It’s no secret that we here at Original Rock absolutely adore Frank Turner. We’re based in Southampton, Franks from the local area, so you can imagine our excitement when he announced a show here to promote his latest release, FTHC. Even more incredibly, we got offered the chance to interview him before the show. Touching on topics such as being the first artist to put on shows during covid, his first appearance at Slam Dunk Festival, what he’d be doing if he wasn’t a touring musician, and why he decided to center the latest album around more personal aspects of his life. If you’re just here for the interview then I won’t keep you, here’s the link.
This show was hosted by Southampton’s brilliant local record store Vinilo Records who are consistently bringing the most incredible artists to the rather intimate setting of the local independent venue, The Brook.
The energy in the room for this show was absolutely phenomenal. For some people, this is still their first time back at a gig post lockdown and the response to the music undoubtedly reflected this. Frank opened the show promoting new music, namely Punches and Haven’t been doing so well. But with the crowd response, you wouldn’t think for a moment that these songs were only released just over a month ago. Then he jumps straight into Recovery from 2014’s Tape Deck Heart, a sure crowd-pleaser to get people moving.
From here, Frank takes a breather to announce that this is show number 2589, a modest number compared to his ambitions I’m sure. He then goes on to discuss the rather personal nature of some of the new songs and how the next two tracks discuss his past relationship with his father and their reconciliation after his dad announced she was transgender and is now called Miranda, the now title of his touching tribute to his trans father, as well as a song of solidarity toward all of his LGBTQ+ fans, and the crowd reaction to this song and the absolute admiration for it from his fans was incredibly heartwarming to see.
The song 1933 comes up in this show. A song that can hold relevance to a lot of what’s going on in the world at almost any point in modern history, but there’s no doubt that tonight this was a subtle reminder that there’s some horrible stuff going on in the world right now and we should absolutely not take moments like these for granted. Following this, we were then blessed to be the first audience to hear FTHC’s Perfect Score live.
It would be quite rude of Frank to not play his ode to the south, Wessex Boy when playing a show anywhere within the borders of Hampshire, but luckily that’s exactly what he did next, much to the audience’s delight, and my own for that matter as during the bridge he discussed the song and referenced a conversation we had earlier that day during our interview.
No Frank Turner show is truly complete without a song that makes your heart stop. Traditionally this has almost always been in the form of a song about heartbreak. But the days of Franks heartbreaks are hopefully long past him and instead tonight he gave us his touching tribute to the late great Scott Hutchison, the lead singer of Frightened Rabbit. Before the song he told us a fun tale of how the two came to be friends at Warped Tour all those years ago, before then playing the beautiful track A wave across a bay.
From this point of the show onwards we were treated to hits both old and new to remind us that we were at a rock concert, and we were there to jump and sing along and get sweaty and have a great time doing so. For what was ultimately a short set, Frank packed in a brilliant setlist comprised of reworked classics that could fit the stripped-back nature of it just being him and his keyboardist turned mandolin player, Matt Nasir from The Sleeping Souls.
Franks latest album FTHC is out now and is available at all good local record stores and on streaming services, he’s touring the UK right now to promote the album and he’ll be back in the UK later this year with a full band tour of the UK, so watch out for that getting announced soon.