Frank Turner has already had several lives. Who would have thought that this banker's son, grandson of Sir, born in Barhein and living next to Prince William at the prestigious Eton College, would end up on the road to play a folk tinged with nostalgia? No one would have put a piece on this trajectory and yet it was music that young Frank clung to.
With a rebellious soul, rage in his stomach and hair in the wind, he started his career with Million Dead, a post-hardcore band with explosive sounds. Screaming vocals against a background of saturated guitars, they enjoyed a small notoriety before exploding in flight, each chord having become a source of conflict. This is the moment Frank Turner chose to unplug the electricity. All he had left were his six strings and the will to soften his music.
No return to his roots for him, he almost discovered folk music at the same time as he wrote it. Tinged with rock and punk, his albums with their melancholic accents are proof that the style is reinventing itself, far from the image of American singers wearing leather boots and jackets. But what Turner does not give up, faithful to his values and the rage of his beginnings, is his strength of protest, his willingness to be a witness to a changing era. Between sensitive folk and devastating rock, he evokes the artist's loneliness, the impoverishment of England, homesickness and the need to escape.
Always on the edge, his songs instantly make you want to follow him on the road he loves like an old friend you can't get rid of. With more than 2,000 concerts, he himself admits: "there is an unresolved conflict between my homesickness and my thirst for travel [...] I am very happy when I get home, and a week later I want to get back on the road". What is certain is that we will be hearing for a long time to come his claims and his refrains that some people tattoo in their skin.
After five years with the band Million Dead, the band splits up with a bang and Frank Turner leaves alone, guitar slung over his shoulder. He was already playing folk music as a side project and decided to go full time. The following year, in 2007, he released his first album, Sleep is for the Week, which was very well received by the critics who didn't necessarily expect him in this genre.
The artist has made a series of albums and concerts to bring his folk music to the four corners of the world. In 2011, he will release the very good England Keep my Bones, an album which "sees him reach the top of his art" according to the Inrocks and which will rank 12th in Great Britain when it is released. The following year, the artist is consecrated. He performed at the opening pre-ceremony of the London Olympics.
The artist is on the road to Africa, but this time it is not for a series of concerts. With a keen awareness of the world around him, he sets off with the Joe Strummer Foundation to raise funds to open a music studio in Freetown and encourage young people to turn to this art in a country where 50,000 of them live on the streets. He also recorded some tracks there.
Two years later, we find this militant commitment in the form of a concept album, No Man's Land. It tells the story of the famous women in history in song, with each title attached to a podcast. For the first one, it welcomes Emily Barker to evoke the career of Sister Rosetta Tharpe who strongly influenced rock music.