Frank Turner
Night & Day, Manchester
10th August 2015
Ian Critchley reports back from Frank Turner’s recent Night & Day show, his second of the year.
My year had started watching Frank play this exact same venue in the cold month of January. That show had given me such an intense buzz that I was only just coming down from it. Frank Turner is a man who clearly likes to play shows, and knows exactly which number each one is (though I’ve forgotten what he said, it was about 1,700ish). So, to coincide with the HMV meet a greet that had gone on earlier in the day, he was playing one of Manchester’s best small independent venues because, though he can easily fill an arena, his heart still lies with the small crowd, the independent venues, and what live music is truly about.
PJ Bond was the opener. I’d seen PJ once before in an even smaller place just down the road, but that was some six years ago. I still drank heavy and didn’t remember very much. Whether PJ had the ability to captivate a crowd back then, I’m not sure, but he sure as hell had it now. PJ Bond is a curious mix of Austin Lucas dulcet vocals and Cory Branan attitude, wrapped up in a blanket of heavy Don McLean (in the Homeless Brother days) inspiration. The audience really seemed to dig PJ Bond, especially the guy who strong-armed me whilst in the loo to say, “Guy is fucking GOOD. Opened with a Gaslight Anthem cover….fucking SOLD.”
Frank took the stage and opened with the first two songs from his new record, Positive Songs For Negative People, and, though having only been released a few days earlier, the entire audience reflected each lyric back. Well, almost all did but every time the energy dropped and Turner played one of his more tranquil songs, the low hum of ignorant chattering began to creep and almost drown out the sounds the rest of the room had come to hear. How to deal with these situations is always tricky and over aggression, though valid, is not often the best course. After a few scowls from the man on stage towards the source of the disruption Frank hit break point. Instead of screaming expletives he calmly said, “please let me know if my playing is too loud for your conversation, it’s not as if there was about a million other people who wanted to come tonight”. The audience roared with applause.
Thankfully, for the most part, the gusto of Frank overwhelmed the rudeness of those couple of audience members with noisy classics like ‘I Knew Prufrock before He Got Famous’, and ‘Photosynthesis’, being played with such furore that it was easy to forget that his band The Sleeping Souls weren’t there this evening.
“This is a song I thought I’d never really play live, but people keep asking for it” Frank said before he played ‘Song For Josh’, a tale about the death of a close friend. This song was hard listening, due to it’s subject matter, and I noticed a good few audience members bawl their eyes out in the front rows. Playing songs with such a painful topic creates a certain mood, and it can be difficult to elevate the audience again afterwards. Frank managed that with the next two-thirds of his set, and I’m sure everyone left with the good feelings I did thanks to songs like latest single ‘The Next Storm’ and fan favourite ‘Balthazar, Impresario’, but the impact of that song left a strong mark.
Frank’s set was, as always, the stuff that blows an entire room away and was filled with a solid mix of old and new. After the 21 originals, and one Queen cover, it was impossible for any Frank fan, from any point in his career, to walk away unsatisfied.
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All words by Ian Critchley. More writing by Ian on Louder Than War can be found at his author’s archive.
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