Here’s a mathematics question for you, dear reader.
Take one of the finest singer-songwriters this country has produced in decades, throw in a capacity crowd who have spent the last two years positively gagging for the return of live music, and add on a bunch of choruses that are more suited to a festival field than they are to the (relatively) intimate confines of Reading’s Hexagon, and what do you get?
The answer, of course, is a Frank Turner show.
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Over the last decade-and-a-bit, Frank Turner has slowly built a reputation as one of the most unwaveringly entertaining live acts this country has produced in donkey’s years.
And, as we look around the crowded confines of the Hexagon, it’s easy to see why. It feels cheap to say that tonight feels more like a communal experience than a regular gig – but, frankly, it wouldn’t be an overstatement.
There’s something cultish about the way that Turner commands his crowd. It doesn’t matter whether he’s dive-bombing around the stage during a punk-inspired outro, or bellowing songs about lost friends and last-minute plans during a mid-set, solo acoustic section – each and every move is met with applomb by the crowd, and every single lyric is bellowed back into the face of a man who looks just as delighted to be there as any member of the evening’s audience.
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And as for the songs themselves? Well, they don’t make them much better.
We meant it when we said that he’s one of the finest singer-songwriters this country has produced in decades. From the heavy-handed introductory one-two of Four Simple Words and The Gathering to the anthemic closing quartet of The Ballad of Me and My Friends, Recovery, Try This At Home, and I Still Believe, it’s hard to believe that anybody present on the evening could fail to have been impressed by the sheer range of Turner’s songwriting.
It’s hard enough to write a folk-rock song with as much sheer bombast as A Wave Across A Day without it coming across like a poorly-minded Bruce Springsteen parody; but to do so while marrying it with a lyric that pays beautiful tribute to Scott Hutchison, the late Frightened Rabbit frontman and a personal friend of Frank’s? That, dear reader, takes some skill.
So, long live Frank Turner – the oft-underrated leading man of British live music and the closest thing that any ardent gig-goer has to a guaranteed good night out. We’ll see you down the front.