Fresh off the beer line at the Frank Turner show at London's O 2 Arena, three punk boys look for the exit. Show's not half over. What's the deal, boys?

"Frank Turner," says the leader, "is bullshit. We came for Flogging Molly. The opening act."

"Bloody hell," says the one with a shaved head, expressing remorse on his mate's behalf.

"Look," says the leader, "some people like that upbeat, romantic, soppy stuff."

"Bloody hell!" yells the third. "Show her yer shirt now!"

The leader Supermans open his jacket to expose a heather-gray T-shirt, two sizes too large, with Frank Turner's face sketched into a romantic, moody pose that looks down, possibly, at tears that have fallen upon his guitar.

"Listen," he says: "The bloody T-shirt came with the bloody ticket."

"Ya, it's true," confirms the nerd. "Plus a shot glass and a pendant. See?"

"Anyhow, least I listened to it. This restless bastard"—the leader points to the shaved head—"had his iPod in his ear the whole time, blasting Leviathan, for fuck's sake."

There's a pause, and at last the leader says, "Look, he's all right, right? The girls know all the words to all his songs. But we're blokes, right? Just regular blokes. We came here looking for something else."

UNDER THE O 2

Frank Turner leads us through a warren of gray rooms beneath the same stage on which Taylor Swift recently played. His friends ask which seats she sat on so that they can rub their bums across them.

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We sit at a table in the heart of the catering room and eat macaroni and cheese the yellow of school buses and the flavor of vinegar. Turner loves it. He squirts some ketchup onto the plate. "I've done—he looks into the air as if to count—one thousand five hundred and twenty … six solo shows now." But he doesn't have to count, because it seems he has a mental tally going. Every time the houselights dim, he clicks it and goes, And there's another.

He's good-looking and his eyes are warm and he has a scruffy beard. He's wearing a white T-shirt, and there are tattoos along his arms and fists.

This is probably the first time you've heard of him—unless you saw the lineup for this year's Coachella—but he has already headlined big venues in the U. S., like House of Blues in Boston, and in the UK he played to a sellout crowd at Wembley Arena, about ten thousand people. He even played the Olympics in London. But a lot of people don't know his name. A British friend living in the States who goes to Barnes & Noble every month to park on the floor with a latte and read every music magazine hasn't heard of him. He says, "I even asked my friends. Nothing."

Might be because Frank Turner made a wholesale change—modifying his sound from riotous punk to pleasing guitar riffs, changing gears from punk to country/folk/punk. Still punk, sure. But the flavor changed and so did the lyrics. He used to grab a microphone and hold it across his angry mouth sideways. He screamed on a rocky English beach in a video. Now in his videos he's on another beach, barefoot, wearing a vest and strumming a guitar on a dining-room chair on the smooth sand.

In a pre-evolutionary Frank Turner video for "I Am the Party," he sounds angry, and the comments on YouTube are like, THIS is the same Frank Turner as the one today? Now I get why people like him.

He didn't, however, come from some Sex Pistols' back alley. Turner, thirty-two, grew up upper-middle class in Winchester. It's been reported that his dad carried on a clandestine affair with another woman for years, a situation Turner learned about only a few years ago, but he demurs when I ask about it, saying he wants to protect his mum. He attended Eton, same class as Prince William, which in England—especially in the "fuckin' punk community"—means a ton of hell, but he went on scholarship. He wasn't a fancy rich kid. He looked like Screech, according to his best friend, and went around saying "football's for twats" to Arsenal and Manchester United fans alike. Suddenly the two opposing sides had something to be united over and kicked his skinny arse into some bushes.

The little boy grew up into someone a little more raw than his background might have foretold, fronting a hardcore punk band, the Million Dead; sporting Jesus hair; and shouting to small, terribly angry audiences about Margaret Thatcher ruining the kids.

But then he met Jay, who performs as Beans on Toast. Jay taught him Townes Van Zandt and the Band and Creedence. Later, when Turner came home from a tour with the Million Dead, which was already beginning to crumble, he'd play Neil Young covers at Sensible Sundays. Instead of, you know, Leviathan.

And so transpired what Turner calls a natural evolution, but what a subsection of fans from the Million Dead days refers to as "a fuckin' bloody sellout situation."

"Sellout," Turner says, "has become a tag that kids can throw effortlessly at bands they're pissed at."

He says there's an innate suspicion in the community about the music industry trying to turn what is truly a rebel home in the woods into another tappable market. Sometimes that suspicion turns into a knee-jerk reaction, an anger over any kind of success or change. "Strangely, then," Turner explains, "punk becomes a conservative statement, which is not what punk was supposed to be."

"Yeah," he says, picking up a sticky bun, "these days, some of my fans would be utterly disgusted with me, if they still even think of me."

Now he sings of breakups that wreck you. He's always loved a good breakup record: Bruce's Tunnel of Love, Frightened Rabbit's The Midnight Organ Flight. Arab Strap's he calls "excoriating" and "brutally honest." So he went and made his own. But first he went and broke a heart.

Shaun Alcock

He wrote the bulk of his latest album, Tape Deck Heart, from the point of view of the bad guy. In the demimonde of the breakup record, he says, the heartbreaker's perspective was a mostly missing demographic. The one who says, "Look, I gotta leave you, and I'm doing it now, like this, fast and hard, pulling the rug out from under the futon, as it were, for your sake and not mine."

If you've ever broken a lady's heart and want to remember the feeling, only in a far-off way that lets you enjoy a protein shake on your way back from the gym, then listen. It's fizzy and pained and promises that cherry blossoms are around the corner. New girls in new cities. Your career.

You get to this spot in your trajectory and I wonder how many more blowjobs per month that means. Is there a way to quantify fame? Or does the number stay the same but the quality of hair on the head of the girl at your waist improve?

"Look," he says, taking a polite sip of cola, "it's something to do after a show.

"But. It can be boring. No, it can be worse than boring. It can be … soul-destroying. You know what Mike Tyson said of all the women he banged? He said that they were each taking a piece from him. I feel similarly."

Someone heard "Anymore" somewhere and sent it to the ex and she rang him up and, as you might imagine, excoriated him. But you have to listen to all of it, Turner says. "Recovery," "Plain Sailing Weather," "Broken Piano"—as a whole, it tells a story. Anyway, he and the ex have had dinner. It's fine now.

Of course it's fine now. His songs said it would be. In his music, Frank Turner is either receiving redemption or delivering it. Redemption for everyone.

Shaun Alcock

ON THE FLOOR

The major archetype at this show is a twenty-seven-year-old assistant in an office. Indiscriminate, friendly, homey. Young and not exactly inspired, but not the opposite either. Not hardcore. Having a good Wednesday night at the show. Having a beer after. Going to work in the morning. Eating a Danish and skipping the gym.

You know, a bloke.

The U. S. is three juice fasts away from having Tape Deck Heart on its iPod. And by the time Turner fully arrives here, a lot of the backstory won't matter much. Maybe being hardcore punk wasn't true to Frank Turner and to his path. Anyway, his lyrics were not that wild and angry, even then. They were conscientiously taking the leadership to task, but with a rough sound, like a prim uniformed boy raising his hand at Eton and shouting, "EXCUSE ME, BUT MAY I GO TO THE BLOODY BATHROOM?!" These days, anyhow, the angst in the districts is not so overt. It is sore and quiet and takes out the recycling, so maybe this middle-management, middle-core voice suits the future better. This idol doesn't bang a girl every night or indiscriminately despise government ministers. He drinks a Throat Coat before a show and ices his back and reads a Rod Stewart autobiography in the bunk of his dark, clean, fuckless bus.

The guy next to me says he saw him in Peterborough, in the east of England, where he played to three people. "Three," he says, sloshing a gin and tonic with import. "He fuckin' deserves this."

Then the lights go dim.

ONSTAGE

My name's Frank Turner, and it's a real pleasure to be here! he roars into the mic. His white shirt is lit up like a monument at night. There are pyrotechnics. More people listen than text.

He looks recently showered. He used to sleep on couches with the stuffing spilling out and the whole continent smelled of shit beer. His hair was longer and he drank more. Nowadays drinking's not as fun as succeeding.

He's in Climb Mode.

His guitar is no longer just an instrument. It has an air about it. It's like the two of them might have a beer tonight and discuss who's more enchanting.

He used to be in a punk band, but now he wants to leave a folk song as his legacy. "A folk song," he said. "To be remembered through the ages." He pictures a group of boys singing his song around a campfire in the south of England—boys not unlike the one he was, but boys who will grow up to be blokes unlike the one he has become. There are a thousand roads that lead to Rome, but his road is now paved before him, and he has cleared two lanes, for his two buses.

The entire mammoth place is screaming for him. The floor is humming. All of England seems to be waiting, and all the world behind it. Every flag is represented, every coat of arms, every socioeconomic what-have-you, every transgendered chat room, and the room is howling now, spitting with desire, can you feel it, well, yes, you can, and before he fully submerges into that warm milk bath of glory, his guitar seems to jab him in the kidney, as if to say, Let's go, man.

Turner closes his eyes. And you can almost hear the weighty click: one thousand five hundred and twenty-SEVEN.

Lesssssgo!!!!

Published in the May 2014 issue, part of our music extravaganza

Lisa Taddeo Lisa Taddeo is an author and two-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize—her book Three Women can be purchased here.

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