Best of What's Next: Frank Turner

Hometown: London
Album: Poetry of the Deed
For Fans of: Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg, early Bruce Springsteen

For someone who often gets slapped with the “folk” modifier, Frank Turner’s musical ambitions began with a rather odd inspiration—an Iron Maiden poster featuring a futuristic zombie cowboy. “I just saw that on the wall and was just like, ‘That’s the coolest thing ever,’” the London troubador says. “And then when somebody told me it was a band, my mind kind of fell apart and I started getting into music.”

Turner ended up playing in hardcore bands, including a two-album run as lead singer/screamer for Million Dead. After the band split, the young metalhead spent the next 18 months booking solo shows anywhere someone would let him play. With just a guitar, his music veered into the territory of musicians he’d begun listening to—Josh Rouse, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen. Despite his punk attitude, it was a scary venture.

“When you play in hardcore bands and things go wrong, you have two options,” he says. “Option number one is to just make loads of noise and scream and roll around on the floor. Option number two is to just blame it all on the drummer. When it’s just you, you can’t do either of those things.”

Even with an acoustic guitar, Turner’s punk roots still show on his third solo record, Poetry of the Deed, especially when he spits out the title track’s earnest manifesto: “Pentameter in attack, iambic pulse in the veins, free verse powered of the street light mains / An Iliad played out without a shadow of doubt between the end of the club, yeah, and the sun coming out … Enough with words and technical theses, let’s grab life by the throat and live it to pieces.”

The album is full of vivid, passionate, literate punk tunes that call us to “forget about the haircuts, the stupid skinny jeans, the stampedes and the irony, the media-fed scenes.” But its vim and vigor is made all the more refreshing by a sweet and honest appeal to his parents called “Faithful Son” and a tender love song called “The Fastest Way Back Home.”

“The last thing that I want to do is to be getting up on stage and singing about something that I don’t believe in or something that I’m not bothered about anymore,” Turner says. “So I guess I just kind of sift through things that happen and find the things that piss me off enough to put the pen onto a paper, and there we go until we have songs.”