Interview with Frank Turner

Frank Turner is having a pretty good year. Over the past 12 months he has been nominated for awards, toured and taken time out to record his fourth solo studio album, England Keep My Bones, set to be released on June 6th. He is also the ideal interviewee; charming, funny and only too happy to have a quick word with Vision before he performs at Fibbers.

Turner began playing solo back in 2005 when his previous band, the moderately successful post-hardcore group Million Dead, split up due to “irreconcilable differences”. Since then he has slowly built up a fanatical cult following, and now his distinctive brand of impassioned folk punk is breaking out into the mainstream with nominations at this year’s NME awards (although sadly with no victories) and a number of big festivals on the cards.

Turner admits that the new album will not be radically different from his predecessors, but he still insists that, although it builds on his established sound, he has tried to push the boundaries. “I’m not Aphex Twin, but I try and do a couple of songs that are a little bit different from what I’ve done before, so there’s a song on the new record that’s more like a hardcore song than anything I’ve done in my solo career before, and there’s an a cappella song, there are some more traditional folky sounds coming in here and there…Lyrically there’s some stuff that I’ve done that’s written from a character’s point of view, which I haven’t really done before.” Turner is modest and comes across as slightly dazed by his success so far. “I’m really pleased with [the record], although obviously I would say that.” Clearly keen not to come across as ungrateful, he adds good-naturedly, “I hope that other people like it too!”

Despite his everyman appearance, Turner comes from a pretty upper-crust background. Born in Bahrain, he was educated at Eton alongside Prince William and studied History at LSE. Nevertheless, despite this fine pedigree, Turner’s musical ambition meant that it never really seemed likely that he would follow his father into investment banking. He formed his first band, Kneejerk, while still at school, and has never looked back, moving from Million Dead to solo work with apparent ease.

Playing live appears to come naturally to Turner, and he admits that the hiatus from touring while recording the new album left him restless. “It was the longest time I’ve ever had off-tour,” he says, “it drove me out of my tiny little mind! I ended up actually just coming down and doing a bunch of shows… I don’t like being in the same place for a long time, it just makes me feel really uncomfortable. When we got to the bus on Tuesday and it arrived I was just saying ‘never leave me!'”

So would he say he was born to be something of a ‘wandering minstrel’? Turner dismisses the idea. “To be honest I’ve just recalibrated myself. I don’t think I was really any better disposed to it than anyone else before I started, but I just did it for a really long time, and now I love it.”

This compulsion to perform might explain the power of Turner’s live shows. Most of his fans will agree that Turner’s music is at its most powerful when performed in person to a receptive crowd. When I ask if he prefers smaller or larger venues he is tactfully ambivalent. “It totally depends, a good show is about atmosphere, and I’ve had brilliant shows to five people and terrible shows to a thousand people…What makes a good show is a lot less definable than what room you’re in, or how many people are there to watch you, or anything like that. A thousand different things come together to make a good show. You can have awesome shows in a venue like this when you just have people coming up to talk to you all the time, you know. But, I mean, at the same time, I’ve had some definite turkey shows in small venues like this one in my time too…”

Being on the road clearly has its downsides, even for an enthusiastic tourer like Turner. While he claims to sleep better on a tour bus than at home, Turner admits that most musicians have their “sanity rituals” to keep themselves going on a long tour. Turner’s is to breakfast alone; “I just give myself an hour, coffee, full English, newspaper, don’t talk to anyone, maybe do a crossword. The thing about being on tour is that you’re around people all the time, and it can get a little claustrophobic. Taking time not to talk to people can help me a lot.”
Despite this apparent craving for early morning solitude, Frank is delightfully chatty, and he scoffs at the stereotype of the aloof rock star: “I just can’t understand how people sustain that kind of up-your-arse-rock-star-ego thing. To me, the business of getting up on stage and performing to people involves making an arse out of yourself so regularly…I find that it’s quite levelling, quite humbling.”

So what has been Turner’s most embarrassing on-stage moment? “I once punched myself in the balls in front of ten thousand people, by mistake, obviously! It was at Download Festival, and I was doing the Roger Daltry thing with the microphone and it sort of span round…and there was no way of disguising it! You can’t pretend it didn’t happen, you’ve just got to roll with it!”

What’s next for Frank Turner? With his new album just released yesterday, he is already halfway through a tour, and has plans to play several of the big festivals over the summer. This hard work seems to be paying off. He has already been bumped up to the main stage at Leeds/Reading festival, and if he keeps grafting the way he has for the past few years, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t continue to expand his cult following, and perhaps transform it into a mainstream one. After all, excessive touring never did that other beardy folk guitarist, a certain Bob Dylan, any harm…