A few short hours before I was wading through a sold-out Canal Club, I met with the mythical British songwriter Frank Turner. While he mostly plays with a full backing band (known as The Sleeping Souls), that night he would be performing an intimate solo show, armed with an acoustic guitar and fascinating stories.
For Turner, storytelling was a birthright. “To some extent I come from a family of raconteurs… family gatherings were just people regaling each other with tales,” some more myth than truth, some more legend than reality, he explains to me. The veins of his family culture pumped with stories from long ago—“and to some extent that bleeds into what I do now,” he elaborates wistfully.
This led to his first songs hitting the paper at the age of 11, though he admits, “they didn’t have any overarching creative or philosophical input… dreadful nonsense,” he chuckles, a gleam of childish joy in his eyes.
The first time he put his amphibious limbs onto the earthy sand of storytelling came with short stories he wrote in his teen years. “I could see some promise, but they were still toe-curlingly adolescent… but around 17 I wrote a novella, which was based on the fact that a guy I knew’s older brother was killed in a car accident. It was very slavishly Coupland-esque (inspired by iconic Canadian writer Douglas Coupland), and in a less charged word, quite emo.”
Though he would not stick with this prose, he had unearthed in himself a new form of communication.
Following this, he entered into his first proper band, Kneejerk. This group helped him cut his teeth on political and emotional lyrics, which soon followed him into his next band, Million Dead (who are performing together in an upcoming reunion). Under this moniker, he wrote the song “Macgyver,” one of his earliest story songs. Worlds began to seep into his reality as a storyteller, and as the hardcore band called it quits, something new emerged.
Frank Turner at The Canal Club, photos by Rich Russo
At that time, Turner was spending quality time with Beans on Toast singer Jay McAllister. Already an experienced storyteller, McAllister performed frequently at a local pub, where one night, a friend had a vivid and dramatic acid trip that revealed the idea of “little green toy soldiers that were part of the Chinese army hiding all around the room.” The following weekend, Jay debuted a song called Steve and the Secret Chinese Army. This was a revelation for Turner—in a less psychoactive sense. Suddenly, songwriting could be about anything. “It could be a much more immediate conversational vehicle.”
Relevance became a forefront concept in his lyrics, and not long after, he wrote The Real Damage, one of his earliest solo numbers. As he speaks longingly about his experiences with McAllister and early adventures that became songs, he finds a hidden truth: having a wild weekend, writing about it the next day, and performing it the following—“somewhere in there is what folk music means.”
This paired with his upbringing in punk, which was all about “immediacy, directness, and [being] communitarian,” to bring about a raw and personal account of life.
As he pushed into a new and unfamiliar world, he found it was not as foreign as he expected. “I found that the folk scene could be just as gatekeep-ey as the punk scene. Probably the two most boringly contentious words in the musical dictionary are ‘folk’ and ‘punk,’ because people argue about what both of them mean, in quite similar ways. Ultimately [he] doesn’t care.” To Turner, there are only two types of music: music you like and music you don’t like.
Cutting teeth through hardcore, punk, and emo, Turner had learned to take it for all the emotion and experience you can get, and hang the criticism with the coats. The majority of his solo career “is actually a second act, at least, if not a third.” This gave him enough experience to be “usefully skeptical.” No matter which way the wind blows, his path was right beneath his feet. That instinct, that intuition, led him to playing around England, then tackling Europe, selling out tours across the world, and finally playing to a sold-out crowd at the Canal Club.
As the conversation drifts from the formal to the informal, we land on a tale of his first time playing The Camel. As he entered the solo portion of his set, his backing band went outside for a smoke. The group returned for the last few songs with bewildered eyes and a nervous twitch.
As soon as the show finished, they all ran to Turner to relay the news: someone had been shot right outside the venue, and the stunned Brits had witnessed the aftermath. It was a jarring introduction to Richmond, and after some thorough convincing, Turner left with a very different impression of the city than he expected.
But this time was different. The show at the Canal Club went off without a hitch. The crowd sang along to every word, dancing away any lingering tension in the room. Turner beamed throughout the set, clearly moved by the energy in the space—a room full of people not just listening, but connecting.
It was a moment of redemption for both the city and the artist. For Turner, Richmond had come full circle—from chaos to community, from confusion to connection. And judging by the smiles, the voices, and the shared sweat in the room, he wasn’t the only one who felt it.
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