Interesting fact: the world record for most gigs in different cities in one day is currently held by American singer-songwriter Hunter Hayes, who travelled across the state of New England on May 10th 2014 to hit the milestone over 24 hours.
As you may have read in the press this week, next month our very own Frank Turner is going to attempt to smash that record, with 15 shows across England on May 4th to 5th (fortunately, for him and the punters, the next Bank Holiday). When speaking to CLASH last week, it’s fair to say the musician has mixed feelings about the prospect.
“It’s going to be an horrendous fucking nightmare, but it was my idea and therefore it’s my fault, goddammit.”
“It’s worth noting I did 24 shows in 24 hours once, but that was all in London and the current record is 10 shows in different cities,” he explains. “Free Now – the cab company – are helping out and providing transport which is very good of them. They do a lot of work for the Music Venue Trust as well, which is great.”
“Basically, I’m going to play half hour solo sets, 15 of them, and drive from Liverpool to Southampton, via Chesterfield and Leamington Spa and that kind of thing,” he continues. “When we did the 24 shows in 24 hours, I started at 7pm, and I got about three shows in and said, ‘We’ve made a huge mistake, why didn’t we start at mid-day?’ So, we are starting at mid-day on this one. It’s going to suck in the middle!”
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As ever, Frank Turner is refreshingly – if disarmingly – honest about the true intentions behind the exercise: ‘It is a promotional tool for myself first and foremost, but I’m hoping it has some peripheral benefits.’
“It’s nice that every venue is a grassroots music, Music Venue Trust-endorsed venue. Every store that’s participating is an independent record store that’s local to the venue. It’s not confirmed yet, but I’m attempting to get an unsigned act to open each show too, which will be really cool. There is a fair amount of community building, I suppose, around the venture. But I’m also going to hate myself at the end, so it’s going to be great.”
“Raising awareness is a big part of it, but also, it’s not going to suck for these venues to have a couple of hours of people buying drinks at the bar. Because I’ve done my fair share of shows for these venues, I always say: take a flyer on your way out and take a punt on a show. Buy a ticket for a show where you don’t know who it is. Fuck it man, the worst thing that’s going to happen is you’ll see the worst band of all time, and you and your mates can have a laugh. I don’t mean to be cruel, but you know! If – for the price of one more pint – you do your drinking at an independent music venue, why not? In order to sustain these spaces for our culture to grow and develop in the way it has done in the past. All the usual bumf about independent venues, insert here!”
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Your interviewer could talk to Turner all day about the issues facing independent venues right now, but those problems are well documented, and a cursory Google will give you all the facts, as well as his opinion on it. We’re here to talk about his music, and the self-promotion he refers to is a component of the promotion for his forthcoming tenth album, ‘Undefeated’. If the title (more of which later) wasn’t defiant enough, the opening line – from recent single ‘Do One’, hammers the points home: ‘Some people are just going to hate you’.
“First of all,” says Turner of the lyric, “It’s my experience of life. There’s a certain type of person – largely on Twitter – and it’s long been apparent to me that there is literally nothing I can do that would assuage this person. Therefore, it’s a fucking waste of my time trying.”
“I’d love to say that I was a bit more John Lydon about this, not giving a fuck, but that’s just not true. I do care, I sort of wish I didn’t, but I do. It’s been a lesson hard learned for me. That’s my specific experience of what I’m talking about, but it’s not a terrible lesson to learn in general. My mum – God bless her – she told me on her 70th birthday, ‘I’ve decided I don’t care what people think about me.’ I was just like, ‘Now? Holy fuck!’ But it is true; you shouldn’t waste your fucking energy caring about it. Like many of the normative statements I make in my lyrics, it’s primarily at myself. Stop caring and move on!”
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Another lyric leaps out, from ‘No Thank You For The Music’: ‘I don’t want to be in your gang.’ “There are ghostly overtones to that lyric which I suspect people can get,” Turner explains, before giving Clash a bit more context. “Quite specifically that song – although there a number of songs about this – it’s about the music business and my experience of it.”
“I was nominated for an award for the livestreams that I did (during lockdown), raising money for independent music venues. I went down to the ceremony, and I kind of knew I wasn’t going to win. My experience of these things is that if you’re going to win, they sort of tell you. I don’t really care per se, but in the event the award was given to a major label artist who had raised the most amount of money for themselves.”
“They went up on stage, and everyone hugged and cried, thanking Jesus, and I just remember thinking to myself, ‘It’s not that I necessarily want to set these people’s houses on fire, but these are not my people. I’m in the wrong fucking room.’ Good luck to you, but I don’t want to be here right now.”
“It was a usefully clarifying moment for me: Fuck these people, I don’t want to be here, I’m gonna go and find my people and hang out with them, because we have a system of ethics and values in common, and that works for me.”
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Speaking of the lockdown, one track (‘Pandemic PTSD’) addresses the collective trauma we went through in 2020/21 yet – presumably in a desperate attempt to move on – no-one really discusses four years on. Frank Turner is different, addressing the subject head on: “I made a record during the pandemic and didn’t discuss the pandemic because it was a bit much. There’s many reasons for this, like a 24-hour news cycle, by which I mean there was moment when it was like, ‘and now we’re going to talk about Ukraine.’ And of course, you should talk about Ukraine, but it was like: really…?”
“Genuinely, people stopped caring about COVID restrictions at shows when the news cycle moved on, in a way that fucking infuriated me. Either this matters, or it doesn’t matter, do you know what I mean? A big part of the reason for this was the fatigue of the lockdown years. Constant fucking bombardment of ultimately, not especially important information. We were all glued to the news because we were stuck inside, and it was a relief to move away from that, of course.”
“This is an issue that’s much broader than the music industry,” he continues, “But the music industry is something I can speak with some small degree of knowledge about. All of the damage to independent venues, touring companies, crew people, life savings, people leaving the industry and taking their skillsets with them, debt-incurred…. all this stuff that I’ve done ten million interviews about, is STILL THERE! It didn’t go away because BBC News stopped covering it. But I have friends who are teachers who speak about the fact there’s a lost generation. A bunch of kids who stopped going to school in 2020 and have not gone back. No-one’s really doing anything about it, and it’s like, what the fuck?”
“I don’t really want to get into economics… but we have inflation because of the lockdowns. It’s not a complicated equation. We turned the economy off and on again several times, pumped a load of money into it and that’s why we have inflation. I don’t know what the solution to that is – and it’s not my job to have solutions to those economic problems – but there’s all shit going on, and there seems to be a reticence to discuss it. In some ways, I understand that because, if we are talking about Trauma, that is often a thing that people shy away from and you have to be careful.”
“Incidentally, my wife’s a psychotherapist and I got in trouble for writing that song. ‘You know PTSD is a technical term and you shouldn’t use it flippantly or conversationally?’ She went out for a bit, and I grabbed her psychology dictionary and looked up the definition of PTSD and realised I could fit into the bridge of the song, so it’s word-for-word the definition of it! She came home and heard me doing this, and said: That’s not what I fucking meant!”
“Anyway, to the extent a song does anything like this, I won’t keep calm and carry on until it’s OK to admit I don’t know how to feel about the shit and that we went through, and it was kind of a big deal. I’m sure everybody has this, but there are moments when I’m walking down a high street and I go, ‘Fuck, I spent two years inside my house.’ It’s so insane and out of time, and I do think that we could benefit from talking about it more.”
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As you may have noticed, once Turner is engaged with a subject, it’s hard to get him away from it. His passion when he speaks is palpable, even over Zoom, and the lockdown informed much of ‘Undefeated’. Case in point: for the first time in his career, the album is self-produced, something Turner wouldn’t have been confident in doing five years ago, as he explains: “I produced this record myself and I’ve never produced my own record before… because I started investigating being a producer with the lockdown. It was my ‘Please Don’t Go Mad’ project!”
“I moved to Essex and built a studio – and that’s a very short version of the last four years, or whatever – and my initial intention was only to produce other people. I figured I’d work with a producer on my own stuff, but after three years of producing younger, newer bands who are local to where I live… we were thinking of producers I could work with and I just said: I can do it.”
“I didn’t mix it myself, and I think that’s quite important (but) with every passing record I’ve made, I’ve demoed in more depth. For my first few records, I didn’t really know what demoing was and I didn’t really see the point and couldn’t afford to do it! But in recent years, partly aided by the increase in technology… we can multitrack off our monitor desk in a soundcheck these days, which was not an option ten years ago. By the time we get into the studio these days, my arrangements are so tightly worked out with my band. That’s not to say we’ll work that with every record; there’s part of me that wants to take a bunch of half-written songs to Nigel Godrich and see what happens. But that’s not this record.”
“The business of producing other bands has been a huge influence on this record. There’s a certain point in the lifestyle of any ‘rock’ musician, when they buy a leather jacket and start announcing prophetically that rock music has run out of ideas. What they’ve done there is confuse themselves with rock music. I have found the business of being a producer for younger and newer bands… it’s so cool to help a band realise their creative vision, and I enjoy the technical side of it as well. But also, it’s completely restorative for me as a writer. It knocks you out of your reverie: ‘Oh yeah, rock and roll is fucking great.’ I think that’s bled through into my own writing.”
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Something else traumatic happened during the pandemic: Frank Turner, the voice of youthful punk for several decades, turned 40. “I barely remember turning 30 because I was busy and I didn’t give a fuck,” he explains of the milestone. “I have friends who were panicked about turning 30 and I was like, whatever. Both inherently and professionally, I’m quite a busy person. I like to be charging round doing stuff all the time.”
“They brought in a new lockdown the day after my 40th birthday, they announced they were doing it which meant I had a party (arranged) and everyone cancelled, so I stayed at home and watched Reeves & Mortimer DVDs which, I should specify, was an act of great charity on my wife’s part. She fucking hates Vic & Bob and I fucking love them, I have a tattoo of their faces on my leg. They’re my all-time favourites.”
“Anyway, I was getting a little petty about that, shall we say,” he admits. “I do also think your forties feel less punk than your thirties. I’m aware that we live in a world that has quite a lot of punk-rock dinosaurs in it now. In a way that’s quite funny, if you re-read Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming and the iconoclasm of 1977 and you’ve got The Damned still on tour!”
“But there’s definitely – in a way that’s new for me – a distinct generation of punk bands around. I think it’s great and I’m really excited – to the extent that anyone cares about me – about the state of punk rock right now. There’s so many great new bands: Gen and the Degenerates, the Meffs… there’s so many great fucking punk bands coming out right now, it’s an exciting time. But I played a bunch of punk-rock festivals the last couple of summers and it’s like, ‘Oh, OK.’ There is clear water between them and me. We all hang out and it’s totally fine but I horrify people by telling them I toured in the nineties. Or indeed, in the 20th century, I enjoy that one!”
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“Overall, I feel that my job as a writer at this point in my life is to find a way to embrace it. There’s a certain type of band – who shall remain nameless – who put out a new song and it’s about high school. You’re in your fucking fifties man, that’s some creepy shit! Stop it! Not least because it just feels like the marketing team told them that was the demographic to aim for. It’s just fucking gross.”
“By contrast, I’ve always loved Loudon Wainwright III and what I love about him is that he writes about different phases of life. I think the same is true of The National and The Hold Steady. I want to write about this stuff as honestly as I can, so that’s what I’m going to do. In life, things may not be your fault but they’re your problem, so you’ve got to find a way of dealing with it. And to be more heavier for a second, my wife always says that getting old is getting lucky, because there is one alternative and it sucks. I think it is important to remember that.”
Undefeated, you might say. “It came from lots of places,” Turner explains of the album title, “but I was watching Raging Bull and Robert DeNiro as Jake LaMotta. I like the word because it doesn’t necessarily imply that you’re the champion. It doesn’t mean you’re the greatest and you’ve beaten everybody else, but it means that no fucker has knocked you over yet. I like that, and it’s kind of how I feel.”
“I don’t want to be especially ‘woe is me’ about my life, but there have been ups and downs in time. Some of those downs are entirely self-inflicted and some of them are to do with the fickleness of the music industry and all the rest of it. But ultimately, to make a tenth record… it’s 26 years my first tour and my first solo show. I didn’t win a gold in the Olympics, but it’s also not a small thing. I’ve seen a lot of other people come and go in my time, and quite a lot of those people had a lot of money invested in them at the beginning than I’ve ever seen in my career, and they crashed and burn. I’m now at a point in my life where I just slightly sit back and nod.”
“It is something to survive for so long in this industry. It’s not the most important thing in the world, but it’s important to me.”
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Frank Turner will release new album ‘Undefeated’ on May 3rd. For all tour dates, visit his website.
Words: Richard Bowes // @rbmusicwriter
Photo Credit: Lukas Rauch
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