Turner - The Road Beneath My Feet

First published in the United States in hardcover in 2016 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

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New York, NY 10012
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2015 by Frank Turner

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-4683-1328-4

I n the fall of 2005, Frank Turner was virtually unheard of. His rock band, Million Dead, was finishing up a grueling tour and had agreed that their show on September 23 would be their last. The entry on the bands schedule for September 24 read simply: Get a job.

Cut to July 2012the London Olympics, where Turner and his backing band, The Sleeping Souls, are playing the pre-show, after having headlined sold-out arenas across the UK and Europe for months.

The Road Beneath My Feet is the unvarnished story of how Turner went from crashing on couches at house shows to performing for thousands of screaming fans who roar his every lyric back at him. Told through tour reminiscences, this is a blisteringly honest tale of a rock career thats taken Turner from drug-fuelled house parties and the grimy club scene to international prominence and acclaim. But more that that, it is the intimate account of what its like to spend your life constantly on the road, sleeping on floors, invariably jetlagged, all for the love of playing music.

i remember noise. walls
of feedback, ringing ears,
a sense of defeat

For Lexie, Josh Burdette and Robb Skipper, and all the others who ended up heading home.

You hold in your hands a book, a book that I wrote, all by myself. This is an unlikely but pleasantly surprising turn of events for me. For a start, I was always a bookworm as a kid, and I still read incessantly now, so to actually have one that has my name and ugly mug emblazoned across the cover is pretty cool. I will be giving many, many copies to friends and family (and maybe enemies too) next Christmas.

One reason I was not expecting this book to exist is that Im not generally much keen on autobiography as a genre. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this Ben Franklins, for example, or Churchills but I feel like you either need to have won a war or be knocking on deaths door to justify the exercise. I havent won any wars and I have no plans to shuffle off this mortal coil just yet, so when the idea of my writing a book was first floated by my friend Dan from Portland, I laughed it off.

After my initial short shrift, the point was raised that Im a public, vocal fan of Henry Rollins (which I am) and have read many of his published tour diaries and travel memoirs. It was also suggested that the book need not be an autobiography in the strict sense, starting with birth and ending in the nursing home; it could be a specific set of recollections about a certain period of time. I felt my defences weakening.

The next stage of the process was to convince me that anyone, anywhere, would be interested in me rambling on about the minutiae of my experiences at great length. While I obviously spend a fair amount of my professional life engaged in self-promotion, that relates to the music I make, not to what I had for breakfast or where I slept.

I wrote a sample entry or two and sent them off to some close friends for comment. I was expecting the worst, but even my friend Evan, historically my harshest critic (he has to do something to pass the time), came back saying it was an interesting read.

And so it began. The project ebbed and flowed, as these things tend to do. It took a lot longer than I thought it would (I feel like I owe professional writers an apology for underestimating their trade). It took me through troves of old emails, blog entries, flyers, posters, conversations with friends, photos and long late-night sessions of racking my brain, trying desperately to remember what, if anything, might have happened on the date in question.

And now, at last, you have the finished book in your grasp. I remain a little nervous about the whole exercise, but I hope you enjoy it. There are a couple of short disclaimers before you dive in. Im aware, painfully so, that Im incredibly fortunate to do what I do for a living; Im also not under the impression that its earthshakingly significant, in the grand scheme of things. Hopefully I dont come off as overly self-pitying or self-important. Im grateful to all the people who have helped me on my way and if Ive left anyone out, I apologize, profusely. In particular Im grateful to you, dear reader, for being interested enough in what I have to say to justify the whole project and thus letting me get my name on the front of a book.

And finally, this is my version of what happened. In fairness, I was pretty pissed for quite a lot of this and long months and years on the road can roll into each other in the cosy haze of hindsight. Ive done my best to be fair and accurate, but if you were there and remember it differently, or just generally think Im talking bollocks, Ill back you up in the argument in the pub.

Right, enough disclaimers, on with the show.

MILLION DEAD, SHOW # 247

The Joiners Arms, Southampton, UK, 23 September 2005

I remember noise. Walls of feedback, ringing ears, a sense of defeat.

Million Dead were nearly done.

Wed decided to break up a few weeks before the tour, so everyone knew that this was the end. Wed even announced it as a farewell tour, and as a result the shows had generally been packed out and feverish. Ironically I think these were probably the best shows we ever played. Wed been at the top of our game onstage fast, visceral, tight, intense. The same cannot be said, alas, for how things were back in the dressing room or in the van.

What to say about Million Dead? It was the defining experience of my late adolescence, my early twenties it was my formative musical experience. But we were also just another jobbing underground hardcore band that made some small ripples and fell apart. By the end of it, relations within the group had broken down completely and wed essentially retreated into two opposing camps, with Jamie Grime (our stage tech) and Graham Kay (our sound guy) caught as innocent civilians in the middle. The final tour was characterized by moody silences, sharp words and nihilistic excess, especially on my part. The tour laminates had all the dates listed, and then, on the twenty-fourth (the day after the tour finished), it said Get a Job. Talk about focusing the mind.

The night before, wed played a show at The Underworld in Camden, London. We filmed the show and looking back now, I still think that together we were fantastic sharp and aggressive, melodic and anthemic. We played what I consider to be probably our best show to 600 or so people crammed against the stage and then Id got titanically fucked up (again) afterwards. The final journey south wasnt a fun one.

I grew up in Winchester, which isnt a city on many touring schedules, so Southampton was generally the place to go for shows. In fact, Id seen my first ever show at The Joiners in 1995 or thereabouts: a band called Snug, who happened to feature a youthful Ed Harcourt on guitar (more on him much, much later). Million Dead had played there many times before, but there was a sense of anticlimax hanging over everything. As well as being a smaller venue than The Underworld, the previous evening we had managed to skirt around the issues because of the fact we had one more show to go. Now that the end was staring us in the face and there was no more road to run, a dark cloud descended. No more pretending.