We had a chat with acoustic troubadour Frank Turner about headlining London’s Alexandra Palace, his songwriting process, and the ‘craft of showmanship’:
You’re playing London’s ten-thousand-capacity Alexandra Palace tonight – are you excited?
‘Yeah, I can’t wait. It’s nice to be back at the Ally Pally. The thing I particularly like about it is that it’s an all-standing venue. At venues like Wembley Arena and The O2 you tend to get security guards patrolling the seats and ordering people to sit down and stop having fun, so I love the way that when we play here everybody’s just in it together and can get on with having a good time.
Does playing such a huge venue massively affect how you approach the show?
‘It does a little bit, but not as much as some people seem to think it does. There are technical tweaks to your craft of showmanship that take place when you’re playing a bigger venue – if nothing else, it means that you need to make bigger gestures in order to reach the people at the back of the room. I’ve also got more room to run around, as opposed to playing somewhere like the Barfly… At the end of the day, the essence of what we’re doing – trying to communicate our music to a group of people – remains the same.
What’s your favourite song to play live?
‘I’m an unashamed populist, so I like playing the singalongs live. I do like to put some curveballs in to every set that we do, though. I like playing things that will get the old-school fans excited, and I’m planning on doing a few of them tonight. There’s actually a song on the setlist for tonight that I’ve only just started playing live again after about five years, so that should be interesting to play. I’ve got to go and relearn the words in a minute…
You released your new album Positive Songs For Negative People in August, and the songs from that album are a lot more… Well, we don’t want to say ‘positive’, but…
‘I am well aware that I’ve completely derailed every journalist’s vocabulary with the name of that album, because that is the right word to use! I suppose that every creative process is reactive to a degree, and I wrote the album before Positive Songs For Negative People (2013’s Tape Deck Heart) during quite a depressed time in my life, so this entire record is about surviving the rough patches and just moving on with it. Tape Deck Heart is quite a mid-paced record, too, so for this one I really wanted to get a few more ‘short and sharp’ songs on there, because those are just the ones that I enjoy writing the most. The ones that slap you in the face, if you will.
‘I try very hard not to pre-destine my writing. I just want to write and see what happens, to be honest – I can’t deliberately sit down one day and think ‘right, I’m going to write a happy song’. The idea of sitting down and knowing what you want to write seems quite weird to me. In the past I would’ve said that it seems bad to me, but now I’m just going to say that it seems quite weird, because it might actually be quite creatively interesting once you give it a go. Never say never!
What’s your favourite song from the new album?
‘It’s very hard to pick an individual song. I can think of songs that I like the most on that record, but they’re all for different reasons. Get Better is a very fully-formed song to me – it took very little time to write, and it just is, and I like that. It’s a really simple song, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. My favourite song on the record is probably Josephine, because it says something that I find it very hard to explain in prose, which to me means that it must be poetry. It always changes, to be honest. The song Demons, for example, has changed a lot for me in the past two weeks because of the events in Paris. Songs are always changing meaning to me – and, I’d imagine, to a lot of people – but that song has really come to mean something new to me now.
Can you talk us through your usual songwriting process?
‘I don’t really have one! There’s a part of it that’s having lyric and melody ideas floating around my head, but the boring bit for me is taking those little pieces and seeing which of them fit together. You try for a while, and then after a while you stumble across something that works. Each of those little ideas represents a spark of inspiration, and you hope that by combining the ideas you end up sparking a song. Sometimes – the best times – everything arrives at once. If Ever I Stray, the entire song came from nothing to being finished in about forty minutes. It actually happened during a soundcheck, which was inconvenient, because it meant that we didn’t actually end up having time to soundcheck properly!
‘It’s different for every song, I suppose. I have done one song – one that hasn’t actually been released yet – called Rescue Annie, where I literally had a notepad open at my piano and I wrote half a line a week for a year. In the end, though, I got it finished, and it ended up being really good. We nearly recorded it for Positive Songs For Negative People, but it wasn’t quite finished, and the last thing that I wanted to do was rush it! It’ll definitely be on a future release.
When can we expect to hear new music from you?
We’re releasing the song Mittens next year, and we’ll be doing a five-track EP to go along with that, which should be really fun. After that? I’m not sure. My tour schedule currently runs through to March 2017, so I’m going to be pretty busy for the foreseeable future, but I’m sure we’ll be getting something out soon.
Out of every song ever recorded, which do you wish you’d written?
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by The Band. That is a contender for my favourite song of all time. I mean, it is a fairly ridiculous question, to be honest. The song Round Here by Counting Crows is pretty flawless, as well, as is the whole of their first three albums… John K. Samson from The Weakerthans is one of my favourite writers, too. I do spend a lot of time thinking about The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, though, because that song is fucking flawless.
Describe yourself in three words? (Or, if you’d prefer, Four Simple Words…)
Haha, very nice! Hmm… I’ll say Easily Bored Englishman. That can be either three or four words!
