Frank Turner interview: 'People who take pride in division freak me out' 

Singer-songwriter Frank Turner
Turning a corner: singer-songwriter Frank Turner

As the Eton-educated singer-songwriter releases a 'Best of' album, he talks to Matt Allen about his new musical direction, being a centrist, and putting drugs behind him 

Politics and arena-primed pop rarely walk hand in hand these days, but for much of his six-album career, Hampshire-born singer-songwriter Frank Turner has made a habit of blending both. Following his solo emergence in 2005, Turner’s melodic folk-punk has managed to find space at Danny Boyle’s 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and Wembley Arena while bringing protest and engaging rhetoric to the party.

Sitting in a north London, a pub pint of Coke in hand, the words “Free” and “Born” tattooed across his knuckles in gothic typeface, the 35-year-old is holding strong to his reputation: he’s currently discussing the democracy tumult of 2017.

“In a world in which we have Donald Trump and Brexit one of my central feelings is that history has returned with a vengeance,” he says. “I say this as someone who marched against the Iraq war in 2003 – for the first time in my life I feel subject to historical forces that are beyond my control. We’ve had this idyllic holiday from history and maybe we should try to have another one of those because, actually, it was pretty good.”

At first glance, Turner’s music doesn’t resemble a political call to arms. His back catalogue of heart-bruised anthems has covered the gamut of lyrical muses: breakups and breakdowns (2013’s career-high so far, Tape Deck Heart), defiance (2015's Positive Songs for Negative People), and his critically acclaimed 2011 examination of national identity, England Keep My Bones.

Throughout, his sometimes-provocative opinions have thrown him towards trouble – not least when he received death threats for expressing right-wing views in print (sample quote: "I think socialism's retarded"). “It was an eye opener to how ridiculous some people are because none of it was serious in any way,” he says. These days he’s less inclined to jump into a debate with strangers. “I’m bored of arguing with people on Twitter.”

Frank Turner
Turner performing at the Reading Festival in 2011 Credit: Simone Joyner

Meanwhile, his current position is described as an “extremist liberal – very, very liberal”, and he later admits to abstaining on the Brexit debate having found the decision too difficult. “I could see arguments on both sides,” he says. “I have zero sympathy with any kind of UKIP, xenophobic people, I’m generally very pro immigration and I like living in a liberal, open society. I can see reasons why some people had a problem with the EU. [But] the complete collapse of our political class since the vote has been a disgrace and I’m extremely worried about where we’re headed. I’m unhappy about people like Theresa May and Boris Johnson having power in our society – it doesn’t make me feel good.”  

There have been other bumps in the road. In 2007, he embarked on a 250-gigs-in-a-year slog around the UK. This effort, which took place during his early steps as a solo artist – having broken from the disbanding London four-piece, Million Dead in 2005 – was rewarding but uncomfortable. “I was engaged in an arms race with myself,” he says. Then there was his latter position as a punk dartboard owing to those mainstream successes and accolades, plus the revelation of an Eton education where he studied alongside fellow alumnus, Prince William.

Turner

“The thing that really made me laugh is people didn’t have an issue with my education until they found out where I went to school,” he says. He’s since drawn flak for the 2018 Campfire Punkrock project, an interactive show in the Forever Wild Catskill Forest Reserve made up of workshops and “jam sessions” with ticket prices reaching $1,999.

“I’m about the 50th person to do it,” he says. “It’s an existing structure I’m plugging in to and it’s going be one of 200 shows I do next year. And we’ve sold most of the tickets, so clearly some people want to go, and the people who don’t can go to 199 other gigs. That’s the end of that.”

Now his portfolio includes the soon to be released Songbook, a "best of" album charting 11 years of “arsing around with a guitar", and there are plenty of career highs to celebrate. “I’ve been shying away from ‘best of...’, that particular phraseology,” he laughs. “It’s probably guilty as charged if you do call it that, though.” Comprising the memorable cuts from a career that underpins his transformation from cultish concern to a solo artist capable of selling out four nights at London’s Roundhouse last year, this is no mere repackaging. Rather, it marks “the end of phase one”, Turner shouldering big hitters such as 2013’s Recovery with a collection of newly recorded versions of singles and album cuts, including a brittle, tender take on The Way I Tend to Be and Long Live the Queen’s souped-up guitar riffs.

Frank Turner
Turner was among many British artists featured in the Danny Boyle-directed opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London Credit: Ian Walton

Phase Two is now fast-moving into view. An as yet-untitled seventh album is currently his major work-in- progress and promises to be a “radical stylistic departure”; his melodic focus is working on beats, synths and dance rhythms. “But I’m not claiming to be The Orb, or Aphex Twin,” he says. The inspiration for this sonic lane change coincided with his reading of Rip it Up and Start Again, writer Simon Reynolds’s exhaustive retelling of the post-punk era. “That really lit a fire in me to expand my horizons. I’m aware I’m quite a traditional songwriter making quite traditional music within the canon of rock’n’roll. I’ve been thinking of that moment in the Seventies when a lot of bands embraced pop music as a weapon.”

Lyrically, Turner has also adjusted his aim. England Keep My Bones, his homespun stab at matching Bruce Springsteen’s detailed sketches on New Jersey life, spoke of the Humber, Northumberland and the Southern Downs. Elsewhere, Recovery, an intimate confessional, covered a painful break-up that led him to “strange flats in east London” where characters gave him mysterious kicks to help him numb the emotional body blows. “I’ve put drugs behind me,” he says today. For his next project, the lyrical cues of “fear, losing common ground” will loom large.

His biggest concern on Britain’s current political discourse is the unwieldy atmosphere of stubborn thinking; a lack of willingness to understand any opposing viewpoints. As a society, we appear divided along distinct battle lines: Leave or Remain; left against right; Trump versus the rest of the world; one or the other, pick your side and hold firm. Exploring a middle ground, listening to differing opinions or being Centrist in viewpoint, is suddenly an unfashionable position.

“The thing that freaks me out are the people who take pride in that division,” he says. “The idea of, ‘I couldn’t understand anyone who doesn’t agree with me.’ Aside from the inherent narcissism of that, surely you should approach every argument with at least the possibility you might be wrong? If human beings don’t resolve their differences through words, they resolve them through violence and that’s a bad thing… The alternatives [to talking] are horrendous. I’m definitely a centrist and f--- anybody who thinks that’s unfashionable.”

Frank Turner
Frank Turner in 2015

Arriving next year, Turner’s new, experimental vehicle will deliver a raft of politically poised verses. Still, his personal mood is one of positivity, regardless of his current lyrical muse: it’s not all bad, he reckons, and despite those chasms in public opinion and an overwhelming vibe of global uncertainty, he seems in a good place. London life with his girlfriend and their cat is calming. “I feel most at home in England,” he says. The day we meet he attends the Hornsey Historical Society to watch several music hall films.

He’s also found an interesting niche in the rock milieu: an artist with enough hooky acclamations to sell out cavernous venues without threatening the lofty positions held by artists such as Ed Sheeran. Turner’s most successful album, Tape Deck Heart, shifted a healthy but hardly world-shattering 200,000 copies. Not that he seems too bothered. Moving forward is what drives him.

“On a personal level I feel very excited and raring to go,” he says. “That’s very different to how I feel about politics in the world at large. But at the core of both my character and politics there is an incorrigible optimism and I do think we have the capacity to get through this. Maybe that’s staggeringly naïve of me to say, but I would hope as time goes by we’re getting better at going through these [global] moments.”

If not, Turner will have plenty more abnormal politics to wrestle against. “Arsing about with a guitar” should provide him with some emotional salve. The rest, sadly, is at the whims of those uncontrollable historical forces.

Frank Turner's Songbook is out on November 24

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