Frank Turner talks grief, anxiety and his first number one album

Musician and long-standing CALM ambassador Frank Turner is known for his honest lyrics and his ninth studio album FTHC is no different. We caught up with him to hear how he’s laying it all on the table with his first number one album, tackling topics like grief and anxiety.

Frank joins our chat from a hotel room, after the first night touring since everything hit the fan with Covid. He admits he’s “fucking knackered and decidedly not gig fit” but that being back playing live again is “incredible”. Luckily, we’ve caught him on a day off and he’s keen to tell us about his latest album before heading to the seaside to recover from last night’s show.

FTHC (short for Frank Turner Hardcore) is perhaps his most personal album yet, dancing from gentle and reflective tracks to the angrier anthems Frank is known for. Like many, he’s struggled with his mental wellbeing over the past couple of years, missing the buzz of live shows and the connection he finds playing music to an audience:

“It’s not just my living, it’s my culture and my communion. I think lots of musicians have been realising over the last couple of years that it’s an important part of their expression and mental health. It’s so nice to be touring again, because it’s food for the soul and I’ve missed it a lot. I’m hungry to get out there and play live shows.”

Despite his success, Frank humbly describes what he does as “playing guitar and shouting at people for an hour or so”. He may play down what he does, but Frank Turner knows the weight of responsibility that comes with being in the public eye and it’s something he takes pretty seriously.

“I’m not a teacher or a doctor and if I stopped doing what I do, the world would continue to spin on its axis. But in terms of changing public conversation, there’s a role that we can play as public figures. It made me reevaluate the value we can have in normalising and destigmatising the conversation on mental health.”

The topic of mental wellbeing is close to Frank’s heart, not only addressing his own struggles with anxiety on the new record, but also the loss of his good friend and frontman of the band Frightened Rabbit, Scott Hutchison, who tragically took his own life in 2018. A Wave Across The Bay is a tribute to Scott and their decade-long friendship, Frank says:

“The song is about hoping that he found peace, because Scott was a beautiful man, but he wasn’t someone I would describe as at peace very often. I’m quite a sceptical atheist and so was Scott, but the song came to me in a lucid dream I had of him sitting at the end of my bed playing me a song. The arrangement and sound is very consciously supposed to sound like a Frightened Rabbit song. It’s a piece of grief, a tribute and a celebration on some level hopefully.”

Frank initially reached out to become a CALM ambassador after hearing about a mate’s struggle with mental wellbeing and despite feeling passionately about shining a light on this stuff, he was struggling to talk about his own emotional health:

“I had no idea that my friend felt the way he did and I felt sorry that I hadn’t noticed. He told me about CALM and I got in touch. But my time working with CALM predates me examining my own mental wellbeing. I’d sit on a panel, learn my lines, then go home and not talk about my own feelings.”

The last couple of years have given Frank space to reflect on some difficult things and after being diagnosed with anxiety having struggled with panic attacks, he wrote the song Haven’t Been Doing So Well. He says:

“I was talking to my therapist about a physical sensation I get reasonably regularly and she told me it was an anxiety attack. I’m familiar with anxiety and I’ve spoken to other people about it, but I’ve never thought to use that word to describe my own experiences. Naming is powerful and it was helpful to me. The issue predated the pandemic, but the last couple of years made my anxiety worse.”

Since then, he’s worked on talking when he feels rubbish, something which his new album addresses. Franks keen to challenge the idea that he’s got his shit together, hoping that sharing his own struggles could help other people:

“A lot of people think I’m really together, but I don’t feel very together at all. Mental health is important and it affects an awful lot of people. More often than I would like, that’s led to losing people before their time, so we have to talk and do something about it. As ridiculous as it is, I have a platform and I want to direct to something more worthwhile than my ego.”

You can listen to FTHC now, or if you’ve missed live music as much as we have, catch Frank playing on The Never Ending Tour of Everywhere 2022 (who knows, you may even see him rocking some CALM merch).

If you need support, check out the CALM Guides, where you can find lots of advice on stuff you might be going through and ways to move forward.

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Photo credit: @sophieduf (IG)