Beautiful Days Festival, Ottery St. Mary, Devon, Sunday, 23rd August 2009. My time in the music business affords me some perks. A great friend of Deb’s had never been to a festival and wanted to go to one for her birthday. So I managed to swing weekend passes and camping (in the backstage camping area I might add, far more civilised !) for The Levellers Beautiful Days Festival. In a working capacity I hate festivals, you get to do what normally takes you a whole day in 45 minutes and it’s generally raining. Beautiful Days is one of the better UK festivals so it was a good weekend, not working, seeing friends and wall to wall live music.

We’d planned to leave early on the Sunday (The Levellers always close the main stage and I’m really not a fan) but on the afternoon it was sunny and warm and all very convivial. If you’ve ever been to Beautiful Days you’ll know that the Main Stage arena is a natural amphitheatre and we were sat at the back at the top of a hill, in the sunshine with a group of friends talking and drinking. I had my back to the stage but whoever the fella was on stage at the time kept singing something or playing something that caught my ear and eventually caused me to turn around and pay him the attention he deserved. I asked if anyone had a running order for the day and that’s when I first came across the name Frank Turner. As soon as he’d finished I paid a visit to the onsite CD shop and purchased copies of “Sleep Is For The Week” and “Love, Ire & Song” making a mental note to play them in the car on the way home that evening (this was back in the mists of time when cars had CD players). What I heard on the way home confirmed what I’d seen at the festival and on getting home I was happy to find Frank was due to release a new album (“Poetry Of The Deed”) just a week or so later.

Now I know I have a lot of friends who are big, big Frank Turner fans so I’ll start with something less controversial to them than what will follow. “Love, Ire & Song” is a truly superb record, one of my very favourite albums of the 21st century, the songwriting and lyrics are seriously, seriously good and it’s a record I play regularly to this day. At the time I really thought I’d found me someone who could rival Damien Dempsey in my musical affections. The controversial bit ? In the 16 years since its release Frank hasn’t produced anything that even approaches the greatness of “Love, Ire & Song”.

The album starts with a song that I will happily argue is one the greatest I’ve ever heard. “I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous” (I have no idea what that means) is stunning in every way that you can think of. It starts quietly with just Frank and his acoustic guitar “Let’s begin at the beginning, We’re lovers and we’re losers…” and from that point, nothing different really happens, the chord structure remains exactly the same all the way through, there is no middle eight or instrumental break but it builds, and it builds and it builds in the same way that The Waterboys “A Pagan Place” does until it reaches a shattering crescendo and Frank leaves you with the final lines and a single guitar chord

“After all the loving and the losing, For the heroes and the pioneers

The only thing that's left to do… Is get another round in at the bar…” <chord>

The album then proceeds through another 11 songs and there’s not a dud on here, every single one is a stunner. If at first the songs title was enough to draw me in the second song “Reasons Not To Be An Idiot” sealed the deal. Frank sings songs about his ill friends (“Long Live The Queen”…”She said "I know I'm dying, but I'm not finished just yet, I’m dying for a drink and for a cigarette”), long lost girlfriends (“Better Half”…”I know what she looks like, her face and skin, her smell and the rest, I know the feel of her soul, but God help me I just cannot find her address”), getting old before your time (“Photosynthesis”…”And if all you ever do with your life is photosynthesise, Then you deserve every hour of these sleepless nights that you waste wondering when you're gonna die”) and the hateful environment that is the airport departure lounge (“Jet Lag”…”Airports make me sad, I’m sure they shouldn't all be the same, But they're just landing pads, Boring tourist shopping chains” OK the song is really about travelling the world as a musician but I’ve always hated airports so I’m gonna highlight that bit).

I really have always wanted to like Frank Turner much more than I do but hey, most people don’t manage to make an album this good and I’m glad Frank walked into my life when he did and that I got to fall for this bloody wonderful record.

I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous - https://youtu.be/NcQ2XmNvjk4?si=wIZrabt-D5pKBTaI