Features

Man at Work: Frank Turner

Photo by Graham Smith

It’s not often that a musician cites Iron Maiden and Loudon Wainwright III as influences. Then again, Englishman Frank Turner isn’t your typical musician.

The former Million Dead frontman has transformed himself from a punk rocker into an acoustic guitar-toting troubadour a la fellow British folkie firebrand Billy Bragg (although Turner isn’t averse to letting his band plug in and bash away).

The singer describes the songs on his latest effort, England Keep My Bones, as having “a very emotional, often spiritual quality to them,” which is fitting since he recorded them in a church. Organized religion, however, doesn’t seem to be his cup of tea. “There is no God,” he chants in the album’s closer “Glory Hallelujah,” and he admits that singing this in an old church “felt a little bizarre.”

For Turner, music serves as his religion. His songs, which name drop everyone from Woody Guthrie to Freddie Mercury, speak to the joys that music brings and how “rock and roll (will) save us all.” Turner reveals, “sometimes it’s easy for me to forget how lucky I am to have this music in my life. The West is saturated with rock and roll—so it gets ubiquitous—but I did some shows in China where people were so stoked and full of energy about the simple fact of this simple music. I found that very inspiring.”

This year, New Music Express nominated him for Best Solo Artist along with Kanye West and Paul Weller, an honor that he describes as “a little surreal,” adding that it’s “not something I am particularly aiming for in making music, but it was flattering.”

Turner, who describes himself as a “massive fan of America,” performed to sold-out rooms on his U.S. club tour this past spring, which followed earlier gigs opening for bands like Social Distortion and The Offspring. He finds that his quite British songs like “English Curse” and “Wessex Boy” go over well with U.S. audiences. “Many Americans,” he suggests, “harbor not-so-secret Anglophilia.”