At the height of the Bluesfest frenzy earlier this month, I interviewed punk poet Frank Turner in the rain under the eucalyptus trees at Tyagarah Tea Tree Farm.
Touring with The Sleeping Souls, Turner was incredibly jetlagged, I was extremely muddy and resembling some kind of swamp goblin. But we spoke about writing an album in four hours, finding his lyrics tattooed on Australian fans, and his natural political inclination to leave everybody the fuck alone.
Frank Turner and the Sleeping Souls amped up the party at Bluesfest and subsequent tour throughout Australia with their poetic lyrics and thrashy, pub rock, punk-folk sound. Taking the piss with just the right amount of rage, it's jump around, swill-your-whiskey, land on your arse in the mud music. The lyrics are dark and nihilist: there is no god, time is running out, and yet there is something essentially uplifting about Turner's live shows.
The album 'Buddies' was conceived by Turner, Colorado artist Jon Snodgrass and copious amounts of whiskey. It was written in four hours and recorded in another four. “With the stuff I usually do I spend months if not years agonising over every detail. It was quite liberating to just sit down and go fuck it, that's how that song goes. And the finished product kind of oscillates wildly between, I think, genuinely quite good and complete and utter bullshit.”
With a huge fan-base across Europe, Turner describes his experiences touring the more remote continent of Australia. “Australia's always been really good to me. Chuck Ragan had spent years telling me how Australia was the promised land of touring. Because everyone was really nice and the shows are always really good and you get treated really well.
"And it reached the point where I was like 'alright, motherfuckers, show me'. And right from the word go, I'll never forget, the day of the first show I met some kids in a burger shop, and one of them had the lyrics to one of my songs tattooed on his arm. And that was a bit like, where's the fucking candid camera.”
With the punk genre being foundational to his musical style, over his career Turner has gained a degree of political notoriety. But rather than coming across as having hard-hitting, anti-societal anarchist, Turner's politics seem more measured, internalised and contained. “My own personal politics are I'm a kind of extremist liberal. Inherent in that is a desire to try and not impose my view on other people. So it's slightly self-defeating. My most burning desire is to leave everybody alone. And have that reciprocated. So it doesn't necessarily lend itself to furious activism.”
Nonetheless, Turner has used his musical standing to advocate for those in need. “I was a little bit more politically noisy, I suppose. When I first started being a solo artist I kind of got pretty bored of that whole thing after a time. The tone of public, political debate, particularly in the music scene, is infantile at best.
“And I’m not really interested in it. What I do try and use it for more charitable stuff, which I see as slightly removed, stuff for homeless charities, doing loads of stuff for teenage cancer and disabled-access charities in the UK to make sure that everyone can get into gigs.”
Frank Turner and The Sleeping Souls are currently working on their next album.
