Frank Turner - Interview

Frank Turner has been at it a while. Eleven years into a solo career after the demise of post-hardcore outfit Million Dead, he has by now built a following of considerable size and devotion. Standing somewhere on the axis of folkish, singer-songwritery introspection, E-Street Band intimate bombast, and the raucous energy of his punk roots, his gigs can approach a spiritual experience to those who have decided to buy into them.

On stage at Dublin's Academy, Turner announces this as his 1,831st solo gig. His propensity for touring and his seeming addiction to the road have long formed a significant chunk of his appeal. In 2009, his video for single “The Road” featured him playing 24 gigs in 24 hours, in venues and houses around London. “I’m never fucking doing that again,” he says laughing, which all things considered is probably for the best.

He’s worked his way from toilet circuit dives to the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, later in 2012 selling out the 12,000-seat Wembley Arena, but it’s the tour and the long slog where he seems most at home. The current tour comes after the release of ‘Positive Songs for Negative People’, his sixth album, toured as relentlessly as its forbears.

“There is a part of me which is immensely proud to be part of the travelling music community, and being a lifelong member of it. It’s like my guild almost, and I like that.”

Being on the road for so long and in the business for a couple of decades has given him access to a world that more transient acts "may only get a glimpse of," he says. He recounts playing Rock City in Nottingham, one of his favourite venues. Being a regular, he knows the in-house chef personally, but had assumed they wouldn’t be on duty as it was only his side project, Mongol Horde, playing a small side room. “So we rocked up and the catering was going on… I was like ‘how come you guys are doing this today?’ and he looked at me like I was a moron, and he said: ‘You’re one of us, you’re family’, and that meant a lot to me, because to feel accepted on that side of the touring world is an achievement.”

Years on the road and thousands of shows gives a certain perspective, although Turner isn’t entirely sure as to what exactly that perspective is. “I mean I think it probably makes me quite a limited person in in a way”, he says, “but I don’t give a shit, I figured out the one thing I’m good at.”

He says he’s found younger bands at festivals “slightly elder-statesman-ing me… I’m still not sure how I feel about it.” He appreciates the sentiment, but says that “I don’t want to start feeling like a heritage act just yet, fucking hell.”

At the grand old age of 34, and rapidly approaching his 2,000th show, he has seen the inside of more venues than you could reasonably shake a drumstick at. This is his first show in the Republic since May 2013, and his fans are no less fanatically receptive to his mix of post-Kerouac libertinism and heart-on-sleeve emotionality than they've ever been.

Of course Turner, like many an artist in the public eye, has been on the receiving end of his fair share of social media bollockings in his day, most notably in 2012 when The Guardian decided to ‘reveal’ that the singer was in fact less of a raging leftist than his fans may have previously thought. He received threats as a result. One man warned him never to set foot in Ireland again.

“That guy did actually take the time to write a letter,” to his credit. “There’s an address on the website so he didn’t have too look far, but he’s clearly taken 5 minutes of his life instead of 1 minute.” He came through the storm intact, but what still annoys him is that “of all people in the world you could be fucked off at,” the online hordes ended up descending on him, a musician.

Having come at popularity in a slightly unconventional way, playing to often modest but madly enthusiastic crowds, Turner appreciates how things have worked out. “There have certainly been times where it’s been quite annoying to me that I don’t fit into any journalistic shorthand pigeonholes,” but in the long run he sees the benefits of never being definitively pegged to one ‘scene’, having one foot in the worlds of folk, punk and whatever he's having himself.

On another note, being such a tour obsessive in an age when recorded music has been constantly and repeatedly devalued has stood him in good stead. “I grew up idolising bands like Black Flag who toured really hard, and I always wanted to tour really hard, and then I happened to arrive in a world where touring really hard is probably the most viable way to make a career as a musician.”

And tour hard he does. Starting in August last year, Turner and his band don’t intend to stop until August 2017, a full 24 months after leaving. All going well, they’ll take in South America for the first time, as well as getting to Australia and China. After that, there’s less certainty.

“That’s what I’ve done for five albums in a row now, finish one album, written another one while touring, and then gone straight back into the studio, back on the road, studio, road, studio, road, and that’s fine up to a point,” but it is incumbent on the artist to develop. Turner recognises that “the scope of one’s creativity is limited if all you do is the same thing day in, day out. So I might move to Paris or work in a bar in Costa Rica or somewhere for a year.” Equally, he may continue “doing the kind of E-Street-esque thing that I’ve been doing,” or take a turn in a different direction, Turner tells as he is "taking bluegrass guitar lessons." which opens up another avenue for him to potentially explore.

Asked about his influences in a non-musical sense, Turner mentions poets like Auden and Larkin, but is sure to underline the fact that “I don’t’ consider myself a poet, I’m a lyricist,” and that the two shouldn’t be mixed up. Nonetheless, to see him on stage is to be convinced that his words have an appeal far beyond other sorts of wallowing minstrelsy. He stresses the notion of writing personal songs that sound personal to thousands, but stresses it as an accidental process, or else things sound like “a marketing department trying to figure out how to wring cash out of high-school leavers.” He is acutely aware of the theory and context behind the writing of music, but even as he progresses through the albums and becomes something of a notable figure, he says “when you start out as a band you don’t think about any of that shit, you just think ‘do I like this?’, and I think it’s important to somehow try and hold on to that.”

Ask anybody who sees him throwing himself around on stage later on in the evening and they would probably agree that he has.