Frank Turner: ‘I’m a cis, hetero white male and what that means I should do is shut the f*** up’

The gobby punk-rock troubadour often takes aim at the Tories, capitalism and the culture wars, but with his new album he’s turning the lens on himself, his former drug addiction, and his fractious relationship with his trans father. He tells all to Mark Beaumont

Frank Turner: ‘If the whole thing that we’re learning about our society, our history and our culture is that voices have been marginalised then we need to make space for those voices to no longer be marginalised' (Olly Curtis/Future Publishing/Getty)

Frank Turner is uncertain whether what happened to him was an overdose. “From my amateur understanding of it, it’s quite difficult to establish exactly what constitutes an overdose on cocaine,” he considers, “but it certainly wasn’t an underdose.” He just knows that one of his many lost weekends, as his favourite Hold Steady lyric goes, “started recreational [but] ended kinda medical”.

“A degree of physical breakdown started, which was new,” says Britain’s biggest folk-punk troubadour, shivering slightly at the memory of the sixth day of the bender, which saw his years of functioning cocaine abuse unravel. “I fell over and threw up and couldn’t see straight and everything was completely f***ed. I didn’t call an ambulance, but I went to a walk-in. They basically just went ‘You’re a f***ing idiot’ and put me on a drip to restore fluids.”

It’s a nightmare revisited with brutal openness on a track called “Untainted Love” from Turner’s forthcoming ninth album FTHC. “I sure do miss cocaine,” he confesses, “the bravado and bloodstains, crushing highs and creeping shame and it nearly killed me… I went up to the wire but it turns out I didn’t want to die”.

“There was a moment in time in my life, I can’t tell you when it was, when it went from partying at the weekends to physical necessity,” he says, transforming a functional basement business room of a Shoreditch hotel into a de facto therapist’s office. “It definitely wasn’t fun anymore, it was haunted. It would always start fun, you’re in a pub, ‘let’s get a line in!’, but literally I would go out for a beer and come home five days later. It was appalling. There’s no logical end point if you can afford to buy more.”

Turner has long been obsessed with chasing life’s myriad unknowns – since leaving his post-hardcore band Million Dead in 2005, he’s dedicated himself to a life on the road, gathering a die-hard fanbase over almost 2,500 gigs, building from bars, squat parties and kitchens in his early solo days to arenas on both sides of the Atlantic. Not to mention his own international four-day festival, Lost Evenings, in London, Boston and Berlin. Drugs, then, represented a similar, internal adventure.

“A lot of it started out with that FOMO… what could happen?” he says, with an analytical lucidity that shows no sign of narcotic wear and tear. “The night’s this great mystery – well, it’s not a f***ing mystery because sooner or later you’re gonna end up in some p****’s kitchen with everybody going through all the numbers they’ve got for dealers to see if anyone’s still delivering. That’s where the night’s going. And you end up hanging out with people who want to do drugs, not people you like. The vivid memories that come to me are hanging out on a corner waiting for somebody to drop something off or to meet up with me, or just staggering around on my fourth straight day awake with not much purpose, or gruellingly travelling from my flat to a certain bar and back again, based on their opening times, but never sleeping in between.”

When he was off tour, Frank’s flat became something of a party hub. “A lot of people were aware that they could probably just stop by and knock”. It’s a period he looks back on with no little shame. “One of the problems I had is that people didn’t seem to notice when I was on a day two, in a way that initially I thought was kinda cool because I get away with it, but it was actually really bad because more of my friends would have called me out on my behaviour sooner if they’d been aware of what was going on.” Ultimately, it was the arrival in his life of his future wife, musician Jessica Guise, that kicked him straight.

“Like many people I was quite good at hiding that part of my personality and when she encountered it in the flesh she was pretty horrified,” Turner says. “She came round to visit on day three and was like, ‘It doesn’t look like you’re having a laugh right now’. I’m just sitting there zombied out. We did then break up for a time because she sort of delivered an ultimatum, ‘Me or the drugs’, and I initially went, ‘The drugs! No wait, hold on, that’s the wrong answer!’ And it took some time for me to patch that up again.”

Frank Turner performing at Coachella in 2014 (Getty)

At Guise’s suggestion, Turner turned to cognitive behavioural therapy to help break his habit and uncovered, at its root, what he calls on the album “a new name for an old, old friend”: anxiety. “In retrospect, there were plenty of times when I wasn’t able to disentangle any anxiety issues from the effects of having quite a big drug problem,” he says. “Surprise, surprise, it turns out that having issues with substance abuse was more of a symptom than anything else. Giving something a name can be revelatory. I was describing these moments I get where I can’t really breathe or concentrate properly and all the rest of it and [my therapist] said, ‘It sounds like an anxiety attack’. It was a huge moment for me because it was just like, ‘Oh f***, that is what that is, clearly, this whole feeling of having a bomb that’s about to go off in the centre of your chest’.”

For 15 years, Turner has cultivated an avid community around his music by being open and available to his fans (his email address is public “and long may it remain so”). He is prone to baring his soul musically, too, be it fired with the passions and determination of the struggling punk troubadour on 2007’s Sleep is for the Week or 2009’s Poetry of the Deed or decimated by a break-up on 2013’s Tape Deck Heart. But even for him, FTHC – or Frank Turner Hardcore – is an album that pulls no personal punches. His rawest, and often loudest, record to date, it confronts the mental health issues he faced when forced off the road by the pandemic (on the punk-pop cry for help “Haven’t Been Doing So Well”), his Olympic level self-loathing (“those shower moments when you go [shivers] just remembering some random thing you did 12 years ago”) and his deeply troubled childhood “born in the wrong place, wrong time”.

Talk inevitably turns to furious punk tracks such as “Fatherless” and “My Bad”, detailing the trauma of being “shipped off to a dormitory full of kids that made no sense to me” aged eight to “cry myself to sleep each night for three straight weeks “’til I was dead inside”; having grown up in Winchester, Turner attended Summer Fields school and then Eton, on a scholarship.

Self-harm was a huge part of my early teenage years

Frank Turner

It’s a topic he’s been reluctant to address before now, wary of assumptions of smug advantage. “I don’t want my schooling to define me as an individual,” he says. “That’s partly because I politically disagree with it – there’s unearned privilege going on there educationally and that’s the f***ing problem – and it’s partly because it was a pretty traumatic experience for me. I hated it, it was awful. Self-harm was a huge part of my early teenage years. I realised after a time that people would then talk about me as if I had a lovely time when I was at school, and I f***ing didn’t. I f***ing hated it and I hated everybody and I didn’t want to be there.”

He absolves his mother of any blame. “[She] reminded me the other day that within a week of arriving at Eton College I asked my parents if I could stop going. My father told me he’d disown me and kick me out of the house. He did then kick me out of the house five or six times later in my teenage years. There are people who would go, ‘Why didn’t you just leave?’ And I suppose there is a certain type of person who at age 15 would have just sacked off their entire family and everything else, but that wasn’t me.”

His Eton schoolmates come in for a sound thrashing too; “My Bad” skewers the “hatred and greed” of the emotionally and psychologically stunted men they became. “I sit here and I watch people who look like me and in many cases went to the same school I did running the country into the f***ing ground and it’s embarrassing,” His amiable manner cracks with deep-seated exasperation. “It’s obvious to me what damage has been done, personality wise.”

Turner’s a self-professed liberal – does Starmer give him hope? “I would prefer Starmer to Boris f***ing Johnson. It’s difficult to say whether there is such a thing as a human being who has broad enough experience of everybody in Britain to run the country, but it’s certainly not them. Starmer has been slightly less glowing than I thought he might be but I’m definitely gonna vote for him. I will do most anything to get rid of our current government.”

It’s that turbulent relationship with his father, however – a banker turned bookshop owner, variously described as “distant and judgemental” and “filled with rage” – which dominates the central run of the new record. “What I wouldn’t give for a caregiver who had care to give,” Turner sings in “Fatherless”, ruthlessly dissecting a volatile relationship which bitterly soured as the teenage Frank found his escape in punk rock: “I sold my soul to rock’n’roll in a desperate throw to even be noticed at all… Look at me now, am I enough of a man?” “There’s a Springsteen quote where he said that 90 per cent of rock’n’roll is someone standing on a stage shouting, ‘Look at me, dad’,” Turner grins. “I read that and thought, ‘I’ve been seen’.”

Frank Turner: ‘Now I feel much more like I know who I am and I know what I want to do and what I want to say’ (Olly Curtis/Future Publishing/Getty)

Turner’s parents split in his early twenties over his father’s infidelities. Although he’s remained close to, and proud of, his mum, Turner’s relationship with his dad soon disintegrated altogether. For nine years of total estrangement, he swore he wouldn’t even attend his father’s funeral. But recent single “Miranda” documents how the pair reconciled over the news that Turner Sr had come out as “a proud transgender woman”: “my resentment has started to fade”, his son declares.

We spoke in an interview last year about the details of their rapprochement: meeting at the death bed of Turner’s uncle and surrogate father figure; Miranda being “a lot more considerate… less boringly male and forthright” than before her transition; their tentatively blossoming friendship and her appearances at his shows and DJ sets; Miranda appearing unexpectedly to dance onstage with Turner at a tattoo festival. “Miranda is a really nice person,” he explained, “and my dad was a p****.”

How has she taken the song, and your comments about her? Turner laughs. “She loved it, but she does like the limelight these days. [She] said, ‘The song’s great; I was quite surprised that it wasn’t more bitter and angry’ and specifically said, ‘That would have been fine’. She very much takes the attitude ‘I did a terrible job’ and is remorseful for that. And actually hearing her say those words is really meaningful to me.”

With the factional and nuance-allergic nature of Twitter turning identity politics into trench warfare, is our best hope for collective progress and understanding to highlight such stories in art? “Any opportunity to take the conversation away from the appalling rage pit that is most social media can only be a positive thing,” Turner believes. “By writing a song about what’s happened between me and my father, there is an infinitesimally small value to it in the sense of it normalising that conversation [but] for me, the song is more about my relationship with another individual human being than it is about some kind of attempt to be a campaigner. I’m obviously aware that I’m a cis, hetero white male and more often than not what that means I should do is shut the f*** up. If the whole thing that we’re learning about our society, our history and our culture is that voices have been marginalised then we need to make space for those voices to no longer be marginalised. So I try and listen… I don’t want to be an expert; I want to be an ally. I want to be a constructive listener.”

I don’t want to be an expert; I want to be an ally

Frank Turner

For processing purposes, Turner seems keen to separate Miranda from the father he barely knew growing up. “It was never about who she was, just the way that he behaved,” he sings in “Miranda”, bringing on accusations of misgendering online. “I’m not going to stop using the word ‘father’ because I’m not gonna use the word ‘mother’ instead. I have a mother,” he explains. “And more importantly Miranda is fine with that.”

Not that Turner checked the (otherwise overwhelmingly positive) social media reaction to the song himself. Having previously been subjected to what he calls online “monsterings” for his perceived politics (which got him up to 100 death threats a day in 2012), for daring to play punk rock in arenas and for “mansplaining” on his 2019 tribute album to historical female achievements No Man’s Land, these days he steers clear of this most divisive, unforgiving and unhealthy of platforms.

“In terms of triggers for my anxiety, about a minute-and-a-half on Twitter will keep me from sleeping for about two straight days without taking any drugs,” he admits. “So just in terms of self-preservation, I don’t check these things… I think Twitter is self-evidently the worst thing that’s happened to our society and our culture and our politics in our lifetimes… A lot of outrage culture is performative. You score points on social media by being the most angry, and finding a new thing to be angry about that no one else has been angry about before. It incentivises expanding the boundaries of outrage and that’s dreadful.”

FTHC wades into the culture wars with scimitar flashing. The ferocious “Non Serviam” stands proud in the face of “belligerent, aggressive illiterates” and refuses to “bow down… before this new set of values”. “It’s apparently now an old-fashioned idea, but I don’t think that something is right or wrong based on how many likes or retweets it might get,” Turner argues. “There’s mob politics going around, and I am old fashioned enough to believe that that’s a thing to be resisted. I’m not going to adjust my view of the world based around the constant rushing tides of Twitter.”

Frank Turner during a typically energetic live show (Clair McAllister)

Social media’s worst tendencies – condemning people for age-old misdemeanours, finding guilt in the flimsiest association, policing art, leaping to the worst assumptions of character with relish, we could go on – aren’t lost on Turner. “Perfect Score”, he explains, is partly inspired by a Barack Obama speech on the pointlessness of pursuing purity. “Nobody is pure,” he insists. “Nobody is flawless. Nobody has a perfect score. We’re all fallible human beings and the quicker we embrace that the better. If any single sin automatically disqualifies somebody from the debate, then sooner or later you’re talking to yourself, and sooner rather than later. You just narrow who you’re talking to, you get eaten by your own set of principles very quickly, but also nobody learns anything.

“I think about some of my older acquaintances or relatives when it comes to discussions about the trans issue. If they have a questioning or even negative attitude to the situation with my father and I immediately went, ‘I’m never talking to you again’, what’s been achieved? What’s changed? Nothing. The better option is to try and find routes into conversation and debate. These, to me, are the most boringly anodyne statements but apparently they need repeating.”

It’s not all anger and exorcism; plenty of FTHC, besides “Miranda”, sets out to warm the heart. “The Gathering” was written to celebrate Turner’s return to live music after a lockdown spent teaching himself production and finding a centring routine in bursts of weekly charity livestreams, raising £400,000 for struggling venues in the process. And “A Wave Across a Bay”, a heartfelt open letter to Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison, who died by suicide in 2018, came to Turner in a “lucid dream” three months after Hutchison’s death. “In my dream Scott came into my room with a guitar and showed me a few chords and a few words and some melody, and that is what it is.”

The album closes with the stirring “Farewell to My City”, tracing a walk Turner took through his old roaring grounds – the demolished bars and clubs around Tottenham Court Road where Million Dead played their early shows; his party flats above Camden’s Wheelbarrow or Holloway’s Nambucca – “all the corners where I used to score” – to say goodbye to the capital having decided to move to the Essex coast. Tired of London but, he claims, not yet tired of life.

As I get older, I find there’s more dignity in accepting that there’s a time and place for everything

Frank Turner

“It’s partly to do with the pandemic – London ceased to be London – and partly to do with getting older,” he says, philosophically. “There’s a time and place for everything in life, and I feel as I get older there’s more dignity in accepting that and working with it than trying to fight it. I remember being in my early twenties and seeing the guy in his mid-forties hanging around the edge of the party and thinking ‘Who’s that guy?’, and then you start realising that you’re turning into that guy. There was a time in my life when I was trying to figure out who I am and what I have to say, and that might have involved squat parties in Forest Gate or lock-ins in Camden until dawn and all the rest of it. Now I feel much more like I know who I am and I know what I want to do and what I want to say.”

Left behind in the Big Smoke: addictions, resentments, wanton youth. You sense that Frank Turner’s new life, beginning at 40, is a real clean slate. “Twenty-one-year-old me swore he would never leave London,” he says, “but 21-year-old me did a number of really quite stupid things as well.” A broad grin. “You reach a point of thinking ‘why am I still listening to that guy?’”

‘FTHC’ is out on 11 February via Xtra Mile Recordings

If you have been affected by this article, you can contact the following organisations for support: actiononaddiction.org.uk, mind.org.uk, nhs.uk/livewell/mentalhealth, mentalhealth.org.uk.