A Singer on the Brink: RRT Interviews Frank Turner

For a music geek, there's nothing more exciting than discovering an artist on the brink of stardom. We live to be the first kid on the block to unwrap a shiny, new and heretofore unknown budding star. That beautiful buzzing at the back of my brain during Frank Turner's recent set here in Fort Collins told me I was, in fact, witnessing such a moment.

Turner, 28, first came to public notice as part of the hardcore band Million Dead. But it was only after he picked up an acoustic guitar did he find his true footing, building a cult following in the UK and winning the attention of Epitaph label head Brett Gurewitz. With his British popularity growing dramatically and at light speed (highlighted by a recent Reading Festival appearance during which he led an estimated 25,000 fans on a raucous singalong) he's turned his attention to the States. Fresh from touring slots with Flogging Molly and The Gaslight Anthem, Turner is ready to hit the road again, this time supporting Social Distortion.

Turner is almost impossible to pigeonhole as a performer (although Tom Robinson and John Wesley Harding are pretty decent touchpoints) but a few things are clear: he's fabulous lyricist, leavening big ideas with self-deprecatory humor; he has a tunesmith's ear for melody and hooks; and his punk roots lend an urgency and excitement to his music that is utterly lacking from the vast majority of modern singer-songwriters.

Recently, Frank took time away from his tour preparations to answer a few questions -- including exactly what his breakthrough moment at Reading felt like:

RRT: Many of your songs present the idea of time slipping by -- of getting older and being impatient about getting on with life before it's too late. At 48, I fully grasp this, but it's unusual to hear it from someone in his 20s. Is this something you've always felt, and what drives this sentiment?

This is something I puzzle over myself. I'm 28 now, but I started writing songs about aging when I was about 21, which seems kind of ridiculous in some ways. I got started with touring and political activism pretty early, I was on the road at 16, and going to demonstrations and so on. Disillusionment with that first flush of philosophy kicked in pretty quickly and I guess it just gave me a sense that time was slipping by. I suppose it's been the central concern of my lyrics since I started doing solo material. But basically, I'm not entirely sure, haha.

RRT: Another vibe I get your work is something of an impatience with your generation. Do you feel a bit like a man out of time? Are you generally hopeful or pessimistic about how things will shake out for people now in their 20s?

I'm not sure it's specifically my generation, just some of the people around me. I'm constantly struck by the fact that we're going to die, that time is limited and so on. And hand in hand with that comes the conviction that you make your own luck in life, something that I feel I got from growing up with punk rock. There isn't much time, but anyone can do amazing things within it if you just get up off your arse and work on it. I think I'm pessimistic, in a way, but only because we have such privileges, such freedom, and people are so careless and blase about them. I have no time for fashionable armchair anti-Westernism. We're lucky, privileged people, and our lazy, selfish children risk squandering that inheritance, and it annoys me greatly. Sorry, off topic!

RRT: In "Try This At Home", you have a brilliant lyrical bit: "There's no such thing as rock stars/There's just people who make music/Some of them are just like us/And some of them are dicks." That makes me laugh whenever I hear it, and I essentially agree. But let me play devil's advocate for a minute: Isn't there something glorious about a real larger than life rock star -- a David Bowie or an in-his-prime Mick Jagger -- that can take a music fan out of his everyday existence for a few hours? Or is the concept of rock stardom outdated and deserving of the dustbin?

You know, I have to agree to some extent, for me Freddie Mercury is the perfect rock star. But here's the thing - there's a world of difference between playing that character during a performance, and just being rude to the people around you on a day to day basis. Whenever I feel myself being drawn towards that bravado, I think about sitting down for a cup of tea with that person and wondering if I'd tolerate them being inconsiderate and self-obsessed. Probably not.

RRT: This is a question directly from my 14 year old son Matt, who really loves your music: "Who were your favorite musicians when you were my age?"

When I was 14 I was just starting to move from metal to punk. So my heroes were Iron Maiden and Pantera, but I'd just started getting into stuff like Rancid, NOFX and the like, and was on the cusp of getting my first Black Flag record, which really blew everything apart for me.

RRT: Back to "Try this At Home" one more time. You write: "Because the only thing that punk rock should ever really mean/is not sitting round and waiting for the lights to go green" Can you elaborate on that a bit? Those of us who've fans of punk from the beginning have a tough time figuring out what it still means. It's hard to know whether it's now largely a fashion...a strictly defined musical genre...an attitude...an ethos... What's your definition of punk as it exists in 2010?

Part of me believes that trying to define punk is actually a very un-punk thing to do, haha. It's a contrarian ethos at heart, in some ways. I guess what that line means for me is that the central thing I take away from punk is the DIY attitude, which I'd explain as being making your own luck, as I said. It's self-reliance, not waiting for authority figures to rubber stamp what you want to do with your life. Incidentally, I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and here's a theory for you. Lester Bangs declared that rock 'n' roll was dead, killed by the money men, in the mid 1970s. And to a degree he had a point. What he didn't forsee is that rock'n'roll has an inherent tendency to self-renewal, like a snake shedding its skin. And that is what I think punk actually was - not something new, but in a way a restatement of what rock 'n' roll was supposed to be - something contrary, fleeting, exciting, dangerous, life-affirming. And as punk has ossified, as all things will, new waves of regeneration have and will continue to bubble through to the surface. So Neil Young was right - rock 'n' roll will never die, but it might call itself different things from time to time.

RRT: There's a fantastic video of you performing "The Ballad of Me and My Friends" at Reading, with a massive crowd clapping and singing along. For those of us who will never get there, can you describe what it feels like to have so many people connected to your music at one moment? What goes through your mind as you hear words you've written echoing back to you from thousands of people?

Uh, it basically feels as awesome as you'd imagine. It's pretty surreal, and I watch the footage with as much fascination as anyone else, partly because at the time I was concentrating on playing and so didn't take things in as much as I would've liked, and partly because it affirms that it did actually happen, haha. That song in particular, which was written when I was living on a sofa in a hallway and no one cared, is particularly poignant in that setting. But let's be optimists, just for now, we'll get to something like that in the USA someday. Ha!

Frank Turner Official Site

Frank Turner on All Music