Album Review
Stuart Turner & Rob Grigg
Gargoyles at the Memoir Club
Lathe cut LP/Digital
released 14th August 2026
5/5
Just the most brilliantly original album I’ve heard for a while, says Ged Babey, Wondering if ‘Tom Waits-style Gothic Folk from the Medway Delta’ is a suitable tag-line. Two Medway movers and shakers mix dark post punk and hypnotic folk, fronted by Turner’s astonishing and shape shifting voice. Add to that an obsession with Tallulah Bankhead and Soho in the 1920s and an experimental song with so many overlapping voices it makes you feel dizzy.
Loosely thematic, most of the lyrics concern themselves with memories, thwarted ambition and a growing sensation that the narrative arcs you imagined in childhood aren’t real, that life simply is, and you are a part of it for as long as you exist. In Tallulah Bankhead, a figure of fading glamour, self-sabotage and thwarted ambition, the album finds a personification of these loose ideas.
Bankhead is on the cover art, as is the wallpaper from the Gargoyle Club.
Now a hotel, the Memoir Club of the title, was created in 1920.“Twelve friends were drawn from the deeply influential group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Set. The friends set about regrouping after the War by sharing their deeply personal autobiographical writings. The rules were simple – whomever was presenting their memoir was required to be candid, while the people doing the listening were obliged to extend an equal openness.”
The Gargoyle Club was similar, a jazz age private members cocktail lounge (that would in time become The Bat Cave and The Comedy Store – birthplace of Goth and Alternative Comedy respectively).
Stuart Turner wrote all the songs and played all the instruments except the drums played by Grigg who also recorded and produced in his freshly built home studio. He told me – The album title came before the songs and was a joke about the navel gazing nature of writing and singing songs about your own experiences, (and jazz age drinking), while simultaneously appreciating that your experiences are no more or less worthy of comment than anyone else’s.
Gargoyles at the Memoir Club isn’t an easy album to get into. it takes few listens but once it clicks – wow. The songs and musical settings mix sometimes angular, sometimes dark post punk with hypnotic folk elements, and almost shanty-like chants and incantations.
Turner has been a key figure in the Medway scene, with a storied music career centred around his own band Stuart Turner and The Flat Earth Society (which at various points contained members of Theatre Royal, The Dentists, Thee Scarecrows, Senior Service, Little Storping in the Swuff, The Singing Loins, Wipeout, and more…) Turner has also played guitar for These Guilty Men, and in partnership with Chris Broderick, (singer and lyricist of The Singing Loins) formed the band Pod and co wrote/performed the acclaimed folk-opera suite And One Red Mitten, about the life of (Jack the Ripper victim) Catherine Eddowes. More recently he’s been involved in playing and production for Medway groups The Dutch Embassy, The Ashen Keys, and Rachel Lowrie’s new South Shore band. It should be noted, this is a side project (by “Stuart Turner and Rob Grigg”). It started as a side project from These Guilty Men and is now a side project from South Shore.
People who know me are aware that I really can’t get on with the music of Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart, simply because I don’t like Tom and Don’s voices. The gurgling growl. Yet here I am trying to convince you that Stuart Turner is a genius too, yet he has a vaguely similar vocal style. As I said here in 2023 –Stuarts singing voice is a growling, gargling bellow; like a baritone Town Crier with a touch of pirate. You would imagine he was a great big burly fellow with big red cheeks and a massive ginger beard – a kinda Hagrid-like figure from his voice, but he looks quite normal. His vocal style takes a bit of getting used to.
In the press release for the album it says: Turner’s extraordinary voice, which can turn from crooning Lloyd Cole to throaty Beefheart or Waits, to the haunted howl of Jeffrey Lee Pearce or Kirk Brandon. I can see the JLP comparison but not the Kirk to be honest.
Turner himself told me about his two different singing voices: Head voice – from mouth and chest voice – from diaphragm. One is quiet. One is loud but distorted. Like having overdrive on your vocal chords. Comes from throat surgery in my 20s. Head voice has no projection and is very quiet live. Chest voice is sometimes an acquired taste. But cuts through a mix for sure.
You can hear both on this track.
For God’s Sake Burn It Down is a title that I knew from somewhere; Chumbawamba’s Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, in turn taken from Dylans Don’t Look Back. It’s a self-pitying wallow of a song about having no control of your life, having regrets and time speeding up the older you get. Yet despite the subject matter it has that negative drive and anger-as-an-energy-to fire-you-up. The guitar reminds me of darker-era Cure.
Around Here is a kind of bildungsroman in song, detailing a young mans travels from place to place, job to job trying to find himself, only to find himself at the end of his rope. Turners admiration for Johnny Marr is all over the music to this song.
Party song – it’s probably by a complete fluke that this actually sounds a bit like the Birthday Party / early Bad Seeds. But compared to the sanitized, born-again Cave we have now – this is a beautiful reminder of how the man sounded at his best, feral and uncompromising.
The longest song, Thank God For Nancy, may be the only song ever written about a 1947 Gibson LG2 guitar, named after Turner’s grandmother hiding out in a bomb damaged apartment in post war Berlin. It is an absolute epic
The song Tallulah Gosh by Tallulah Gosh is about Claire Grogans proposed stage name of Tallulah Gish, (Bankhead and Lillian), that was written down wrong by her agent. I asked Amelia if we could sample the song for the song Dahlings Dark Victory, instead she sang the line, avoiding copywrite issues.
Miss You Then is the song where the Gun Club comparison materialises. It’s the voice and the sharp bluesy guitar sound on the last forty seconds. Turners amazing guitar-playing/guitar-sound are a feature of a couple of other songs – specifically…
Stories – The combination of ingredients (angular, dark post punk, hypnotic folk elements) reaches a kind of critical mass in side two’s looping, relentless multi layered “Stories”, where Turner embodies multiple characters and voices simultaneously in a terrifyingly brilliant tour de force. What keeps you listening, despite the disorientating clamour of voices is the sharp, jagged, steely guitar figure, looping and feeding-back, which is the constant, the backbone of the piece.
The point of the song is essentially that life has no narrative arc and to try and follow it makes no sense (“So many stories…”) .
Overcoming Cynicism is great title and noble intention but the only song which really fails to make any real impact.
Michael is the bonus digital only song and a cover of a popular song by The Frank & Walters (cult 90’s indie heroes). They were not a band I ever liked (much preferred A House) but it’s a sweet/strange song about either supporting the under-dog or becoming a parent, We care Michael, we care…
Gargoyles at the Memoir Club is an album designed to be listened to from start to finish. It’s dark, strange but has a dramatic vibe to it, a gothic feel, a kind of yearning for meaning and order to life – or a religion to follow, rather than just chance, luck… yet it creates it’s own mystery and myth – we are just as interesting and profound and worthy as the writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists held in adoration by other writers, intellectuals and critics, seems to be the conclusion to be drawn.
Or you can just listen to it as a great wallow-deep, you’re-not-alone, English Gothic Folk album the like of which you have probably never heard before.`
Buy from Bandcamp
All wordsGed Babeyexcept quotes, PR content and lyrics in italics.
South Shore – who include Turner & Grigg are Crowdfunding to release their album HERE The single isone of the best love songs you will hear all year. Or any year. It really is a classic. It’s on a par with Chrissie Hynde and Kirsty MacColl at their very best.So, you know what to do.
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