This interview was kind of a big deal for me. I think the world of Frank Turner and was thrilled to see him finally play in Colorado. I was sitting at my desk, listening to Love, Ire, & Song when I got an e-mail back from Frank himself. I almost fell out of my chair. If you take a peek at his website, you’ll see that Mr. Turner handles most everything himself, including an informative blog and posting in his own forums. I am, well, incredibly biased, but I think that it's pretty cool for a musician to have that kind of interaction with his fans.
If you haven’t heard of Frank Turner, go and buy his albums right now, because he’s fucking phenomenal. Well, you can finish reading this interview first, but if you live outside the UK, I advise you to get your order in soon. If you do live in the UK, make sure that you get tickets to see Frank on tour this fall. If you’re in the US, Frank will be opening for The Offspring at a few east coast shows. Go get tickets for those, too.
As I mentioned before, I was a little nervous about this interview. When I went to the car to leave for the venue, the battery was dead. Instead of just having a full on panic attack, I somehow managed to locate a taxi service that could get us there only about fifteen minutes late. Fortunately, Mr. Turner was still en route as well. This gave me time to calm down and meet one of the fantastic opening acts, Rooster Brothers. Watch this blog for more on the Rooster Brothers.
When Frank did arrive, he literally jumped out of the van and found a somewhat quiet corner of the theater to talk with me:
Tiffiny: So, what have you been doing with your free time here?
Frank: [laughs] Well, I haven’t had much free time it’s been a pretty full schedule. We did…I had a couple of days off in Austin. I did SXSW and then I was kind of all done by Friday so I had a couple of days to hang in Austin and a combination of lots of international friends of mine, lots of American friends of mine, and friends in Austin, altogether meant total unbridled chaos broke out and I actually woke up with a tattoo of Texas on my arm.
Tiffiny: Yeah, I saw that in your blog.
Frank: Yeah, that was pretty intense. That was not the intention. But I’ve got a friend from Austin who is a tattooist who thankfully doesn’t drink. He’s been kind of bugging me about doing some work on me for ages. After about fourteen hours of drinking, suddenly it was an awesome idea. So yeah, ow. That’s been my free time.
Tiffiny: Any thoughts of tattoos of Colorado? It’s a very interesting shape.
Frank: Yeah, it’s kind of square, really, isn’t it?
Tiffiny: Yeah, then you could really pretend that it was anything.
Frank: Yeah, I think I might try to put a halt to the whole getting states done while I’m wasted thing.
Tiffiny: I won’t be offended then.
Frank: Ok, but I mean it’s easy to get drunk in this town, right?
Tiffiny: Oh yeah.
Frank: It’s the mile high thing. I’ve never actually played here
before, but my sister lives in Boulder so I was in Colorado for
Christmas. I went out on the first day I was here, and jet lag plus the
altitude thing, I had two beers and was like catatonically fucked up.
Tiffiny: Where is your favorite place to play?
Frank: In the world?
Tiffiny: Yes
Frank: That’s a good question. I might have to be slightly boring and say London. London shows are the best. Just because, though it’s not strictly my hometown, it’s kind of my proxy hometown. We had a show just before Christmas there, actually, which was I think probably the best show just in terms of atmosphere. It was in a five hundred count room and they oversold it so there was about 600 people in there and it was kind of the last show of the year for everybody and it was just absolute madness. The last few songs of the set I actually just got rid of the mic and just played the guitar and had the whole crowd sing. That was pretty special.
Tiffiny: That’s really cool.
Frank: Having said that, Latvia is amazing. I’d seriously recommend gigging in that bit, it’s the best.
Tiffiny: What are some big differences for you between playing shows in the UK and shows in the US?
Frank: You kind of have a head start being English in this country because there’s so much kind of Anglophilia going on. You know what I mean, you open your mouth and say, [overemphasized accent] “Blimey Governor” and everyone’s just like, “Oh my god it’s amazing!” So yeah, I think that’s probably the main thing, well that, and again it’s kind of clichéd but the distance thing is just madness. The UK is hugely overpopulated and people won’t travel from Manchester to Liverpool for shows, which takes about twenty minutes to get there. Whereas here like today, it seemed like every corner we went around was a whole new horizon wide of empty nothingness. Its kind of mind boggling if you’re from Europe or the UK to just sort of get a handle on how vast this country is. And like west Texas. I mean, really, does the world need that much west Texas? When we were doing that drive, we drove overnight from San Antonio to Phoenix and we kept going to sleep in the back of the van and then waking up and being like, “Are we still in Texas? Yep.” Go back to sleep for a few hours then wake up, “Are we in Texas? Yeah, we’re in Texas.” It just went on and on and on.
Tiffiny: Do you ever get nervous about going on stage?
Frank: Not really. I started touring eleven years ago. I even did some gigs for a few years before then. I’ve played big shows and I’ve played small bars. No, not really. The last time I got really nervous, actually, my mum is a grammar school teacher and she asked me not even to play a gig, but do kind of a guitar demonstration afternoon for her students who are all 4-6 years old. I was pretty nervous about that because they’re a pretty unforgiving audience. But, other than that, not really.
Tiffiny: What three songs of yours are you most proud of and why?
Frank: There’s a song called I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous which I’m proud of just ‘cause I think it says something that I’ve been trying to say for a little while and it says it just right and now, having finished that, I don’t need to say that again. Do you know what I mean? And it’s also an example for me of a song where the music and lyrics fit together perfectly. So that one. There’s a song on my first record called My Kingdom for a Horse, which no one liked. I love it. I think it’s one of the best songs I ever wrote. It’s easily the most confessional song that I’ve ever written and it was a reasonably harrowing song for me to write and I felt very, very much better about life when I finished it because I felt I a really big weight off my mind. And I’m going to rather annoyingly say I’ve got a new song that I’ve finished which I’ll play tonight. It’s called Try This At Home. I’m currently very pleased with that.
Tiffiny: Who and what inspires you?
Frank: I have two heroes in life. One of them is Bruce Springsteen and one of them is Henry Rollins. Henry Rollins for the ethos and Springsteen for the music. Those are my kind of guiding lights. For music, for books, for poetry, and stuff. Philip Larkin; he’s an English poet. He’s the greatest wordsmith in the English language, in my opinion. So that kind of stuff.
Tiffiny: Tell me about some of your favorite music.
Frank: Springsteen gets a big vote from me. Particularly the older I get, the more I find myself going back again and again to Springsteen. Like finding new things and discovering albums of his that I heard the first time around and wasn’t that into kind of thing. Finding worth in them. Definitely very, very inspired by him and what he does. I have him down as one of my favorite song writers. He’s just got a way with melody that’s just kind of effortless. And the Hold Steady are one of my favorite bands. I even have a Hold Steady tattoo, which I got when I was sober so yeah that works. At SXSW I had three bands that I wanted to see and I got to see them all. So, Two Gallants, which is amazing. Do you know that band? They’re from San Francisco. They’re kind of like a country band. It’s just a guitarist and a drummer. Totally incredible, one of the best guitarists in the world, Hold Steady, and a band called the Van Pelts, they’re a band from New York who broke up about ten years ago, did a wonderful reunion show. I peed myself when I found out about it because they never toured in Europe so I never saw them live before. It’s a guy called Chris Leo; he’s Ted Leo’s brother in the band. The thing that was great about the show is that only about a hundred people were there and every one of them was obviously like so excited they were about to die about the fact that they were playing, so the atmosphere was just electric.
Tiffiny: What are you listening to right now on your music player of choice?
Frank: Actually, I got given a record a couple months ago called by a band called Frightened Rabbit.
Tiffiny: They’re like my favorite band. I cannot stop listening to them.
Frank: Yeah! Goddammit that record’s good. I’ve only got one album The Midnight Organ Fight.
Tiffiny: You should check out the first one. It’s really good.
Frank: Yeah I plan on getting that as well. But basically, yeah. It was actually an American friend who gave me the album and he was surprised that I didn’t know who they were. I’d never heard of them. I’m actually going to try and take them out on tour in the UK in December.
Tiffiny: I would have to consider getting a passport for that.
Frank: That record is so good. I literally put my mp3 player on and I try to listen to something else and just go [no]. I just think [sings the beginning of The Modern Leper]. He’s got the best Scottish accent.
Tiffiny: You make yourself very available to your listeners. Not that I don’t appreciate it, but what was your decision to do that?
Frank: Well, just because it seems to me, monologues are much less interesting to me than dialogues. I think that artwork where one person, like blaring it out to the world, and not receiving any kind of comeback on it isn’t. I don’t know why some people I just find that kind of boring. Obviously there’s a monologue element to the art form that I’ve chosen to engage in, but the thing for me is, it seems to me that it would be kind of pretentious and slightly sterile of me not to be in contact. This sort of ties in with the fact that I firmly disavow concepts, like I don’t think there’s any such thing as rock stars. I don’t like the division between performers and consumers of music, you know? When I’m not playing I go to shows and all the people who are in the crowd will rightfully take photos, or even outside of this small little clusterfuck that is music they’ll do their own creative thing. And, I don’t know, I just don’t see myself as being any different, hold myself above any people who listen to my music and so it seems like if I was trying to hide away from the people who enable me to do what I do by coming to shows and buying records and such it would be kind of like, so.
Tiffiny: What are a few things that you feel people should know about you?
Frank: I have grade two harp but I can't remember how to play it. I got grade 2 at harp when I was 12 years old, but I can't remember how to play it now.
I’m English rather than British. That is something that I spend a lot of time telling American people. It’s kind of, it’s funny, that Englishness was subsumed in Britishness for the last couple hundred years and now in the last fifty years there’s a definite kind of Scottish identity, Welsh identity, Irish identity… But, I’m very interested in English traditional music and English folk traditions. Not through any kind of exclusionary thing. I’m not trying to one up anyone else or that kind of thing, I’m just interested in my culture. It’s a commonplace thing you hear in the UK that there’s no such thing as English culture and it drives me up the wall because it’s like, yes there is, you just don’t know about it. Because it vanished, you know England was dominating all the nations around it, which has now come to pass. I’m really thinking about maybe after my next album doing a record of just traditional English songs. It’s funny in America, not everybody, but most people have some knowledge of traditional music. They’ll know Jesse James, they’ll know a couple of traditional songs When the Saints… whatever. Nobody knows traditional English songs and it’s really depressing and they’re so good as well. So I thought it would be really to fun to. And the thing is that almost all of them are a cappella, unaccompanied, as well, so I thought it would be fun for me to write my own accompaniments for them so there’s the creative angle for me. Just do stuff like Matty James and Barbara Allen classic songs that are like 400 years old and try and spread the word.
Tiffiny: What are your feelings on music piracy?
Frank: We had a massive discussion about this in the van. Basically, the old business model under which the music industry worked by, which the route through which musicians were reimbursed for their labor, was through record sales has been short-circuited by technology and there’s no point in anybody trying to pretend that technology is going to go away. Sooner or later, we’re going to reach a point where nobody actually pays for recorded music. It’s essentially coming, if it’s not here already. I actually think that the difference between private stereos and radios is essentially going to fall down, if you know what I mean. What is happening at the moment and what needs to happen is that we need to find a new way for musicians to be reimbursed for what they do. The bottom line is, that it isn’t free for me to record my albums it isn’t free for me to tour around, it isn’t free for me to get guitars, and all that kind of thing. I spend ten months a year on the road. Do you know what I mean? I can’t have another job. So my problem with the music piracy thing is when people aren’t contributing anything to it and they’re taking from it. We’re reaching a point where you won’t pay for any recorded music but you’ll pay more to go to the shows, and I think that’s fair enough, because at the end of the day, I’ve got to eat. I get very frustrated when people try to idealize and go on about the fact that copyright is bullshit and the freedom of this, that, and the other. I’m just like, “Man if you want to fucking pay my fucking rent you can have my music for free. Until that point, fuck you.” I don’t walk into a hospital and demand free treatment because I’ve had a quick think about the medical institute works and decided that it should probably be free. I don’t walk into a food store and demand free food because of my little knowledge of how the food industry works. And yet, these kids kind of come along, and go with no knowledge of what I do and the mechanics of what I do and how it all works, and go yeah it should be free I should be allowed to take whatever I want. And it’s kind of like well, that’s absolute bollocks move out of your fucking parents’ house then e-mail me back. It’s a fraught time at the moment. I’m not worried about it- there’s more demand for live music than there’s ever been before. Popular music is definitely kind of a growth industry, we just need to kind of recalibrate the way it works as a business. Hopefully it won’t take very long to pencil it out because in the meantime a lot of good people suffer. The other thing just very quickly is, I get really because everyone kind of resorts to the “Britney Spears, she’s got loads of money!” I’m not fucking talking about Britney Spears, I’m talking about the people who engineer at small recording studios, those who work independent record stores.
Tiffiny: I’ve read some of this on your website, but I really wanted to bring it up because I think people need to be reminded because they lose touch.
Frank: The thing is, at the moment, people of my generation, our generation, we kind of have some knowledge of how it used to be and have some knowledge of the justice of putting something in to it. The thing that winds me is I have a couple cousins who are like 10, 11, 12 years old who just have no concept of contributing financially to the music they enjoy. It’s just a free thing to them. I constantly have kids e-mailing me, “Can I get a photo pass for the show?” and it’s like fuck off, you just want to get in for free. I have kids coming up to the merch table all the time just trying to get free stuff off of me. It’s just like, you know, at some point you have to contribute because you’re getting something out of it.
Tiffiny: Are there any artists that you’d like to work with?
Frank: Yeah, hundreds, thousands. In terms of touring with, I’ve got a list of people as long as my arm. I’m taking Fake Problems, they’re from Florida. I’ve toured with them over here a few times. I’m finally managing to repay the favor and they’re coming out with me in the UK in October, which is great. I did the revival tour with Chuck Ragan and Tim Barry and Ben Nichols here last year, and me and Chuck are trying to put together a revival in the UK, probably for early next year, and I’m being super ambitious and trying to get Billy Bragg involved as well. Which would be stunning. I kind of have fantasies about maybe getting to record with T-Bone Burnett sometime, that would be amazing. I’m actually recording my next album with Alex Newport who did Two Gallants, At The Drive-In, Death Cab for Cutie, all that kind of stuff and he actually contacted me, which I’m very flattered about. He’s an amazing producer. I could go on. There’s a vast, vast list of people I’d like to hang out with.
Tiffiny: What are your plans for your next album?
Frank: The previous records I’ve done, we’ve done with my drummer playing drums and me playing everything else, and kind of piecing everything together slowly and meticulously, and this time around I’ve basically finally nailed it with my backing band in the UK, it’s taking a lot of time but it’s looking perfect now. So we’re going to actually spend four weeks rehearsing the album and then do the whole record in like five days, so it’s going to be more I think a band record, be a bit more rock, feel a bit more live, but the main thing is that I’m really confident about the song writing. I think it’s going to be better than the other albums that I’ve made. Actually, I feel kind of almost pregnant at this point in the cycle because we’re recording in May and I just sort of feel like I’m really worried about getting hit by a bus because the songs are basically written, but they’re not down. So it’s like a stay away from sharp objects kind of thing. And then soon as the album’s done it’s just "ahhh"... feel kind of empty. So my record’s due, the first of June the record’s going to be handed in. And basically, it’s coming out in September. I can’t talk about the details but we’re basically putting the finishing touches to a deal with the fucking coolest record label in the whole world that’s going to get the album out properly, like proper distribution and stuff all over the states, like everywhere. I have no idea when I’m going to be able to announce who it is, but when I do, you’ll see exactly what I mean.
Tiffiny: How would you describe your music?
Frank: On one hand I just call it pop music, because in the grand scheme of things pop music is what it is. At the risk of sounding a bit like a music journalist, I think the word folk and the word punk both denote the sound and the ethos. I try to incorporate elements of all of those things so folk punk. I sound like a journalist saying that.
The band touring with Frank Turner was called Look Mexico. Hopefully, you will also see more on Look Mexico in this blog. I knew little about these guys other than the one song that the venue had put up with the track information. However, I was very impressed and I hope they come through Denver again sooner rather than later. Look Mexico is compromised of a bunch of incredibly talented, good humored guys from Florida. They were very rock and roll and very entertaining. They also provided this service during Frank Turner’s set from the front row. I particularly enjoyed the fake British (English?) accents.
Frank Turner played a solo acoustic set. I enjoyed the venue very much (despite the staff being a little off putting). Though small, the Marquis Theater is well planned and allowed for an intimate set. Songs from all three albums were played as well as a couple new ones. For one of the latter mentioned, Dan’s Song, Look Mexico’s Dan Pinkman joined in on harmonica. Before playing Nashville, Tenessee, Frank claimed to have won the SXSW music festival and revealed his new tattoo to the crowd. We were also entertained by stories of evil ex-girlfriends before Sunshine State and a harrowing version of Worse Things Happen At Sea. If you are familiar with Frank Turner, you probably know that he started his career in the hardcore punk band, Million Dead. Frank manages to bring the hardcore principles (and sometimes the yelling) to folk and does it damn well. The intensity and honesty are forefront in every song. Frank did justice to Springsteen’s Thunder Road as well. During Photosynthesis, the audience was encouraged to adopt the buddy system to learn the words for a sing along. I’m not sure how many people at the Marquis were fans of Frank Turner that night, but I’m willing to bet that most people were when they left.
See more photos (click to embiggen):
Photos by phenomenal rockstar with a camera Cheryl Wilson.
Where you can find him: www.frank-turner.com
Buy his music: www.frank-turner.com/music.html
[Want to win an autographed copy of Frank's CD? Hell yeah, you do. Leave a comment here - we'll pick two of you lucky folks at random.]
