The history between Frank Turner and the city of Boston is a long road filled with a number of career highlights and milestones. It’s to the point where it’s almost the perfect love story: Boston loves Turner, and Turner loves Boston right back, as made evident by some of his most energetic and memorable shows taking place within the confines of the city, including his appearance at Boston Calling in 2014. Now, with 10 years, five more albums and hundreds more shows to his credit, the eclectically inspired English punk vet returned to the festival to unleash a new dose of “fuck yous” and fury as part of Saturday’s festivities, and to celebrate, along with the New England faction of his loyal and enthusiastic fanbase, the release of his latest album, Undefeated.
Vanyaland had the chance to catch up with Turner ahead of show #2884 in front of what proved to be a lively festival crowd to talk about that dirty water love affair, the new record, and being completely invested in bringing his best to the stage, regardless of the size of the room.
Check it out below, scan out full Frank Turner & The Sleeping Souls gallery from Saturday’s performance, and keep it locked here and Instagram for our ongoing coverage all weekend long.
Jason Greenough: Hey Frank, it’s a pleasure to see you back at Boston Calling, and it’s good to catch up. How does it feel to be back after 10 years?
Frank Turner: I hadn’t realized it’s been 10 years until someone told me just now, and I was like ‘fuck!’ but it’s very nice to be back.
For sure! There’s been a lot of growth over the past 10 years, for both the festival and yourself. With that in mind, what’s the vibe from that perspective?
It feels good. I am aware of how fickle of a business this is, and if you look at the lineup from 2014 and see how many people are still doing these festivals, now I don’t want this to sound like bravado, but it’s going to sound a little bravado, and this goes along with what the new record is all about, but I’m sort of pleasantly surprised and also proud to still be on my feet. You know what I mean? It’s certainly not the easiest thing to do in the world after this amount of time, so I feel pretty good about it. I’m at a point in my career where I’m definitely considered a veteran, and it’s fun wandering around here and, it’s happened a few times already, where bands I’ve never heard of have told me they grew up with my music, and that’s a fucking wonderful thing to hear. Then I tell them ‘I just put out a new record, by the way, motherfuckers’ [laughs]. It’s a nice thing to think about.
Right on. This return to Boston was kicked off by one of your, I suppose, customary late shows at Big Night Live. How’s the energy level today after that?
It’ll all be alright. I mean, I’m pretty fucking tired right now, as we’ve been on the go endlessly since the start of February. We put out the record earlier this month, then started the tour, like, four days later, then came out here on Tuesday, and now we’re here. I played two shows on Friday, one in Philly and one in Boston, and we’re still on UK time, so going on stage at midnight was rough. It’s, like, five in the morning in my head, but it was fun. We had a good show, and this one will be fun too.
Tour life, broadly, is interesting. Once you get into the swing of it, you kind of just hibernate all day because there’s only an hour or two where you have to shine, and the rest of the day doesn’t really matter that much, or you can at least think about it that way if you want to, and I actually find that to be a useful discipline in life. You can do whatever the fuck you want, but you have to not suck once nine o’clock rolls around, and it’s really a focus in life.
Touching on that, with doing what you want but not sucking at it, you’ve gone from playing a room that fits 2000 people to a festival setting less 24 hours later. Is there anything that goes into that, mentally, to bring it in both of those settings? Or is there no real difference in approach for you?
I always try to bring the same energy. There was a moment in my life when I first started playing arena shows in the UK where I felt like I should start switching up everything I had been doing, but then I didn’t want to because, ultimately, I had only gotten to that point by doing a certain level of show that people enjoy. I mean, there are better reasons to switch it up if you want to do that, and there are small things that you have to tweak, like speaking slower in a larger setting like this because of the echo, because if you just ramble away like you do in a small club, no one will hear a fucking word you’re saying. And then of course, you want to try and connect with people further back and make everyone feel included, but broadly speaking, I’m doing much of the same thing.
We love to see that, man. Now, this year’s lineup is quite an eclectic one, with a lot of pop and country-heavy inspirations, and in a lot of ways, your music spans a wide spectrum itself. What’s the mindset when preparing for those types of crowds?
That’s a very interesting question. I think one way of describing what we’re talking about is, well, the root word for it is ‘pandering.’ Like, how much do you tailor what you do for your expected audience? I go back and forth with that. Like, we’ve toured with Jason Isbell, and I did play a set that was a bit more leaning into that crowd, and it was kind of hilarious because on our first night doing it, people were coming up to us and telling us how heavy and energetic we were, and I was like ‘you should see us play the heavy songs’. [laughs] But right now, I’m kind of in a ‘fuck it’ mood, where I’m going to do what I want to do and you can like it or leave it.
It becomes didactic in a way, where you’re almost teaching the audience, and explaining that you may not have seen a show like this before, but here’s how it goes. Broadly speaking in my career, there’s definitely been a vibe where, maybe ‘gimmick’ would be an unkind word, but it’s one of my facets, after growing up going to see bands like Sick Of It All, and The Chariot, and Dillinger Escape Plan, where I work with that approach to a live show where it’s just utterly physical and throwing yourself around the stage, going completely bananas, and then coming off stage feeling like you’re having a heart attack. If you take that kind of performance angle, and apply it to folk rock, folk punk or whatever you want to call it, it tends to shock people in a good way. It gets people going ‘Jesus fucking Christ, man! I’ve never seen a band as interesting as you!’ and that’s when I say ‘oh, there are plenty, but they just tend to be in different genres.’
From a viewer’s perspective, it’s been cool to see that consistently be your approach over the years. The first time I caught you on stage was on St. Patrick’s Day in Lowell with Dropkick Murphys in 2012, and that was very apparent to me from the jump.
Oh fuck yeah, I remember that very well. Two shows in one day. I was very tired, but it was a great day, and because it was the last day of the tour, we pushed really hard to sell every piece of merch we had with us.
Thinking back through the years, from those shows with Dropkicks, to your first Boston Calling, then the Royale shows in 2018, and Lost Evenings at House of Blues, all the way to now, how does the history you’ve had with this city play into the emotion and excitement when you return?
It’s to the point where you can breathe out a bit when you see a Boston show on the schedule, because you just know it’s going to be good. It’s different when you see a date in Montana, because then you’re like ‘well fuck, how is that gonna go?’
I’ve been very welcomed by Boston, and I think partly, it’s because the city has a history of being kind of adoptive to UK music over the years, going way back to the ’60s with Van Morrison and all those artists. I mean, fuck, man. We’ve played St. Patrick’s Day with Dropkick Murphys. It’s like being handed the keys to the city. Also, for a long time, we had a lock-up in Boston that had our touring gear in it, but I’m sad to report it has since moved for logistic reasons [laughs]. But because of that, for the longest time, we always flew into Boston to start American tours regardless of where the first show was. It got to the point where the passport control guys at Logan knew my name, and that’s nice to hear after feeling totally fucked after an eight-hour flight.
I can only imagine how warm that has to feel. Now, going back to the eclectic nature of this year’s lineup. If we’re talking different inspirations, you’ve got plenty on your new album Undefeated. I’ve listened to this album on repeat since it dropped, with a special shout out for ‘Never Mind The Back Problems.’ Of course, you’ve already worked some of these songs into your set over the last few months, but how does it feel bringing this batch of songs out into a live setting now that the record is officially out there?
I’m really stoked on it. It’s the first album we’ve recorded with Callum [Green], our new drummer, and he’s the fucking best drummer in the whole universe. He brings a new drive and energy, he’s disgustingly young, and it makes the rest of us push a bit harder, which is nice energy to have in the band.
But yes, I’m very pleased with these new songs, and we are playing a very new song-heavy set for the headline shows so far, and there are arguments for and against that, but like, fuck it. It’s my new record, and I have to play it for you. I mean, we always play the old songs at the end, and we drop a rarity in there too, but it’s been fun playing the new stuff. Like the song ‘Ceasefire,’ which is one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written, and we’ve played it twice, and it almost brought the house down at Big Night Live, so it made me feel really good about it.
Obviously, there has always been a lot of emotion felt through your work, but with these new songs, is there any added emotion to them now that crowds are already singing them back to you?
It’s a strange thing. I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s more emotion, but another favorite song of mine from this new record, and I know you’re not supposed to have favorites, but ‘Somewhere In Between’ is the most starkly raw song I’ve ever written in my whole life, but intentionally so, and there’s definitely a moment where I’m introducing the song to the crowd and explaining what it’s about and then I see folks going ‘why the fuck are you saying all this? There are people here,’ and that’s actually a good thing to me. When I’m writing, I have a thing I refer to as ‘the wince,’ where if a lyric makes me sort of jump, then I know I have to keep it in because I just provoked a reaction in myself. That’s a strong signal of value. It’s certainly not a flattering song about myself.
This is going to get quite mechanical, but bear with me. On a given set list, I try to pace it out a bit, where songs like that are kind of a break for me because it’s less vocally energetic, so I put it in a certain place in order to catch a breath or get my shit together over the course of a two-hour show. I don’t play guitar until the very end of that song, and it’s not the highest vocal range, so I figured it would be a breather, but fuck no. Because the emotions of that song, I really got into it and just gave it everything I had, so by the end of it, I was completely fucked. Then we had four energetic songs in a row, so then I had to think about how I was going to rewrite the setlist for today.