It's Going To Take A Lot To Kill Frank Turner

“I’ve got this whole kind of bee in my bonnet,” he explains, “about the idea. I sort of feel like there’s nothing inherently exciting about doing a sixth record and so it seems to me that the onus is on me to kind of reinvent slightly or at least just try and find some track that’s interesting, and on this record it sounds and feels like a debut album, you know. I think a lot of bands get to the point where, when they’re on album six it all becomes slightly automatic and by rote almost, and I want to obviously avoid that as much as possible. When bands make debut records, they generally just load into the studio and play their songs like they’re doing their live set, so I want to try and recapture that to a degree.”

To that end, rather than present the songs to his band when The Sleeping Souls go in to record, they’ve already been playing them at live shows. As for what sort of direction the new songs are taking…

“The last record that I did had sort of a break-up kind of vibe, which was cathartic to do but I’m quite sort of pleased that that is done – it’s quite liberating so I can write about other things. Without getting too deep into the details, I wrote a break-up record, I had a rough time in my personal life but I’ve also since experienced the joys of being on the wrong end of the press and Twitter and that kind of thing, which was a new thing for me, so there was a rocky period for a time there but I came through it thanks to my friends, and I guess the general sort of spirit of the new songs is kind of defiance in a way. It’s kind of a record about saying, like, ‘Fuck you. I’m still here. It’s going to take more than that to kill me’ kind of thing. So that’s the sort of general spirit.

“I find recording quite intimidating just because when you’re playing live, you get to kind of reinvent every night, d’ya know what I mean? If you play a song badly or in a way that doesn’t quite work one night, then you can play it again the next night and swap things around. With recording, you’re capturing definitive versions on acetate and there’s something that’s just quite scary about that – that’s how everyone’s gonna hear it forever.”