marketed because she's just another singer-songwriter. Or the record companies who don't want to know because she doesn't look like a desirable composite of the Corr sisters.

"I'm not a pretty wee girl who can be shoved into a pair of trousers and a tight Tshirt and marketed that way," she bristles. "Equally, I'm not going to lose weight or change my style just so I can be easily marketed."

She shifts in her seat in the hotel foyer, her tone of voice and demeanour matching her best songs: clear cut, decisive, barely restrained, emotive and hinting danger.

"I get bored doing the singer-songwriter thing all the time. I do love it, though, the one girl and the guitar. It touches people in the way that I want it to. It's a brave thing to do, both for the performer and the audience. They can get uncomfortable with the stripped-down intimacy, but I want to be able to do live gigs different ways. If I can do that and still reach people, then great, but until the right record company comes along and makes the right offer, I won't go for it. Until that happens . . . "

Juliet Turner plays Geoffs, Waterford, November 7th; Ballymore Inn, Ballymore Eustace, November 15th; the Point, Dublin, November 23rd (supporting Brian Kennedy); Tallaght Theatre, November 30th; The Waterfront, Belfast, November 28th (supporting Brian Kennedy); Whelan's, Dublin, December 1st; the Errigal Inn, Belfast, December 2nd; Mullingar Arts Centre, December 3rd; the Lobby, Cork, December 18th

Tony Clayton-Lea can be contacted at: tclaytonlea@irish-times.ie