Meeting up with Frank Turner and having a chat has become a yearly occurrence. We're too busy for anything more. In the past six months folk-rock songwriter Frank has visited Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China and Israel all for the first time, toured America a bit, headlined his first festival and supported Green Day at Wembly Stadium. He has reached this plateau in just under five years; since September 2005, in fact, when he first took his sadly departed first and only acoustic guitar out on the road and proceeded to never look back.
“I'm gonna get a tiny bit defensive now and even get a bit of my pride out on show,” he warns while supping a pint of golden nectar in a Notting Hill beer garden towards the end of our interview. “It's just funny because there is a folk punk thing, particularly in America. But in the UK five years ago, people thought I was fucking mental when I said this was what I was gonna do and retrospectively even I think I was mental as well. I don't wanna sound prissy about this but it wasn't the obvious move. So, yes, I do feel vindicated about that.”
Ask Frank what has been most fulfilling about his rise to headlining venues like Brixton Academy, which he will do in December, he'll explain that it's the publicly perceived sense that his rise “isn't a fabricated or a flash in the pan thing”. He admits with blunt honesty that he has never hidden his roots and never wanted to. “I can't claim and don't see the point of claiming and will never claim to be working class in anything that I do in my life with the possible exception of the way I've gone about my career which is that I've done this through graft and I'm proud of that fact. It's the one bit of blue collar in my life.” For a man rapidly approaching his 1000th show in five years, this is no overstatement. Playmusic, in all its guises, has followed Frank from his early shows at tiny acoustic clubs like Monkey Chews in Chalk Farm, open mic nights at The Snooty Fox in Canonbury and three shows at the local Tunbridge Wells Forum. The gig count is well into double figures but that's only roughly about 2-3% of his actual gigging schedule. Which perhaps puts his work rate into perspective for even the most sceptical of you.
Between that time he has also released three full-length albums, an armful of EPs, split singles – all collected on The First Three Years - and two DVDs plus a live recording of his triumphant Shepherd's Bush Empire show in 2009. He's also contributed to several tribute albums (the highlight of which is the excellent Mark Mulcahy tribute album made to raise funds to help the American songwriter raise his family and continue to make music after the death of his wife), been added to countless compilations and has guested on records by Chris T-T and The Dawn Chorus of late. Prolific just about covers it and with a new EP out November, there's no shortage of songs in the Turner canon it seems. “One of the things that drives me to write as much as I can and tour as much as I can, is, to be very specific about it, Bob Dylan in the late seventies. If even Bob Dylan can run out of juice then everyone's gonna run out and that makes me hammer it for all its worth. Of course, if I run out of songs than I'll just coast, tour and not release new material,” he adds, laughing.
“I want to see it as a way into the new album,” Frank says of the new five track EP. “I'm quite confident in the stockpile of songs I've got at the moment and its almost quite hard to choose what songs are gonna go on the EP rather than the record but I think its important to stress that it's not gonna be second class songs on the EP. The lead track is gonna be I Still Believe which is rapidly turning into a live favourite.” Frank's recent iTunes Festival performance at the Roundhouse included this huge, jaunty singalong. With lyrics espousing the virtues of rock and roll, a choral echo primed for arenas and a central lyric that goes 'I still believe (I still believe)/In the need for guitar and drums and desperate poetry', its no surprise that about its first UK outing at a last minute secret show at The Flowerpot in Kentish Town Frank says “the crowd response to it was totally overwhelming, more for any new song I've ever had”. Nevertheless, while he is aware of the importance of meshing his passionate lyricism with indelible hooks, something he's incredibly adept at, it's not necessarily the most fulfilling of his oeuvre for him.
“That was an easy song for me to write. I can already tell you what my favourite song on the next record is going to be and it's not going to be a crowd favourite and we probably won't play it more than once live”, he admits. “It's just got an incredibly dense and complicated set of lyrics that took me forever and its the closest I've ever felt that I've got to writing poetry in my life. I just spent ages on meter and rhythm and rhyming structure. This is not a gripe in anyway but I always felt like people hone in on the more simplistic stuff, with the notable exception of 'Prufrock' which is a crowd favourite and one of the best sets of words I've ever turned out. I'm just geeky about words,” he says, shrugging.
Frank has made no secret of his adoration and continuous research into English folk music, another subject he can be incredibly 'geeky' about. He points to his suitcase – awaiting its trip to Canada the very next morning - which has a volume detailing the history of English folk songs during our conversation. He has also recorded a version of Barbara Allen, first mentioned as a Scottish folk song in Samuel Pepys diary, as well as performing it completely acapella at Shepherd's Bush Empire. This may well have started a trend. “I've been writing a few acapella songs recently. I also found this old myth which is a folk tale from the New Forest, which is just down the road from where I'm from. William II, was killed in a hunting accident in the forest and there's a local myth that his father William the Conqueror stole commoner John the Blacksmith's land for royal hunting grounds and John the Blacksmith laid a curse on the King and said 'I'll kill your son for stealing my land.' I'm just trying to turn that into a traditional song.” Frank also isn't shy about his libertarian political standpoint. Songs like Sons of Liberty should make that really clear. Discussing everything from government funded lobby/charity groups and his distaste for such a practice to the real Robin Hood being a tax-hating worker, its easy to get Frank onto a tangent which eludes an answer entirely, while showing how much he thinks, reads, absorbs and consequently, has to say. The topic of place spreads from “a slight obsession with Ernest Hemingway and this idea of collecting experience,” to the possibility of playing prison shows around London and even the Alternative USO, for US soldiers at military bases and even Afghanistan. He references Kerouac's On The Road and being asked by an American customs official on the phone if he was “the singer in Million Dead”. These tangents are triggered simply by his need to express his love of new experiences and returning to his own country.
“In the last couple of days I've just finished a song about rivers and England. Even when talking about something else, when there comes a time to mention a city or a place, without wanting to sound like Lily Allen, (mocking singing voice)'al fresco, Tesco', I'd rather drop Manchester or Exeter into a song. I probably go more to Denver than I do Exeter but Exeter sounds more relevant to me. I completely agree with you that a sense of place is fascinating and really important and that's one of the many things that attracts me to folk music generally. When I go to other places I'm always super interested in how people live, how other people work and I think it makes me appreciate my own cultural and political identity a little more.”
It's an issue that dominates the media, arts and, yes, songwriting and it's genuinely refreshing to have an increasingly popular musician approach the matter from both a personal and educated standpoint.
Perhaps the biggest shift from his defiantly solo beginnings, and one that originally caused a schism between fans, has been the introduction of his band. They comprise of three members of Oxford band Dive Dive – bassist Tarrant Anderson, guitarist Ben Lloyd and drummer Nigel Powell – and keys player/multi-instrumentalist Matt Nasir. Though they've been present since the first full band show in Oxford's Port Mahon on 20th January 2007, with Matt joining in October of 2008, third album Poetry of the Deed is the first to have the whole band recording their parts in the studio at the same time. “I still say this is MY project and I have done this,” proclaims Frank. “(But) there are one or two songs I don't like and/or can't do solo already, though I have to say I'm slightly annoyed by that because I do like the idea that there's always a solo version of the song that I can play.”
Though Frank refutes the idea that he couldn't imagine his songs without the other musician's contributions, he's very stringent on one point: “I certainly don't want to play with any other musicians any time soon,” he says. “We've actually legally bound ourselves to each other quite recently which I'm very happy about and I was keen to do. There's a strength to the paradigm of one man and his guitar which is important, and there is a reason I'm doing this under my own name and not in a band and all the rest of it, so I don't want to lose sight of any of that but they are important to what I do, particularly to the live show now.” Yet, there have been challenges along the way. Not least the balance between being the four guys in Frank's backing band, and turning into a band with equal billing to Frank himself. His rather cynical but hilarious nickname given to him by the band is 'the product', which aptly distinguishes their roles.
“In the annals of rock and roll, there's not that many well-known established backing bands. There's E Street, there's Crazy Horse but its a delicate balance and I think its great that the guys in the band have got that now. I'm more than happy and comfortable to talk about them in interviews and introduce them on stage and I like that its got to a point where people know them by name. Fans are like 'hey it's Nigel' backstage.”
Inevitably, for a man wanting to distance himself from previous working practices in hardcore and rock bands, there has been a certain amount of “headbutting”when working on new material. “We're still learning. See, one of my reservations about Poetry of the Deed as a record is that I got overly carried away with recording with a band. I think arrangement wise it just kinda goes like that,” he says moving his hand upon an invisible horizontal conveyor belt. “Whereas Love Ire and Song and Sleep Is For the Week have a lot more peaks and troughs. I think part of the reason for that is I was like 'I've got a band in the studio! Everybody play all the time, on everything!' and I think for the next record I'm now less worried saying to a band member, 'hey, you know what? You're not playing on this one'. I feel like we're reaching an equilibrium now and I would love to look back like Springsteen at, say, Born To Run through to Born In The USA, where there's that string of great E-Street band records. I'd love to look from Poetry of the Deed through to whatever album in the same way...”
A week ago at time of writing, Frank won the Kerrang! No Half Measures award, formally the Spirit of Independence award which has seemingly been renamed specifically for him. I don't think there's many who would argue with the sentiment and, as a final example of why he deserves this recognition, Frank tackles my query on just why he considers himself an entertainer rather than an artist. “I don't think there's anything more pretentious than referring to yourself as an artist. I think other people can decide whether what you do is art. Obviously what I do is songwriting and in a broader sense I'm an entertainer. There are people who are very snobby about the term entertainer. Off the top of my head (political activist punk band and one of Frank and my favourite bands as younger men) Propagandhi said: 'It seems we're only here to entertain.' And I think 'ONLY entertain?'. See, you can tie yourself in with travelling players and vaudeville and anyone who has got up on a stage and tried to make people feel better about their life. I actually happen to think that's a very noble tradition to be a part of. So if someone else wants to describe what I do as art, that's fine I'm just not gonna get involved. It's not really for me to say. Actually, I don't think it's for anyone to say except when I'm dead, or at least, older. I think Born To Run is art and I think first of all, we can judge this more than Springsteen can and second we can judge it because it has survived the passage of time and it has become a cultural landmark, in a way. I don't wanna stand here and say I engage in art. I engage in songwriting which might cumulatively become art. I certainly think that of all the tests to establish whether something is art or not, the test of time is a pretty strong one. Townes Van Zandt was really not popular in the day but he has endured and the reason he's endured is because he was a fabulous artist. I know it sounds like a self absorbed thing to be concerned about, but first of all I don't like the connotations of the word artist because the kind of people who describe themselves as artists are cunts. But, also, I'm really bothered about reclaiming the term entertainer. I have this mental image of the old luvvie getting up to play a pantomime dame for the 700th time at the age of 75 and saying 'my public need me' and you know what, they fucking do. And its not because you're saving the world, but because everyone needs to have their mind taken off things. Life is horrible and entertainment and friends are God's compensation. Loudon Wainwright does that for me. He's a consummate entertainer. He tells jokes and tells stories and plays songs and gets the crowd on side and I really like picturing myself like him. I'd love to be Neil Young, doing stadium shows when I'm 60 years old but if I'm like Loudon, who is still just on the road and got enough of a crowd to pay his petrol and the hotel, I'm in.” I've said it before, and I'll continue to say it: this country needs Frank Turner; his band, his energy, his attitude, his guitar, his voice and his desperate poetry. Because if there's anyone in music who can inspire you to do the very best you can and disregard the bloated ambitions of wannabe rock stars, it's him.
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