Frank Turner & the Sleeping Souls// UEA
"I'm gonna spend all of my life on the road"
It's early in this spectacle when Frank Turner proclaims a welcome to his 1607th show, and that little number contains much of what anyone really needs to know about the restless frontman and his backing band, The Sleeping Souls. The journeyman status of Turner is well known and well loved. Many call him the hardest working artist on the live scene but it hardly seems a chore for the Winchester singer. Bringing searing heart and bucketfuls of acoustic attack to the stage, you have to believe him completely when he takes the mic and breathes "I'm gonna spend all of my life on the road" during outstanding new track The Next Storm.
Tonight is everything you'd expect. All skinny swagger and no-nonsense vocal, Turner and his band of merry men enthral a packed out LCR from the first blasts of Try This At Home, through to the final utterances of Four Simple Words. This venue dazzles as a place for live music, and each track is accompanied by a backing of full-voiced fans brimming with good will and years of Turner's guttural lyrics entrenched in their minds. For twenty tracks I'm in a mass of singing, clapping, dancing disciples. I'm covered in other people's beer and it's great.
There is brand new material on display, scattered through the set - where, naturally, the singalong is paused - but these tracks aren't jarring in the least. Turner's brand of sound make these five numbers instantly accessible but still tantalisingly fresh. It's a credit to him that they went down so well, though there always remains a niggle that you'll never really be surprised by what is squeezed from speakers on evenings like these. In fact, the biggest curveball comes when Turner airs a song that dates back to his days with Million Dead. Smiling At Strangers On Trains is a glorious gut-punch of a throwback, emotive as it ever was and a reminder of the brilliant rawness on which his enduring popularity has been built.
What you see here is an assured performer with a tangible connection to those he plays for and an enduring confidence in the art of taking on the oscillations of life's fortunes with a scruffy, shouty realism. All the things you think you'd get from this show are delivered with gusto, but rarely anything else. That said, if there are people who, musically, want Turner to put out something more, I don't know, 'refined', I think they are perhaps missing the point. Moment to moment there is little to astonish, but it comes together in a breathless totality. Frank and The Sleeping Souls have brought their show to town in sterling form, and we can be pretty sure that the next umpteen gigs will all shine just as brightly.
