“Punk rock didn’t live up to what I hoped that it could
be/And all the things that I believed with all my heart when I was
young are just coasters for beers and clean surfaces for drugs.”
Frank Turner has a point (and not just about the smooth snortable
plastic surface of Never Mind the Bollocks). Punk rock did, in
fact, fail the 27-year-old Brit, but instead of drinking and sniffing
his way into clichéd excess, Turner chose a different path. His
youth was spent cutting his teeth and shredding his larynx at the helm
of hardcore/screamo act Million Dead—unless you are a British emo
kid with Funeral for a Friend posters on your dorm room wall, you
probably have not heard of them. But Turner was left by the wayside
when the band unceremoniously splintered in 2005. Prior to the split he
had toyed with the idea of performing solo, no longer hiding beneath
the screams of modern hardcore, and pursuing a musical direction he
initially started at a very young age.
“I’ve been playing guitar and sitting around the kitchen table
singing with my friends since I was 12 years old,” Turner explains over
the phone. “One of the major differences between playing in a hardcore
band and playing a solo show is that—as much as I love
it—there’s quite a lot you can hide behind when you’re playing
hardcore. If things start going badly onstage you can either just make
loads of noise while writhing around on the floor, or you can just
blame it on the drummer. When it’s just you and the guitar, neither of
these options are available.”
Without a drummer to take the fall, Turner’s callous punk rock
persona took a bruising in his initial foray into the folk world. “I
have footage from some of those early shows. I don’t watch it very
often, it makes me sad on the inside,” he says. “I spent between a year
and 18 months on the road. I was taking the train with a bag of clothes
and a guitar case—it was terribly Woody Guthrie. Although, I’ll
tell you, the romanticism wears off pretty damn fast.”
Following his stint on the rails—and all the lumps that came
with it—Turner was quick out of the gates with a series of solo
releases, but he never quite freed himself from the dubious
side-project distinction until last year’s Love Ire & Song,
which was soon followed by his finest work, the brand new Poetry of
the Deed. Throughout the album Turner travels on a well-worn path
best traversed by the saintly actions of Joe Strummer and the
man-versus-the-world political folk of Billy Bragg. And while Turner is
so much more than the product of a pair of lofty influences, he truly
does combine the best of both: the wide-eyed hope and optimism of
Strummer with the gnashed-teeth rage and eternal heartbreak of Bragg.
Poetry opens with “Live Fast Die Old,” a ferocious
testament—”We can never sell out because we never bought
in”—that a reckless rock ‘n’ roll life can extend far beyond the
clichéd 27 years allotted by past musical icons.
The shuffling traveling song “The Road” was the subject of an overly
ambitious, if not downright insane, music video where Turner performs
24 shows in 24 hours. While the finished project is probably the most
fun you’ll ever witness in a single music video, the execution took its
toll on Turner. “I was really geared up for it to be really tough, and
then the first eight hours were a breeze.” But as the shoot dragged on,
the act of constantly swapping locations—everything from teenage
house parties, sophisticated dinner parties, and record
in-stores—began to wear on the exhausted singer. “There was one
show we turned up to and there were only three people there; two of
them blatantly didn’t want to be there and the other was a mega
fan.”
Much like those who came before him, Turner has a distinct hardwired
devotion to the act of playing and sharing music with as many people as
humanly possible and never looking at his career path as anything but
an absolute blessing. “Every time I see one of those bands who are
trying really hard to look like they’re not enjoying themselves… if
you’re not enjoying it, I’m not enjoying it either.” He pauses, before
adding, “It’s a privilege to do this job and I have little time for
people who don’t see that.”