Frank Turner is slowly garnering a massive cult following both in the UK and the US. Altsounds caught up with the Folk / Punk man to ask him all sorts of questions about the current world of Frank Turner.
Altsounds: How has your tour been so far?
Frank Turner: It’s been kinda surreal, really good, amazing, but this is the biggest headline tour I’ve ever done, in any kind of capacity. It’s always a bit nerve-racking stepping things up at venue level coz it’s like ‘oh my god, are we going to be playing to 100 people at a 500 person venue?’, but it’s all been packed out, sold out in most places.
The thing is I got back from America, had half a day off, we had 2 days of rehearsal then 2 days of rest and then the tour, so I was still on America time for the first few days of the tour, and as a result, I don’t really feel like I’ve touched the ground, and that it’s perhaps happening to someone else! You know, we’re playing a long set, it’s tiring and we haven’t had any days off, so it’s all kinda building up. But it’s fun!
Altsounds: Yes! So, you played loads of festivals over the summer, which one was your favourite?
Frank Turner: Can I have a first equal?
Altsounds: Yep!
Frank Turner: Reading, no, Reading and Leeds counts as one..
Altsounds: Yeah but Reading’s better…
OK we’ll say Reading. Reading was amazing. Reading’s always fun to play because it was the festival I used to go to as a kid, and it’s my favourite festival anyway, I just love it. I got to play on my friend Mike’s stage this year – Mike Davies from Radio 1. He’s a really old friend of mine, and he’s been so good to me. It was a real moment for us as friends, for me to play the stage, and the crowd reaction was just insane. That one performance has kinda kicked off everything that has happened since because Zane Lowe was there, and through him we’re all of a sudden on the Radio 1 daytime play-list. The other one was 2000 trees in Cheltenham – it’s run by some friends of mine and has been going 2 years and I’ve played both years, and I saw them last night and they told me I’m playing next year aswell! I ended up playing 4 sets over the weekend. They asked me to play an acoustic set on the first day and then a band set on the second day, which I did but I was just staggering around the camp site – I didn’t sleep coz I was just charging around, getting messed up and hanging out with friends and playing more sets around the camp site, then all of a sudden it was 9 o clock in the morning and I was like ‘ugh’.
The thing that saved me was Jim Lockie, my mate who’s a singer from Cheltenham, was like ‘Lets get in a cab and go to my house and shower and get breakfast’ and I was like ‘yes!’
Altsounds: Ahh, but you broke a cardinal rule didn’t you, washing at a festival?
Frank Turner: Ha ha you know what? All the cardinal rules at festivals? They can all fuuuuuck off! I’ve been to so many festivals, as a player and as a punter, I’m fucking 26 – I wanna sleep in a bed, and I wanna shower in the morning!
Altsounds: So… you did your festivals, then you were in America, and now you are doing this tour. And after this you are going on tour with the Levellers in December…
Frank Turner: I’m going to Europe before then..
Altsounds: … So when are you going to sleep? Do you have any plans to do that?
Frank Turner: I dunno. I’ve got a week off in November, when I’m going to go and remind my girlfriend of who I am, what I look like! Also, my sister is moving to Colorado tomorrow, so I’m going to Colorado for Christmas, because everyone else in the family is going and if I don’t go I’ll be ostracised, but it’s going to be so tiresome.
I finish tour, then I have 1 day before I have to get back on a plane to go and sleep on a floor in Colorado for 4 days. So I’ve decided as a result of this I’m going to spend New Years Eve at home, on my own, and everyone else can fuck off. I’m gonna sleep, and it’s gonna be great.
Altsounds: You’re originally from Winchester, what’s it like playing back here?
Frank Turner: Yeah it’s great. It’s funny I didn’t actually grow up in Winchester, I grew up just outside in the Meon Valley, but Winchester was my town, where I used to come and sleep in the Brook Centre because the last fucking bus home was at like 7pm. So me and my mates would come out to Winchester, get pissed, and then one of our mates brothers was a security guard at the Brook Centre, so he’d basically open a part of it and let us go sleep in there until about 7am, when we used to get the first bus back.
Wouldn’t do that again! So it’s cool, on a tour level as this they wouldn’t normally include a small venue like the one in Winchester but I like to come back, I like this place. It’s also fucking nice to be able to go home before sound check – it’s the first time I’ve been home since September. It is weird being back here in a sense because I don’t actually have that many friends in Winchester, they’ve all moved away. So I come back here and everyone expects me to have this huge guest list but it’s normally just my mum, and my sister!
Altsounds: Your single, Long Live the Queen, came out on the 20th, and went in at number 65, congratulations. How has the whole experience been for you? Releasing the single, performing the single, is it ever hard for you?
Frank Turner: There is an element of disconnect whenever I play that song, to tell the truth, although, actually, I must say last night, I had a bit of a moment playing that, because that circle of my friends were all there, and the only person missing was Lex.
You know, every single London Million Dead show, or show of mine when she was still with us, that whole crowd would be there, and that whole crowd was there, apart from Lex. There was definitely a gap in the line up. But you know, one has to emotionally disconnect to a certain degree, because I do this every night. And not just for that song, every song I have to back off a bit, you’ve got to, or else you’d go totally insane. I mean not totally, it’s not like I’m thinking about shopping or anything, but yeah, you’ve gotta give yourself a bit of room. I was very very very nervous about the song when I finished it, because I was very worried about friends or family being in any way.... offended is probably too strong a word, but just not being cool with it somehow.
So I did a rough demo and got approvals off people basically. I’m very pleased to say that Lex’s mum and kids have been fucking great, really into it and everything. The 2 kids in the video are actually Lex’s kids, that’s why they’re in the vid. Little Kyuss writing at the back and he wrote ‘Queem’ on the first take so we had to do it again! The thing that sort of validates it all for me, besides the fund raising aspect, it’s just I know that if Lex was with us now, no, if Lex exists in some form or another now, which I firmly believes she doesn’t because I’m an atheist, but if she does I’m sure she finds the whole thing hilarious, like she’d cackle, she’d laugh, and go ‘fucking hell'! if she knew that I was reaching new heights of success on the back of the single, she’d be like ‘too fucking right!’, because that’s just kinda what she was like.
Altsounds: I was listening to Radio 1 yesterday, and Greg James was filling in for Scott Mills and he said you were his record of the week this week…
Frank Turner: Did he play the jingle?
Altsounds: He did yeah it was wicked!
Frank Turner: Yeah we did that yesterday morning!
Altsounds; I was wondering when you did that!
Frank Turner: Yeah I got the email yesterday morning, I was in the office, and I was there with Barbs. Barbs is my guitar tech and he is a man amongst men, he’s great. This is the first tour he’s done with us as a band, though I’ve known him for years. First morning after the first show, he came out of the travel lodge holding a bottle of whisky going ‘I had a battle with alcohol last night and I won’. Anyway, we have a band that has existed in theory for many years but we finally started recording some songs, and we’re called ‘In it for the Tank’, basically the idea is we get a massive record deal, and buy a tank, and then fight the record label when they try and get us to record some songs, and we’ll win because we’ve got a tank. We’ve written some songs and there’s a video on the website, of me and Barbs doing ‘Hungry’ and ‘Mmm’.
We wrote a new one yesterday called ‘Stuff with Meat’, which is about how various things would be better if they were stuffed with meat. So anyway, me and him are sat in the office and I get this email through, a slightly embarrassed email from my label saying ‘they want you to do a jingle, I know it sounds a bit gay but if you want do it..’ and me and Barbs looked at each other and were like ‘we’re on the case!’ We timed it, it took 25 minutes from receiving the email to finishing recording it, we wrote it there and then. We were just going through things that rhymed with James…
Altsounds: At least it was a good name for rhyming..
Frank Turner: Yeah I’m very pleased it wasn’t like Jo Whiley or something - that could have got complicated. I’m really pleased he actually played it.
Altsounds: He loved it! Said it was the best one he ever had. So from all this, the Frank love is ever increasing.
Frank Turner: Yeah, it’s a strange time.
Altsounds: Strange good though?
Frank Turner: Yeah definitely. You know, I’m an ambitious person, I want to sell out large venues, sell thousands of records, be revered and become a national treasure like Morrissey.
Altsounds: Have a bath full of champagne, things like that?
Frank Turner: Yes, and have a massive cocaine problem, and womanise my way through the cast of every soap in the UK, and whatever else comes along with all that shit. And afterwards incidentally when I’ve been through rehab but I’ve still got loads of money, you know I’m going to get back into Games Workshop, that’s my plan. I was really into it as a kid, but then I sold all my Games Workshop and bought a guitar.
Altsounds: I’d like to think of you on VH1’s where are they now, you’re just sort of just sitting in Winchester in your rocking chair....
Frank Turner: Well I quite like the idea of it being more along the lines of Kevin Shields, from My Bloody Valentine, who’s been working on an album for some time. Or Axel Rose for that matter. Announce I’m going back into the studio, and I’ll be this great mystic figure of the English music scene, whom everyone is waiting for and whom everyone thinks I’m in the studio going ‘oh god, go no!’ and firing producers and hiring people and stuff, when actually I’ll just be playing Games Workshop going ‘wicked!’. That’s the plan.
Altsounds: Do you like to play World of Warcraft? I’ve got a few friends who are a bit too into that.
Frank Turner: No no no.
Altsounds; Don’t start, it’ll end your music career.
Frank Turner: I like computers, but when it comes to fantasy gaming, I want little plastic models, and I want them now.
Altsounds: Do you have some sort of name for yourself?
Frank Turner: No, I was spectacularly bad at it as well. I think that’s one of the reasons I want to get back into it. My friend Seb, me and him when we were kids used to play it all the time… this is a digression, and it’s completely nerdy, but I’ve got to explain. Basically I was Undead, right, and one of the rules is your General in Undead is a warlock who’s casts a spell that holds all the zombies and if he gets killed your whole army disappears so you’ve got to protect him.
Conversely, Seb was Goblins. Goblins have these things called doom divers which are basically kamikaze, they fire little dudes, and they land, and then they totally kill you. He’d basically get 10 doom divers in the first go, and just kill my General, and then my army would disappear, then I’d go ‘ahhh no!’, and then we’d set up again, and he’d do the same thing again. Funny thing is it takes about 2 hours to set up a game. But he would never stop finding it funny. I used to get really upset – I was about 8 though.
Altsounds: When I first heard Long Live the Queen, I actually did a small cry, which was quite embarrassing as I was on the tube at the time! But I find the same with all of your lyrics, they’re very honest and very real, and I’m sure you hear this a lot. It must be really amazing to sing all your lyrics and have so many people connect to them.
Frank Turner: Yes, it’s really gratifying. I spend fucking ages on them! It’s funny, I spend so long kicking around pronouns and tenses, they’re my big thing, changing a past to a present tense, it just takes forever. The new song, which we’ll play tonight, there’s one section of that song that’s currently on it’s 4,000 draft, and it’s not done yet. It’s pissing me off a lot, because everything has to work, and fit, and this line is good, and this other line is good, but getting from one to the other is the problem.
Altsounds: So it’s a long process for you with you lyrics?
Frank Turner: Yes, it’s a long process and it’s one I spend ages on so yes, it’s very gratifying when people care, and get it, and all the rest of it. There was a great thread on my forum the other day about misheard lyrics, which I found quite funny, but also quite annoying as I think ‘read the fucking lyrics!’. Plus it’s also something since the first Million Dead record, Joe Gibb produced it and he made me concentrate on diction because he was like ‘your lyrics are great, but I can’t understand a word you’re saying’. So we spent ages on the vocals on that album, doing them again and again, making sure I pronounced my words properly and I’m really pleased because it’s something I try and do live, and on the album. Unless you’re playing something like death metal, you’re singing something and you want it to be understood.
Altsounds: I find it strange that people don’t understand your lyrics because you have very good diction!
Frank Turner: Well it’s just stuff like there’s a line in ‘Reasons not to be an Idiot’, the popular consensus is that it’s actually ‘invisible llama’, rather than ‘invisible armour’ – so there’s all these people making up T-shirts with a dotted outline of a llama on them. There’s a line in ‘Better Half’ that says ‘I just cannot find her address’, but somebody said they thought it was ‘a dress’, and that it was a really shit lyric until he read the lyric sheet and got it.
Altsounds: So, bit of a generic question, but what’s your favourite thing about playing live?
Frank Turner: That’s actually quite a good question and not one I get asked very often. OK, I’m going to get philosophical. For me, the highest thing that music can achieve is empathy.
Art is about empathy.
Art is about letting people know that the awful terrible experience that is being alive is an experience that is being shared and suffered by other people to. That’s the point of art, if you ask me. So the greatest achievement, live for me is when you’ve got a whole room of people singing, and it ceases to be important who is on the stage and who isn’t. I’m turned off by the whole ego, the whole traditional rock cliché – the stars and the audience – I don’t accept that that barrier is genuine.
So when you’ve got a whole room of people singing, and at the end of the set we get everyone on the tour up on stage for the last songs and so it becomes a very collective experience and for me, that’s the best part of playing live.
Altsounds: So what is going on with you in the US at the moment?
Frank Turner: Love, Ire and Song is now out in the States, I did the Revival Tour with Chuck Regan which was great. I’m still basically introducing myself over there and playing catch up release wise. Vinnie from Less than Jake is putting out a vinyl record which is hopefully going to make a big difference. I think I’ll be going over there a fair amount in the next few years, which is cool, I really like touring America it’s great. The American cities are tedious but American people are lovely and the American countryside/wilderness is phenomenal.
Altsounds: Who was your favourite discovery of 2008? Old or new band.
Frank Turner: The Dawn Chorus, who are a band from Fareham. They supported me at a show and they were fucking great, and I’m going to take them on tour with me next year. They gave me their record at the end of the show and I basically listened to it on repeat for about a month. I told them and I really don’t think they believed me. They're all fans of what I do, and I mailed them being such a fan boy, saying 'god you're fucking great'. I dunno whether they though I was taking the piss. But yeah, they're great - they rule.
Altsounds: Album of the year?
Frank Turner: Future of the Left. I've done a few festivals with them. I've known Falkous and Kelson for a while now. Falkous used to be in McClusky, and Kelson was in Jarcrew. They're from Wales and they released a record called Curses this year. McClusky were the best fucking band in the whole fucking world, end of. Thankfully, Future of the Left are as good. Falkous is the most terminally sarcastic man in the entire universe. First McClusky album was called ‘My Pain and Sadness is More Sad and Painful than Yours’, the second was called ‘McClusky do Dallas’, and the third record was called ‘The Difference Between Me and You is I'm Not on Fire’. So Future of the Left are as good as I hoped they would be - the first track of the album is 'Violence Solves Everything' - it's just brilliant. Kelson used to be in Jarcrew who are totally amazing as well.
They're great live because Falkous just doesn't give a fuck. They played right after me at a festival, so I said 'you guys have got to stick around, best fucking band in the UK coming up next’, and Falkous comes onstage and says 'I wanna say thanks to Frank for the shout-out. I would say thanks to you guys but you haven't done anything yet. Look at this fuck fest - I'm going to dedicate this song to the Levellers, because they're the godfathers of this mud stained shit pit. I fucking hate the Levellers'. Which I must say I disagree with them on - I love the Levellers.
Falkous is a good guy, he's not one to cross. There was a McClusky show a few years ago and me and a friend went. He plays with a weird string alignment on his guitar, he has like 2 strings missing. Me and my friend were daring each other to go up and ask him if he nicked the idea from the Presidents of the United States of America, because he'd probably punch you.
Altsounds: So that must be cool, a band like the Levellers who I’m guessing you really loved when you were growing up, and you're now going on tour with them.
Frank Turner: And possibly even writing songs for them...
Altsounds: That's awesome.
Frank Turner: Yeah it's fucking insane. My sister is spitting with rage about the whole thing - she moves to Colorado tomorrow so she's not going to see me on the Levellers tour, and she loves them.
Altsounds: Plans for the future? Do you have any plans to go back to your more hardcore roots ala Million Dead?
Frank Turner: Ben and I (drummer in Million Dead) have been kicking a few ideas around - maybe just doing an EP or a mini album of hardcore stuff. The point would be to prove to the world that some hardcore bands at the moment, who shall remain nameless, are terribly, terribly pedestrian, and that hardcore when done right is much better. The hardcore that I love and I grew up with pisses on that middle-of-the-road, NME friendly hardcore shit.
Hardcore should make you fucking scared to be at the gig, hardcore should fucking rip the ears out of your head when you put it on. When did hardcore become about fucking eyeliner? I remember going to see I Hate God play at the Underworld, probably about 7 years ago. The singer came on in nothing but a pair of jeans, already covered in his own blood, with no explanation of what was going on, and then halfway through the set smashed all of the teeth out of an audience members mouth, because he spat at him.
So he just picked up his mic stand and knocked all the guys teeth out. The security guards were too scared to do anything about it so they basically just got the guy out of the pit and took him to hospital. It was just absolute fucking grinding chaos from start to finish. I remember seeing Botch play and utterly destroying the room, I remember Dillinger Escpae Plans guitarist just walking, looking straight ahead, walking over the crowd at their first show. We tried to do it with Million Dead - Tom would jump off the monitor, arms out, guitar on his back and just lands, strings down in the crowd, and just go fucking crazy.
That's what hardcore is about.
If I do a hardcore band I want to do it properly, so if me and Ben do this, we're gonna make it extremely fucked up, and heavy, fast, and violent. If you're not going to do that, then fuck it, play folk music.
Altsounds: Lastly, please use this opportunity to shamelessly promote yourself!
Frank Turner: I'm on tour forever, everywhere, and I have records for sale!
Download the single, Long Live the Queen -
Frank Turner - Long Live The Queen MP3 Downloads - 7digital
http://www.myspace.com/frankturner
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Interview with Chris T-T | 30th October 2008
| Features 
Interview with Frank Turner - 30th October 2008
