Frank Turner has better reason than most to kickstart the new year with a euphoric punk-rock clatter. And that’s exactly what he did with brilliantly contrary and playfully snotty new track No Thank You For The Music, released on his 42^nd birthday on 28^th December. “It's about the idea that it's good to remind yourself every now and again that being part of underground culture means, among other things, being unpopular,” he explains cheerfully.

So, 2024 is a leap year. That means that this touring musicians' touring musician – a road warrior who’s been out there, playing somewhere, since 1998 and who, after starting gigging when he was 16, didn’t go home for a decade – has one extra day to play with, and play on. And you know he’ll use it. Turner and his band The Sleeping Souls did 50 states in 50 days during FTHC tour.

“The whole touring cycle for FTHC had a feeling of reinvigoration. A sense of coming out from under, both in terms of the pandemic and a rediscovery of the sense that what I do can be – or in fact should be – fun,” he says now of a long run lent wings by the Number One success of an album that joyously blasted a hardcore uproar (the clue was in the acronym).

That invigoration came, too, from new drummer Callum Green.

“Callum is younger than the rest of us,” he says of a line-up completed by Ben Lloyd (guitar), Tarrant Anderson (bass) and Matt Nasir (piano). “He’s phenomenally talented and brings new energy and a new enthusiasm to touring. He'd never been to America before, and on his first visit he went to 48 states. Which is pretty good! His  enthusiasm put energy back into me and into the rest of the band and the crew. It reminded us how fortunate we are to do what we do and to go to the places we go.”

Turner will plead the fifth on the specifics for now, “but there were some moments before the pandemic where I was taking myself and what I do quite seriously. There wasn't a huge amount of joie de vivre around what I was doing.”

But the 2022/23 touring cycle brought liberation and stimulation for all concerned. “There was definitely a sense of, oh, yeah, this is amazing. This is fun. This is really cool. And there's a different energy to that approach.”

Which brings us to the other reasons why 2024 is Turner’s time. He’s releasing his 10^th album. It’s a record he’s, as usual, written himself – but, for the first time in a kaleidoscopic career, he’s produced himself. Not only that, he’s recorded it in his new home studio in he and his wife’s home on Mersea Island, Essex. And, finally, crucially, going back to his roots, he’s releasing it as a fully independent artist.

After a quarter-century in the game, the title of this barnstorming, 14-track album says it all: Frank Turner is Undefeated.

Cue a cathartic agit-punk rabble-rouser that necessarily, vitally addresses that mental and emotional fall-out, whether on trapped-at-home schoolkids or, yes, stage-struck musicians denied the opportunity to do what they loved best.

Outlier, pioneer, punk-rock road-warrior who’d do this 366 days a year if he could: he knew that struggle better than most of his peers. But he is the undefeated Frank Turner, 42 years young, and he’s ready to smash it all over again in 2024. 

27.03.2024