Frank Turner is a singer, songwriter and author who went from fronting post-hardcore band Million Dead to a solo career that has now passed 3,000 live shows. His tenth studio album, Undefeated, was released in 2024, followed in 2025 by The Next Ten Years, a collection of rarities, covers, collaborations and acoustic recordings.
Find out more at frank-turner.com
This interview began as an experiment: what happens when the Tarot DMs format leaves the messenger app and escapes via email?
Frank Turner was about to find out.
23/08/2026 - Finbarre:
Thank you for being the first brave soul to try out this format, letting three tarot cards of mine loose in your inbox.
I’m going to send you three cards, the first being the Anchor card for this month, a card that all of my guests will receive.
And it is...
The Hierophant
This is a card of tradition and the passing down of established knowledge. The Hierophant represents the structures that shape our world, conventions and the belief systems we are handed. It represents lineage and asks the question: “Who holds the authority to teach?”
For someone who has spent over twenty years involved in the chaos of punk and the heritage of folk music, I would love to know:
What have you had to push against to get where you are now?
24/08/2026 - Frank Turner:
I’m cautious, off the bat, about painting my life story too much as a tale of woe or hardship overcome. In the broad spectrum of human experience, I have led a charmed life from a comfortable start, and I want to begin by acknowledging that obvious fact.
All that throat-clearing aside, there are some challenges faced, and things I have had to push against, in my time.
I’d start by saying that I’ve had to push against the expectations of my background, and more specifically my parents. I was not raised to be... this.
I was an academic kid, pushed to be such, and there was a general feeling that I would do something more “respectable” with my life than I have.
As a kid, I got into metal, which put the literal fear of god into my folks. Once that progressed to punk rock and hardcore, their concerns graduated from being aesthetic and moral to being social and political.
I was banned from buying records or going to shows, and my musicality, once it moved on from middle-class piano lessons, was discouraged and lobbied against at every turn.
I reacted by essentially disappearing from my parents’ world and, metaphorically, running off to join the circus.
At every stage of the formative years of my life and career, the only person who thought there was any wisdom or promise in my obsession with the music I love was me. My family recoiled in horror, my friends, such as they were, laughed.
The next problem that arose, against which I continue to push every day, was the limitations of my own innate talents and abilities.
I’m not a hugely gifted musician, and less so a singer.
I used a combination of bloody-mindedness and brute force to teach myself the rudiments I needed to begin making sounds that weren’t completely without merit, but it’s safe to say that my gift, to the extent I have one, is as a writer and communicator, not as a musician.
Day on day I still strive to improve my skillset, with the eventual dream of qualifying one day as average from a technical standpoint.
The point of those skills is to facilitate communication, of course, and on that score I’ve done OK. But I was not Mozart or Alex Turner, not a relation, contrary to some of the sillier internet rumours I’ve come across. I had to graft to get to where I am as a musician.
Speaking of graft, I have not had the fortune of the obvious career path.
No shade on those who have, but my success did not come through big record deals, magazine fawning or radio station, remember them, attention.
The industry as a whole has always regarded me as something of an interloper, at least in part because of my educational background, which is ironic, as the main complaint about that unwanted part of my CV is the unfair advantage it allegedly gives me.
There have been moments of grudging coverage here and there, but for the most part I built everything I have the hard way, simply because there was no other option.
Finally, like everyone, I push against the constraints of being human day on day. Of getting older, of self-doubt, of irrelevance or obsolescence.
But that hardly makes me unique.
24/08/2026 - Finbarre:
Thank you Frank for opening the first card with such a heartfelt and honest sharing of your life.
I smiled when you mentioned radio stations. I used to work at Manchester’s ALL FM way back when, and looking at the landscape today, it feels like another world.
Back then there were so many gatekeepers, the magazine fawning, the prescribed paths you mentioned bypassing.
Hearing how you metaphorically ran off to join the circus and built your career the hard way, simply because the industry viewed you as an interloper, brings us nicely to your next card.
Your journey, especially that sheer bloody-mindedness and brute force you used to forge your skills, perfectly embodies the energy of the...
King of Wands
In tarot, this King is someone who takes a spark of an idea and wills it into reality through grit and vision, all without permission.
Your relentless daily graft to hone your craft despite self-doubt is pure King of Wands energy. It is about building a big bonfire that people want to gather around.
Which brings me to question two:
What is it that keeps your bonfire burning?
27/08/2026 - Frank Turner:
This is a good question, and one I’ve asked myself many times.
For the most part, I don’t operate on a daily basis feeling especially driven, but people have often remarked on my work schedule being at one extreme.
And I have to say that as I get a little older and a little further from some of my earlier exploits, I do look back at that younger man, increasingly a stranger, and think he comes off as a little manic at times.
That said, I have always believed there are 24 hours in every day, and I have a habit of just tackling an issue, a problem, a task, head on and straight away.
Why wait?
Sometimes that possibly means my work is rushed, but there’s certainly more of it to pick through.
I guess in part I’m animated by a sense of limited time, mortality and so on. I wasn’t especially haunted by loss as a child, though I’ve had my share in more recent years, but nonetheless it’s self-evident that there are limits on what any one person can get done, so don’t fuck about.
I also have a sense of a debt, on some levels.
So many great songwriters started out with me and didn’t end up with the career I have, that I feel duty-bound to live out this life-path to its maximum, on their behalf as well as my own.
I have been blessed with luck in my life and I don’t want to be churlish about it, or take it for granted.
But ultimately, I think I’ve been driven by a sense of having something to say, ideas to communicate.
That should be at the bottom of all art, I think.
I didn’t ask for the songs I’ve written to arrive in the way and at the rate that they did, but they arrived nonetheless, and I wanted to share them.
When and if that changes, my drive may change with it.
We shall see.
27/08/2026 - Finbarre:
I was moved by your mention of the debt owed to peers who didn’t get to see their own journeys through.
Honouring the paths they could have taken by sprinting along your own as if they were still in the race is a fascinating way to see a career.
I was also struck by your point that your songs rarely arrive when expected. That uninvited arrival of ideas leads us directly to your third and final card.
The Moon
La Lune rules the subconscious, the dream state, and the peculiar deep-sea moods that swim far beneath the surface of our waking lives.
It governs the things we feel instinctively but can’t pin down easily.
As the mirror opposite of the Strength card, it asks us to step off the road, run into the woods howling and maybe go feral for a while.
The writer John Higgs chose this card. In his recent book Lynchian: The Spell of David Lynch, Higgs explores how Lynch champions the dream-like and unexplained. He advocates for letting a mystery remain a mystery. Rather than peeping behind the curtain.
The Moon reflects this, thriving on the rum and the uncanny.
Since you mentioned that your ideas often swim up from somewhere unseen, here is your final question:
How do you catch your fleeting inspiration without overthinking it and breaking the spell?
30/08/2026 - Frank Turner:
This is the million-dollar, well, maybe less these days, question for any songwriter or creative person.
Songwriting is both an art and a craft.
The craft side can be examined, practised, taught, trained. The other side, the “inspiration”, as opposed to perspiration, side of the cliché remains somehow ineluctable, and perhaps always should.
Whilst you can train the craft side of your creativity, learning scales, techniques, chord shapes, studying other writers and so on, I do think there is some work you can do for the inspiration part.
I think you can work on putting yourself in the way of good ideas, even if you’ll never entirely be able to predict where they come from or when.
The best metaphor for this I know is fishing.
You can buy the right equipment and learn the techniques, but you can also work out good spots on the bank, good times of day and a good mindset.
Ultimately, whether or not the fish, ideas, come remains unpredictable, but it is possible to increase your odds.
All that said, to actually answer your question, at some point you have to remember the mystery, the impenetrability of the task at hand.
When good ideas start to flow, there’s a moment where you let go of the wheel, to mix my metaphors to breaking point.
The best stuff retains a sense of being unstudied, free-flowing.
Sometimes I write and rewrite a verse or a melody for years, but I often find that the best stuff is the stuff that retains its original form from when it first showed itself to me.
Don’t overthink, let it be what it wants to be.
Hope that all makes sense.
Alas, I don’t have a tarot deck, I’m afraid. I’ll leave the picking to you.
31/08/2026 - Finbarre:
Thank you Frank!
I was mulling over which card to choose for you and, after listening again to your track Get Better, I’m going to pick the...
Seven of Wands
It has such big “You Shall Not Pass” energy.
The card shows a man standing on high ground, outnumbered, fiercely swinging his staff to fend off six others thrusting up at him from a ditch.
He is in the thick of a “fight for four square feet of land like a mean old son of a bitch”.
You nailed it with your answers throughout this chain.
The traditions of the Hierophant are where the song starts, but the Seven of Wands is where we leave.
Punk-rock defiance.
Refusing to give up the hill.
Thank you again for being so generous with your time and thoughts.
04/09/2026 - Frank Turner:
Thanks Finbarre, was fun to do.