His settings are meticulously-edited montages of classic soul and funk elements, enjoyable but not always explicable. "I have no idea what dude is saying in the hook sample," he admits in the annotation to "Hott Bizness" "Hey pal, I don't make the records, I just sample 'em.". "The lineage of Doncaster talent," claims the press release, "reads like a roll call of the great and the good: Honky, Bitter Suite, and now Relaxed Muscle." And with such high standards to live up to, it's hardly surprising that veteran Muscle mainman Darren Spooner has waited so long before releasing this debut album. On this solo debut, he demonstrates an equal facility on both sides of the microphone, adept both at delivering articulate raps in a quick-fire patter bordering on stream-of-consciousness scat, and at fashioning the infectious backing tracks that carry his missives - sometimes marshalling up to 50 different samples in one piece, as with the opening vocal-sample collage "Dream Sequence". With gritty accounts of real-life tribulations borne along on sinuous funk grooves, Later That Day...

recalls Michael Franti's work with Spearhead - particularly on the post-September 11 musings of "Last Trumpet". Elsewhere, he takes on telemarketers in "Cold Call", inveterate moaners in "Stop Complaining", and best of all, rising stress-levels in "Bad Dream". I'd make up a cassette for him, and he'd say: 'Oh, don't worry about it Wait until the dub If I don't like it, I don't like it There's nothing I can do about it It's too late. If it's no good, we won't use it.' He was very sweet, like that."Turner seems slightly alienated by the overly cerebral approach "I left school when I was 17 Does that stop me being intellectual? I'm inquisitive. Derek would say: 'I'm doing a film about Caravaggio', and I'd ask: 'Who's Caravaggio?' Or 'I'm doing a film about Edward II.' 'Well, I don't know anything about Edward II.' It was always learn, learn, learn. Down to the bookshops, down to the National Gallery and then: 'Oh, I see what you're talking about!'"By the time of Blue in 1993, Turner had honed his craft, bearing the responsibility for shaping this image-less film's blank blue screen with music, speech and silence. "I was a controller for Blue, just trying to make sure it all worked It was very difficult, because there was no image.

Derek wrote all the words and it turned out to be more about him, and his illness It became very personal. They recorded the dialogue, and it only came to 23 minutes, so we had to place it with silence, and fill the gaps, really. It was a pleasure to do, very uplifting."Between 1969, when Turner made his teen debut as a Jonathan King prot?, up to the late 1980s, when he was producing albums such as The King Of Luxembourg, a vocal/guitar, singer-songwriter approach provided the main thrust "Now, I don't like the electric guitar I thought of an electric guitar the other day. I've just gone off guitars completely, from being a complete guitar freak when I was a kid."For his next Mute album, Turner is going in yet another unpredictable direction. "I've been recording pianos for quite a long time now, just pianos all over the place My favourite so far has been playing in piano shops. "Mariza's voice I like very much - she is a very authentic artist, very generous - and her success is good for Portuguese music.