Frank Turner talks new compilation, fan backlash to hosting festival in Dallas and Million Dead reunion
Frank Turner has endured easier chapters in his life than the few weeks that precede our conversation, and I half expected that our chat would be quietly cancelled at the last minute.
Thankfully, after a few dreaded minutes of waiting, Turner arrived on the video call from his dressing room backstage in Stuttgart ahead of an arena show with The Dropkick Murphys, with who he’s spent the last few weeks galavanting around Europe.
Prying into the personal lives of an artist isn’t part of my job description, but an elephant in the room arose 24 hours before our interview. The day before, Turner took to Instagram to issue a public statement, with the comments section turned off, regarding his divorce last year, and his current relationship with singer-songwriter Katacombs.
In the message, he wrote that he was speaking out after growing “tired of the gossip, misrepresentation, and untruths” regarding his personal life online, before saying of his new relationship, “Timing and context was not perfect. I knew there’d be hurt involved. I went in with open eyes, and handled my end of that as honestly as I could. I didn’t screw up and get caught, I made a choice myself and followed through, taking the consequences and responsibilities.”
During our conversation, Turner explained his reasoning for breaking his silence on a subject he’d rather have kept behind closed doors, stating, “There’s been a lot of people just talking shit, and it hurts me, and it hurts other people in my life, including my ex, who wants no part of the horse shit that some people say.”
“I wish to have a line drawn under it,” he added. “It is ultimately nobody else’s business, but you reach a point where there’s just flat-out untruths being shared online, and you’re just kind of like, ‘Sorry, but no, that’s wrong’. As I said in the statement, ultimately, I’m a songwriter and I play shows, come down, have fun, or don’t, whatever. But I’m bored of people implying that I’m kind of ashamed and hiding some aspects of my personal life.”
Turner’s public statement regarding his relationship status came off the back end of another backlash within his fan community. The first was following the announcement in September that he would be bringing his annual festival, Lost Evenings, to Dallas in 2026.
The four-day event has travelled across the world since its first incarnation in 2017, visiting Toronto, Berlin, and California. The most recent edition was held in Edinburgh in September.
Due to the regression of LGBTQ rights in Texas, such as the high court recently ruling that judges can decide against performing same-sex marriages, this location has been heavily criticised. Turner is a vocal supporter of the LGBTQ community, and the Ally Coalition are a partner of Lost Evenings. The transgender community is also close to his heart due to his father transitioning to a woman, which he detailed on his 2021 song, ‘Miranda’. However, Turner is adamant that coming to Dallas is the best way to support their local marginalised LGBTQ community.
Turner firstly acknowledges “there are terrible things happening in Texas from a legislative point of view” as well as “trade unions and all of the things that make up the kind of constellation of the alternative universe, which I consider myself part of.”
He then explained that it was the Ally Coalition who proposed Dallas as a location, sharing, “The Ally Coalition piped up and said that they really wanted us to consider doing it in Dallas, because Dallas has the largest LGBTQ community in the United States. They are people who are amazing, lovely, brilliant and vibrant, but also in a more difficult place than anybody else. Ultimately, it’s called The Ally Coalition, and it seems to me that trying to be an ally without leaving the house is self-serving horse shit.”
While Turner maintains that Lost Evenings is “first and foremost, a music festival”, he wants it to serve a “broader social function” which he thinks “in Dallas makes more sense anywhere else”. He is also currently in talks with former Democratic Party congressman Beto O’Rourke, who was also once a bandmate of Cedric Bixler-Zavala in post-hardcore band Foss, over an appearance.
Reflecting on the decision, Turner is wholly confident that his decision was the right one, sharing, “I have been through many internet kerfuffles in my career, and they always suck, but this one’s been an interesting one, because more so than in any previous occasion, I have no doubts about my decision. I know it’s the right thing to do.”
The United States is a place that Turner has got to know well since he began his solo career. He has played Dallas 14 times before, but admits that “yes, is the short answer” to whether it has crossed his mind that speaking about these matters could lead to his visa potentially being revoked. “There are considerations about what the balance is between speaking your mind and telling the truth, but do you want to end up in a situation where you can’t actually go to places? It’s a difficult one,” he admits.
As much as Turner has kept looking forward with a relentless touring schedule in 2025, studio work hasn’t been on the agenda of late for the singer-songwriter. His latest project, The Next Ten Years, is a compilation of his favourite B-sides, covers, live recordings, and rarities from the last decade. He began the series with The First Three Years in 2008, a nod to Black Flag’s The First Four Years, but as his rate of releasing music has slowed, every decade is now the right time to take a moment to reflect.
For Turner, the process of going through to pick these recordings has been “really fun”, especially covers such as Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah’ or Janis Ian’s ‘Better Times Will Come’, which she personally emailed him asking him to record in 2020. “Evan Dando (The Lemonheads singer) once said in an interview that a singer-songwriter has two components, and I think that’s true. Interpretation is an interesting thing. You know, Nina Simone didn’t write many of her own songs. Elvis didn’t write any of his own songs,” he explains before clarifying that he’s “not comparing myself” to those two legends.
Next month, Turner will be looking back on another chapter in his life as he reunites with Million Dead, which will be the final page of their story. After splitting up in 2005, which led to Turner swapping hardcore for folk, they reunited this summer for 2000 Trees and a warm-up show in Southampton ahead of one final tour in December.
Unlike many reunions, this one hasn’t been for a payday, with Turner describing the backstory behind the tour as “full fat ridiculous”. He begins, “I don’t know what about three-quarters of the words I’m about to say mean, but there is a spin-off series of e-books from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, about a character called Spike.”
While this e-book series imaginably has a relatively niche readership, Million Dead’s old guitar tech is part of the loyal group, and alerted the band to “a scene in one of these books where Spike has to leave wherever he is in a hurry because he’s got to get the Million Dead reunion show,” Turner says. Their former guitar tech then took a screenshot of the passage and sent it to everyone on an email thread, which gave everybody a reason to shoot the shit again. “For the first time in 19 years, we were all in a thread together,” he warmly recalled.
Soon enough, the topic of meeting up for pints was broached, which “gradually spiralled” into a full-blown reunion. By Turner’s own admission, the first rehearsal was shady, but eventually, it all fell into place, recalling, “There was one really specific moment where we kicked into one song and it just kind of gelled, and it was and felt powerful.”
20 years is a long time for a band to be away, and Turner admits that he was likely “the stumbling block” to a reunion before, reflecting, “I had a big bee in my bonnet about not looking backwards”.
Refreshingly, the Million Dead reunion is for the love of the game rather than enhancing any bank balances. In fact, the venues they will play are considerably smaller than Turner typically would on a headline tour with his band, leading him to muse, “It’s slightly different in the sense that what I personally have done has been much more successful than it than ever was. So there’s not a sense… and I don’t mean to slag anybody off by saying this, but quite often, bands have a moment, members go on to do less successful things, and they reconstitute the thing that was successful.”
As much as he’s excited to share the stage with old friends again, Turner wholeheartedly rules out the prospect of recording any new material or another tour in the future. “We’re very aware that the motivation of our audience is either nostalgia or catching something that they missed the first time around,” he honestly admits.
On a profound note, the band’s drummer Ben Dawson, who Turner describes as “one of my childhood best friends”, has pledged for their concert at the Electric Ballroom to be the final time he ever plays the drums, with Turner conceding, “So, that might well be the end.”
Following the Million Dead reunion and The Next Ten Years retrospective, one would presume that Turner would be planning a follow-up to his next studio album, 2024’s Undefeated. However, now that he’s ten albums deep into his solo career, he’s in no rush to make another record, confessing, “It’s very much a first-world problem, I’m in a place right now where I’m slightly snookered by how much I like my preceding album.”
While his motivation typically concerns “improving on my previous effort”, he is now mulling over whether to “just do the same thing again, or completely flip the script”. He shares, “I haven’t quite made up my mind”. Although the songwriting never stops, he says, “I don’t want to just churn out another record because I’m the sort of person that releases records.”
There’s no new record in the pipeline, but his touring itinerary remains hectic by most artists’ standards. Next year will see him hit the road with The Descendents on a co-headline North American tour, before returning to intimate UK venues for a solo acoustic tour honouring the 20th anniversary of his debut EP, Campfire Punkrock.
For somebody who spent most of his career with his first foot forward and not taking a second to look back, Turner, now 43, is no longer feeling like he’s in a race against time. Instead, he’s taking a moment to ponder the journey so far, including celebrating the band that started it all for him, and toasting his 20 years as a solo artist.
The Next Ten Years is available to buy or stream now.
