Frankly Speaking

As the saying goes, if you’re not a rebel at the age of 20 you’ve got no heart, but if you haven’t turned establishment by 30, you’ve got no brains. For Frank Turner, folk-punk hero and all-round social commentator, the big three-zero is just around the corner. Latest album England Keep My Bones offers some insight into the mind of a man about to achieve that milestone, finding its author seemingly at odds with his home country.

Peppered with a knowing weariness, Turner’s ode to his nation is not sycophantic, but probing, the depiction of a conflicted relationship between man and his land. Still, with such specific and sensitive subject matter, was he worried about isolating his audience?
“I certainly gave a lot of thought about whether or not it was a good idea to put the word ‘England’ in an album title,” he says. “The statement of the album, if there is anything so simplistic as an overall statement, is kind of a question of what England might be. It’s supposed to be enquiring, and there are many things that depress and annoy and irritate me about where I’m from as much as there are things that I love. Recent events on the streets are a good example of that.”
Indeed. At time of talking to Turner, the riots that engulfed the streets of his beloved nation were but days old. Was he personally affected?
“I was in London on the Monday, the worst day of it,” he recalls. “Members of my family were attacked in their homes. I had friends who had their property smashed up and the PIAS warehouse was burned down, which for a time looked like it would be a serious body blow to independent music. There’s obviously something wrong socially that needs addressing, but I have precisely no time for people who make out that it was an uprising, or for certain American musicians who pontificate from their million-dollar mansions in Beverly Hills that this was like ‘the British spring’ or some bullshit like that.”
For a moment it’s tempting to envision Turner atop a soapbox, bleating rhetoric into a megaphone, such is his evident passion concerning the ills of his society. But while he’s never been the shy and retiring type, he’s not about to don a suit and canvas the locals.
“Once somebody gets labelled with the political tag, they become property of the politico music scene and it ceases completely to be anything about the music they’re making. I just don’t care enough about politics, at all. If I wanted to be a politician, I’d be a politician. I want to be a musician and I want my music to be judged on that basis, not as propaganda.”
However, Turner has been the subject of some especially petty judgement in recent months, following his appearance in a short film sponsored by Relentless Energy. Some fans chose to be offended, declaring Turner a sellout. Not that it bothered him in the slightest.
“Back when I was in Million Dead, when we first did a tour in a van that had seats in it, we had friends telling us that we’d sold out. There’s plenty of people sitting by their laptops in their mother’s basement with their trigger finger itching, waiting to type the word ‘sellout’ onto a forum about somebody. I don’t care. I haven’t cared for a long time, so fucking whatever!”
Could the man who once mused that “Our culture is carrion and we’re all vultures” be – whisper it – mellowing as he approaches a new decade in his life?
“On some things, I am, yeah. My desire to take my shirt off and get down in the front row and start screaming at people has kind of decreased over time,” he laughs. “There are still plenty of things that – to use my latest favourite phrase – boil my piss, but I dunno, I think that part of getting older is looking at things in a slightly different light. And it’s funny, the word I’m skirting around here, and I use with due diligence and caution, is the ‘M’ word – mature. I think if you describe any music as mature you automatically think of Dire Straits and trousers that go up to your ribcage, and it’s not that kind of thing but I’m now 29 years old. I’m not 19 anymore and my concerns and my approach to life are different from what they were back then.”
 
England Keep My Bones is out now.