Frank Turner is not the first punk kid to have packed away his bomber jacket and picked up an acoustic guitar, and he certainly won’t be the last. What Turner is, however, is perhaps the most successful example of such a transition in the modern era – a singer-songwriter who went from playing in the corners of bars and basements to a sold-out Wembley Arena at which his hero, Billy Bragg, was his support act.
The Hampshire-bred Turner has been omnipresent throughout 2015, all in the lead-up to his excellent sixth LP, Positive Songs For Negative People.
“In a way, I feel like I still don’t know that much about my own songwriting process,” he begins. “In all the years I’ve been doing it, I think the only thing I’ve figured out is that I do most of my best writing in the shower – it’s just a nice, quiet place to think about words. My process hasn’t broken yet, so I’ve never really tried to fix it. I just tend to let songs come as they please in whatever way they choose to do so. Having said all of that, one of the major themes of this album is a sense of release. The last record that I did [2013’s Tape Deck Heart] was a very dark album, mainly concerning a break-up, about failure and fucking up my life. It was a difficult record to write and an even more difficult record to make, but I needed to do it. It helped me move forward, and that’s what led me to wanting to make this album.”
While the new record’s first single, ‘Get Better’, was received well and pleased fans with its defiant, rockier dirge, it was its follow-up ‘The Next Storm’ that truly set things off for the promotion of Positive Songs. Its music video is an ultimate worlds-colliding moment, as Turner stars alongside former WWE wrestler and soon-to-be UFC fighter Phil Brooks, better known as CM Punk.
“My friend Ryan plays in the band Off With Their Heads,” says Turner on Punk’s involvement. “He’s got a lot of friends in the wrestling world, like Daniel Bryan and CM Punk. Word filtered back that a lot of Ryan’s wrestler friends were fans of my music. I didn’t even know that much about wrestling, but Ben [Morse], who directs all of my videos, lost his shit. He immediately came up with a treatment of me stepping into the ring with a wrestler, and then we somehow ended up with CM Punk’s email address. Before we shot the video in Chicago, I had a wrestling training day. Learning how to get a running knee strike to the face is still one of the scariest things I’ve ever had happen to me!”
In addition to the imminent release of Positive Songs, Turner recently completed work on his first book. A memoir entitled The Road Beneath My Feet – so named for one of his own lyrics – the book details Turner’s various experiences since going solo after the demise of his original band, Million Dead. Although Turner admits the authorship wasn’t always an easy experience, the end result was more than gratifying.“If you’re going to sit down and write about the last seven-odd years of your life, it leads you through some pretty hellish thinking about who you are and what you’ve done,” he says. “It definitely put me in quite a reflective state of mind. It didn’t really occur to me that it would have me thinking this way, but I’m really glad that it did – I think the end result was a project that I was really happy with and I thought was really worthwhile.”
Anyone who has seen Turner in the last few years is aware he has kept a precise memory of how many shows he has played under his own name. Most recently, he clocked over to 1,700 – and that show was about as far a cry as possible from the bigger rooms Turner is used to playing these days.
“There’s this group of people that go to loads of my shows when I tour through Europe,” he explains. “German, French, Austrian… they come to maybe three-quarters of the shows I do across the entire run. One of them is a guy from Naples, and he was the only one out of the entire crew that I hadn’t played in the hometown of. I’ve not done that much touring through Italy, and Naples is way down south. It turned into a bit of a joke that one day I’d come and play in Naples, and that somehow turned into a drunken promise that I’d come and play a show at his house – and I’m a man of my word!”
Another place Turner showed up this year was so subtle that even he was unaware of it: during a scene in the all-singing blockbuster Pitch Perfect 2, a Turner poster is visible on the bedroom wall of Anna Kendrick’s character, Beca Mitchell. “I hadn’t even heard of Pitch Perfect 1, if I’m honest,” Turner laughs. “From what I understand, it was someone in set design that was a fan and somehow snuck it in underneath everyone’s nose. I still haven’t seen the film, but it’s certainly a compliment!”
Frank Turner’s Positive Songs For Negative People is out Friday August 7 through Xtra Mile/Universal.
