Frank Turner: ‘I’m a cis, hetero white male and what that means I should do is shut the f*** up’

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Get our Now Hear This email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “I read that and thought, ‘I’ve been seen’.” open image in gallery Frank Turner: ‘Now I feel much more like I know who I am and I know what I want to do and what I want to say’ Turner’s parents split in his early twenties over his father’s infidelities. “It’s apparently now an old-fashioned idea, but I don’t think that something is right or wrong based on how many likes or retweets it might get,” Turner argues. And “A Wave Across a Bay”, a heartfelt open letter to Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison, who died by suicide in 2018, came to Turner in a “lucid dream” three months after Hutchison’s death. “In my dream Scott came into my room with a guitar and showed me a few chords and a few words and some melody, and that is what it is.” The album closes with the stirring “Farewell to My City”, tracing a walk Turner took through his old roaring grounds – the demolished bars and clubs around Tottenham Court Road where Million Dead played their early shows; his party flats above Camden’s Wheelbarrow or Holloway’s Nambucca – “all the corners where I used to score” – to say goodbye to the capital having decided to move to the Essex coast.