Folk-punk star Frank Turner heads to Oxford for intimate Town Hall gig

Frank Turner is, to possibly misquote Winston Churchill “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.

An Old Etonian who studied alongside Prince William, born the son of a wealthy investment banker, and grandson of a former chairman of high street chain BHS, he was destined for a life of comfortable privilege. He studied at the London School of Economics, but instead of following his father into the world of finance, he became a punk-rocker, and a particularly noisy one at that, fronting the band Million Dead, before unplugging and hitting the road as a solo folk-rock singer, armed with just an acoustic guitar.

Dubbed by some the British Bruce Springsteen, he is a classic liberal with a distrust of power and a belief in freedom and equality of opportunity.

He led the warm-up to the London Olympics opening ceremony in front of an audience of 120,000 in the Olympic Stadium, and more than 27 million more watching on TV in the UK alone. And this year appeared on Celebrity Mastermind (specialist subject: Iron Maiden).

Oh, and this most urbane of musicians is actually a country boy — having grown up in a small village in Hampshire. Which explains why, for his latest tour, he is eschewing the usual circuit of rock venues in favour of more intimate spaces, including, this Tuesday, Oxford Town Hall. For a stadium-rocker who has previously headlined in front of 12,000 people at Wembley Arena, it’s a bit of a step down.

“It’s a nod of respect to people who like my music,” says the boy from Meonstoke, population: 645.

“I am aware not everyone lives in London, Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham. And people are so entitled these days. As soon as we announced these gigs, people in the cities were saying, ‘There’s nowhere near me’, so I say ‘Yes there is, there’s this place, which is 15 minutes on the train’. Those guys in the sticks have to travel all the time.

“Plus, as well as keeping fans on their toes, it’s more interesting for me and my crew to go to new places, too.”

The show will be something of a homecoming for Frank, who is regarded by many as an adopted Oxfordian. Indeed three-quarters of his band The Sleeping Souls are Oxford lads, featuring Tarrant Anderson, Nigel Powell and Ben Lloyd of punk-pop band Dive Dive.

The tour follows a busy summer which saw Frank and the band storming the festival circuit. But rather than the usual crowd-pleasing show of live favourites, the shows will see him trying out all-new material, in readiness for recording his sixth album — the follow-up to last year’s number two hit Tape Deck Heart.

“We’re going into the studio in October,” he says. “I’ve long had the feeling I’m yet to make a record that captures what we sound like live. You can think about methodology and studio craft all you want, but why not just go into the studio on the back of a tour when we’re sounding great?

“And I’ve got way too many songs for an album — 19 at last count — so we’re going to play lots of them, and we will work out what to put on the record from that. Not that I’m going to be saying, ‘That went down well, let’s put it on the record’, but I’ll get a good idea from crowd reaction and from playing the songs each night.”

The album, he expects, will be released at the end of February, and will feature one song called Love Forty Down, a metaphor for being in your thirties and being “rubbish at relationships”, inspired by hearing some friends playing table tennis one night.

Another is called Get Better, which shares a title with a song by his friends Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip. “I rang Pip to ask if it was okay to share the title and not only did he say yes, but he offered to remix the song for us as well.

“I have a title for the album but I can’t tell you what it is,” he says, though he hints that it will be more upbeat than its predecessor. “I want it to be shorter, too,” he says.

“We did a deluxe album for the last one, which seems confused to me in retrospect. I want the next one to be a 12-track album — simple and direct.”

And there’s no sign of this hard-working, hard-touring troubadour slowing down.

Despite 2014 seeing him play all over the world, his team are currently booking shows as far ahead as 2016.

“I live a life that revolves around album cycles, and those shows are definitely written in pencil rather than pen, but yeah, it’s all being planned,” he says. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

After a summer of playing festivals all over Europe, he’s particularly excited to get back to playing his own shows.

“I did my first tour in 1998, which was 16 years ago, and now I’m 32, so I’ve spent half my life on the road,” he says.

“I think we celebrated with another gig, which seemed about right.”

He has also gone back to his punk roots with his hardcore band side-project Mongol Horde, which features former Million Dead bandmate Ben Dawson and Sleeping Souls keyboardist Matt Nasir.

The life of a travelling folk singer perhaps seems unlikely for a former Eton and LSE pupil, but nothing is quite what it seems with Turner — who was born in Muharraq, Bahrain, where his dad was posted in the 1980s. And while Frank only lived in the Middle East for the first six months of his life, there is no escaping his short sojourn in the Gulf.

“The main impact that it has on my life is that the place of birth on my passport is Muharraq” he says. “Try getting into the US with Muharraq written on your passport!”

Frank Turner
Oxford Town Hall
Tuesday
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