Frank Turner has spent the better part of the last 25 years of his life on the road. Since first taking to it in 1998, it is fair to say the road has taught the hardcore frontman turned folk-punk troubadour many things. Chief amongst his learnings, by his own very frank admission, is he, or any of us truly know about anything. Yet the road has also left him with an obsession with learning more, about songwriting and human nature, history and fiction, the past and the present and what we can hope to learn from both about the future. This fixation on using life as one long self-directed learning journey has led Turner to some very interesting places.
Statistically, and geographically speaking, the fifth most frequently visited of those places is Australia. It is perhaps no surprise then that Turner and his bandmates The Sleeping Souls are currently down under for an extensive run of shows with Mom Jeans and longtime Turner tourmate Emily Barker.
They are here ostensibly to tour Turner's ninth studio album, the 2022 release FTHC, albeit such is the work ethic of the man, he has already put the finishing touches on album ten. Prior to his boarding the plane to Australia, we caught up with Turner (and his cat) for a lively and informative conversation about his unique career path, human nature, songwriting, mental health and why Torture is the best Cannibal Corpse album of all time.
A Frankly Fascinating Discussion With Frank Turner
Frank, you’re about to hit Australia for a rather extensive tour. Are you excited to be headed back to what is statistically speaking, your fifth most visited territory?
“The fifth-most-visited territory is an excellent stat. I'm big into my stats. The actual answer to your question is yes. I mean, obviously, for defendable reasons we didn't come to Australia for a good few years, there was something going on in the news? I've been keen to get back. I love Australia.”
“My sort of origin story with Australia, which I always enjoy telling is that Chuck Ragan is an old friend of mine. We’ve done a bunch of tours together. At that point, I’d never been to Australia and he just kept banging on and on and on about how Australia was the promised land of touring, saying that I would love it, and I would do well there and they’d look after me well, and all this sort of stuff. At a certain point, I went well ‘ put up or shut up’, like take me down. So my first visit was ‘The Revival Tour’ in 2010, \and slightly annoyingly, he was 100% right. There was a good chunk of time, there, about five or six years where I came once a year in April for for a tour, which was fantastic. I'm very stoked to be coming back.”
You’re technically visiting Australia in support of 2022’s FTHC, but I believe you have another full-length ready-to-roll as well. What on earth inspires you to continue pumping out albums in the single-heavy streaming era?
“That’s a good question. Part of the answer is that I’m old-fashioned. I still believe in the album as a coherent body of work. I'm aware that there are kind of interesting, historical and technological reasons why certain bodies of popular music are the length that they are. I don't know if you know this, but the length of the 7-inch single was dictated by research on how quickly somebody eats a hamburger. Because fast food chains in the late 1940s, were trying to increase their turnover. They did research that discovered that if a song ends at the time that you finished your food, you tend to leave. So they were trying to increase the footfall in their restaurants. There are other examples relating to how much music you can fit on a 12-inch vinyl, and a CD and blah, blah, blah.”
"I do think it is interesting that with the birth of the streaming era, and yes this is so much nerdier than you were expecting, but with the birth of the streaming era, in theory, there are no technological limits on how long either a song or an album can be. Nevertheless, quite a lot of people have stuck to tried and tested formats. I think that there is something about the human attention span. I think there is something about the coherence of an album. Possibly again this could be me being old-fashioned and refusing to accept the march of time, like a hardened Japanese soldier still fighting the war or whatever. But I like records.”
“I have a rule of thumb, which is a record that should be shorter than 45 minutes so it can all fit on one side of the cassette. There are a lot of albums from my youth where I know every song like the back of my hand apart from the last one because the album is 50 minutes long, and it's like ‘Fuck you, man, I got another album to put on the other side of this tape.”
“Slightly more philosophically, I remain pleasantly surprised that I feel fired up and have things to say and songs to write and ideas and all the rest of it. I do try and check myself and make sure I'm not making records for the sake of it or because it's what I do. And you know that I'm not just churning things out for the sake of essentially. But right now I feel about as kind of creatively fired up as I've ever felt in my life and 10 albums in my early 40s. That is a rare privilege, I think.”
It's very much a rare privilege. You don't hear many artists still seeming as engaged as you are this far into your career. At your age, they tend to all become like that Jaded Punk Hulk parody account but in real life. What’s the secret to you remaining so switched on?
“Well, I mean, there's a bunch of reasons. The simple fact is that it's still working. That was a very pleasant surprise to me. I want to take advantage of that fact. The other thing that really is worth mentioning both for the album and for the tour is that as of 2020, I have a new drummer in my band, Callum, and Callum is the best drummer in the whole universe. And he's also 10 years younger than everybody else in the band, if not more, and he's not really been anywhere before he joined the band outside the UK. He's just this kind of burst of energy and excitement. The rest of us are like oh ‘Australia, jetlag is gonna suck’ and he's like, ‘I've never been to Australia, fuck, that's gonna be amazing.’ His playing and his just his general enthusiasm have been a welcome kind of injection of energy to me, as a writer, as a performer and all the rest of it.”
Now you’d be in a much different headspace now than what you were in when you wrote and recorded the material that was on FTHC. Has the experience of getting out and playing these songs live, with a band, in front of actual people had a cathartic impact on you?
“Definitely. I’m extremely proud of FTHC, but with the benefit of a tiny bit of hindsight, as a record, it feels like a transitional record for me in many ways. I was between drummers when we made it, it was made during the pandemic, so there is that to consider too. But there were three different people who played drums on FTHC and I’ve never met any of them.
Because it was the pandemic. I met them on Zoom. But it's not quite the same. We sort of pieced the album together from demos that sort of got posh versions done of the different parts and all that kind of thing. So it was, it was a weird and slightly disjointed way to make an album but in a slightly counterintuitive way, and I'm a contrarian, if anything in life, the fact that it was being put together that way, made me want to make a record that was designed to be played live. That also is part and parcel of the fact that with both FTHC and the new record that I finished, I'm on this real punk rock chip at the moment.”
“The music I've made as a solo artist has always kind of hovered around the edges of punk rock as a concept, with feet in many other camps as well. But I just sort of felt, again, both with that one and with the new one that it was like I wanted to kind of go home might be the right way of putting it. You know, we did the split with NOFX in 2020, we did a bunch of punk rock festivals just before the pandemic and touring, and I just sort of felt like I was among my people, if you like, for the first time in a while. With FTHC I returned to that fold, and it felt amazing. And so we're very much kind of staying there. And it feels good. I mean, I've always considered myself to be a punk rock kid. You know, I'm proud of the fact that I've been to other places and made folk records and electro records and all the rest of it. And there are still lots of other bits of DNA floating around in the mix. But broadly speaking, for the time being for the foreseeable future, I'm in the punk rock world, and I love it.”
You're probably winning back a lot of your more judgmental fans, who seem to love screaming and shouting on the internet that you've betrayed all of your punk rock creds too. Have you noticed that?
“Yes, totally. To be honest, I know exactly what you mean. The thing about this is that first of all, I'm in my 40s. So I don't care about the internet anymore. Secondly, you know, I was kind of one of them. If the internet had been around when I was 16, I would have been screaming at people and bands for doing things that I disapproved of. So I am sort of sympathetic on some level. So there's that. But I mean I always think back to the fact that with Million Dead, a punk band I was in when I was younger, we did our first headline tour with kind of an advert in the back of Kerrang, when we got a van that had seats in it. When it came to pick us up from our rehearsal space, the guys who ran the rehearsal space told us that we'd sold out! This was a tour of 200 cap venues around the UK for 10 days or whatever. I remember thinking at the time, well, that was easy and painless. I'm glad it's out of the way. Do you know what I mean? I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've worked quite hard not to give a fuck about that kind of thing. Having said all of that, if there are some people who are more into what I'm doing now than they were a couple of records before, that's great, and everyone's welcome!”
Now I was actually at that first tour that you did with Chuck Ragan and at that point in time you were mostly known for your exploits with Love, Ire and Song, and Poetry of the Deed. Can you believe that is now 15 years ago? Does it feel like 15 years?
“The concept is quite disarming. I have two broad feelings about the length of time this has been going on for. In some ways, it is sort of terrifying. Time marches on and my hangover gets worse and my jetlag gets worse and my back hurts more and all of this old-man bullshit. The advantage of it though centrally is that I’m proud that I’m still doing it. When I was a kid, my parents, and well everybody to be honest worked really hard to stop me from doing this. My school friends to me not to try and be a touring musician, and even when we started up, for a lot of people it’s not a thing that lasts all that long whether through choice or through circumstance. The fact that I’ve now been on tour for 25 years August 1998 was my first tour, I’m proud of that actually.”
“The other thing to mention is talking about Love, Ire & Song and Poetry of the Deed I feel like there's a kind of tenure thing, which is that after about 10 years, I can listen back to those records as a kind of almost independent third party. Listen to it objectively. Because I'm a very different person from who I was when I was 25, as I bloody should be, do you know what I mean? I think the idea certain people have that artists should be kind of like, cryogenically frozen at the time when they first discovered them, that I would go on tour for 15 years and not change in any way, that seems completely insane to me. Having said all that, listening back to those songs now for me is a really lovely experience. Because there is some distance and some objectivity and I’m really proud of them. If you’d said to me when we were making Love, Ire & Song in particular that in 15 years' time, we’d be having a conversation about it, I’d have been very pleasantly surprised.”
It’s mindblowing to consider, as a musician myself, I can’t fathom in the modern world being part of something that had been productive for that amount of time. Musicians can be quite tricky to work with! We’re not typically the easiest of people! What’s the secret?
“I must phrase this carefully so as to not sound like a complete megalomaniac. But that is one of the advantages of being a quote-unquote, solo artist. The Sleeping Souls are my band and I love them to pieces, some of them have been with me since 2006. We're all in, and the same is also true, I should add my touring crew, as well, my production manager, Doug, who will be in Australia with us, and I have been friends since 2002, and we've been touring together for most of that time. So it's not I don't want to put it across that it's just me. But at the same time, having someone in control, having an authorial voice and all this kind of thing does tend to kind of head off quite a lot of the traditional band arguments that quite often put paid to bands before their time. So you know, in many ways, I feel like I'm lucky that I have the best of all worlds, I have the camaraderie of the of the touring pirate ship gang, thing that is the kind of band stereotype but at the same time, I also get my way all the time, which is lovely.”
That is lovely. Getting your way all of the time feels like what the internet wants to do pretty much every day, which leads me to question you, does it frustrate you still as a human being, that people can't seem to understand that growth and change? That the capacity to take on information and change your mind is an important part of being a human being?
“I mean it does, but I also think that’s always been the case. The internet, or I should say social media, tends to metastasise that instinct among humans. We’re all familiar with the online instant expert. I’m in a place in my life now, where I no longer read social media. I use it purely as a broadcast tool. Which is useful for many things, not least of all my mental health. It’s worth saying that there were long periods of my life, Twitter in particular did awful things to my self-regard, sleep patterns, anxiety, all these kinds of things. I'm trying to be reasonably Zen about things at this point. I think that being angry at humans for being human, strikes me as a waste of energy. Because we are who we are, in both our strengths and our weaknesses.”
“I am at a point in my life where, you know, I put my art out into the world, and some people like it, and some people don't and, and I'm totally fine with that. As you mentioned, I grow and I change, and I do different things of my art. And I just try and try and be Zen about it, basically. In the broader philosophical sense, the idea of people struggling to kind of change their minds when they take on new information. I mean, that strikes me as a sign of immaturity, not one that I'm completely free of, I should add, you know, we all have our idiosyncrasies but I do think that the risk of sounding pretentious, if there's one thing I've learned getting older, and I'm 41, it's not that old, but it's old by punk standards, I’ve learned increasingly, with every passing year, with every book that I read and I’m a complete literary maniac, I read all the time, I’ve learned how little I know about anything, and how little any of us know about anything The older I get the more I try and be sort of less strident in my opinions, basically, because, actually, you know, all I know is my outlook on the world and there are at least 6 billion others and so yeah, so I try and I try and have some intellectual humility. I mean, I could probably improve on that, but that's my life.”
Frank give me your Desert Island Records. Now because this is principally a metal and hardcore publication I want to know what your your desert island hardcore punk or metal records are. Give me four.
“We’ll do two hardcore and two metal, we all know these are different concepts. For some metal, I'm probably going to choose Killers by Iron Maiden because it was the first record I bought. I've got the artwork tattooed on my leg and I will always adore that album. For some more metal, I might choose Torture by Cannibal Corpse. I'm a huge Cannibal Corpse fan. There’s a sort of baked-in opinion that Butchered at Birth is the best record, and I just think that's a ludicrous opinion. I think that partly because in many ways that type of music is a lot about the sonics and Butchered at Birth is a great record, it was very groundbreaking, but doesn't sound great, and Torture is fucking phenomenal.”
“Hardcore I’m going to choose Black Flag First Four Years, it’s an obvious choice, but cmon. It was such a defining record for me. It’s one of those records where I had a cassette copy of it, initially. I now have it on vinyl. But the cassette copy I had when I was a kid when I listen to the songs, I can still sort of hear the bits where my tape copy faltered a little bit, you know what I mean? It’s so ingrained in my mind. I'm also going to choose the album You Fail Me by Converge, which could possibly have gone in the metal category, but I have the artwork tattooed on my arm. Converge just always been the best heavy band ever, in my opinion. I just fucking love them. I've reached the point where we're sort of passingly friends, acquaintances, whatever you want to call it we've recorded with Kurt Ballou in the past and stuff like this, but they will always be the absolute pinnacle and that's my favourite record.”
“I should add by the way that I was choosing hardcore rather than punk because if we throw punk into the mix as well we're gonna be here all fucking day. Okay, I'll pick one punk rock and it’s Descendent's Everything Sucks. Best punk record ever made.”
Outside of music, what do you consider yourself to be a Maniac for?
“I'm gonna say books because essentially, I have a kind of mild OCD about everything really I mean, you saying fifth most visited territory, that made my day earlier, stats, figures all that. So I keep lists of what I've read. If I don't get through 50 pages a day, I feel like I've wasted my day. I read all the time, I tend to read about 80 books a year. And I just am a complete maniac for this stuff. I'm currently finishing off a history of the Byzantine Empire, which is fascinating because I know almost nothing at all about the Balkans in the 1300s. So I'm educating myself.”
I wonder if it'll inform you at all about the current circumstances?
“My obsession with history is linked to this. I think that it’s very difficult to know where you're going if you don't know where you started. And I mean, I read history all the fucking time. So I would hope so. For example, I've just read about the Battle of Kosovo, which I know a little bit about because I studied Balkan history at University. It was in 1389. People think ‘Well, it's a long time ago.’ But it's worth noting that current Serbian politics is very much animated by debates over what happened at the Battle of Kosovo. So it is important.”
It is indeed important just like your first record is as important in your sets as your last record. Can we trust you’ll be playing a selection of all of those records when you make it to Australia?
“Absolutely. I am an unashamed populist in one thing and one thing only and that's my setlist choices so there will be a bit of everything in the set.”
Frank Turner and the Sleeping Souls are currently on tour in Australia and New Zealand.
Tickets for the remaining shows are on sale now via Destroy All Lines.
