Frank Turner announces Portsmouth Guildhall date in 2023 - tickets on sale today | Big Interview

At the time of writing he is on his 2,694th gig, by the time he makes it back to his home county of Hampshire for the final night of his current tour with his band The Sleeping Souls, it will be show 2,703.

He has now also announced a further run of shows for next year – including Portsmouth Guildhall on February 7.

And although he’s played numerous UK festivals in the interim, he hasn’t toured the UK since, as he puts it, ‘the roof caved in’ in March 2020.

‘It's been a miserable couple of years to be a touring musician,’ Frank tells The Guide. ‘It's really important to say collectively that the live industry around the world is not,’ he affects a forced jaunty tone, ‘completely fine now.

‘There was a lot of damage done in the past couple of years and the industry is still limping, and will be for some time.‘Nevertheless I'm trying to come at things from an approach of gratitude. If I find myself on a stage in front of an audience of people who are excited for me to be there, then I'll be thankful for that.

‘It's the old cliché of you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone, but I know now for the first time in my adult life to have that taken away, and therefore I'm very, very grateful to have it back.’

When we talk Frank has recently returned from a gruelling US tour – playing all 50 states in 50 days.

‘It was mental – and extremely hard work, and I spent a lot of the tour wondering who I could blame for the nightmare I was living through – then realising it was entirely my fault, because the idea for the tour was mine! We're only the third people to ever do it, and I now understand why we're only the third people to do it...

‘But it's a cool achievement. I had 47 states ticked off before the tour and now I've got them all. And for the record, my booking agent did say we could just do three shows, and I said "No, no, no!" But about halfway through I was like, “Man, three shows sounds like a great idea...”

‘We did have a great time though, it was nice to be back in America properly again. I've toured America a lot, I love it over there, but it's a pretty fraught time in America which is worrying and sad, but for what it's worth we did some great shows, and I got to see some old friends and make some new ones.’

The tour finished in Hawaii, but after the exhausting run didn’t stay to relax.

‘You kind of have to either start or finish there because it's so far away from everywhere else. A few people said, presumably you're having a holiday? But I just wanted to come home. I hadn't seen my wife in two months and pretty much everyone in my band and crew has kids and they were missing their families and their homes and all the rest. I came home and had myself a little staycation instead.’

Not only is this currently his first UK tour in two-and-a-half years, it is celebrating his first ever number one album. FTHC, his ninth long-player, made it to the top spot on its release in February.

‘It was a relief,’ he admits. ‘My records went number two, number two, number three, number two and then finally number one. If it had been another number two...’ he sighs.

‘For some of those it was a targeted campaign to try and get a number one, and some it wasn't, but in this instance it was just like: “Come on, let's see if we can do this!” And it was a fair amount of effort, I will admit.

‘It's a funny old thing, because when I was a kid I aggressively didn't care about the charts, that was almost like a point of identity for me, being – and this is a word I'm trying to revive – a grebo (an early-’90s alternative music scene), baggy combat shorts and all that! We didn't care about the charts. So there's a part of me for which it's not that emotionally resonant, but at the same time – I got a number one! I've got a little brass statuette with a one in it!’

Although he couldn’t physically tour during the pandemic, Turner embraced livestreaming, putting on a series of 27 gigs from his home, each supporting a different independent music venue, raising nearly £300,000 in the process. He was given the Music Venue Trust’s Outstanding Achievement award for his efforts.

‘They are venues that for the most part I owed a debt of gratitude to in the first place because I played there when no one cared about me and my music.

‘That whole thing felt like a debt repaid, really. I'll probably struggle to pay for a drink in quite a few of those venues, and that's okay!’ he laughs. ‘Some of them were for places I'd not played, but places like The Cavern, Nambucca and The Tunbridge Wells Forum, these places, without them I wouldn't have a career.’

Two Hampshire venues were on the receiving end of these gigs – The Railway in Winchester and Southampton’s The Joiners. As someone who grew up in the Meon Valley, he knows them both well.

‘I have a slightly odd relationship with them – there's a bit of romantic rivalry, a bit of a love triangle between me, The Railway and The Joiners! I love both of them. I know the guys who run The Joiners better, but when I was a kid, no one came to Winchester on tour. But The Railway was always there and valiantly flying the flag for live music. There were those rare occasions when a band would come to Winchester on tour and people would come up from Southampton and be: "Ugh, I had to get the train!"

‘And those of us in Winchester were like: "Welcome to our world!"’

The latest album saw Frank turn back to some of his noisier roots while also getting more personal than ever before.

‘The general broad-strokes creative decision to make a more aggressive, more "punk rock" record was already in place before the pandemic. I was starting to investigate that line of attack and then there was so much time in 2020, I wrote a lot more songs than I would have otherwise done, and I got much more into recording technology, which meant I demoed in much more depth.

‘There was time to go down any roads I was going down, and that applies to the music and to the brutality of the lyrics – the kind of rawness of the lyrics. I was going that way, but was I going to go that far without there being a lockdown and all the rest of it? I doubt it.

‘I had started chatting about what my new record was going to be like before I finished writing it, so I deliberately rhetorically backed myself in to a corner by telling everyone I was going to make a punk record next.

‘You and I both know that thing where a band yaks on about how different their new record is and it turns out to be exactly the same – so now I had to do this. I had to walk the walk!’

The emotional core of the album comes in a three song run – Fatherless, My Bad, Miranda – which looks at his childhood and his relationship with his father.

Frank explains: ‘I turned 40 while making this, and one of the few consolations about growing older is that you're more secure in who you are, less looking over your shoulder – there's no point in wasting your energy.

‘For example, the endless albatross of my education.’ Frank was sent to Summer Fields boarding school and then went attended Eton on a scholarship – something at odds with being an anti-establishment punk-rocker and something his detractors have often seized upon.

‘I've spent forever going out of my way to not talk about it – I hated it, I didn't want it to define who I am and I politically disagree with it, my approach was therefore to not talk about it. But what I've discovered through my life is that me not talking about it hasn't stopped every other person having an opinion about it.

‘It's got to the point where I get to have my two cents about it, and a lot is to do with my dad and my relationship with him. When I was younger, he very much wanted me to go to those schools and be a certain type of person, in quite an angry and forceful way, and I hated it. So My Bad is about where I went to school and thought it was vile, and it was traumatic. I got kicked out of the house when I was eight years old. I know that sounds melodramatic, but it's not untrue. I ceased to have my own bedroom at home. I lived somewhere else from when I was eight, and I did not enjoy that. I would not do that to a child myself.

‘Now that I am 40 I am an "established artist” for want of a less naff phrase, and I'm married, and I moved out of the big city and all this – we've got a garden now!’ he stage-whispers, ‘Don't tell the punks...’

‘For me, rather than that meaning I'm fat and comfortable and like high-waisted jeans, because I'm more secure as an artist I'm able to fish in deeper waters because I'm more secure about the land I'm standing on when I do that.

‘I was not remotely ready to discuss my childhood in a public forum, or indeed with my wife or myself until comparatively recently.’

There has also been quite a lot of attention for the song Miranda – the name of his parent who recently came out as a trans woman. It was, as Frank puts it ‘not something I saw coming.’

‘The decision to write about it was an interesting one for me, because the public trans debate can be extremely ill-tempered and toxic. I was very careful when I was writing the song to make sure I wasn't speaking on anyone's behalf – I don't know what it's like to be trans, I don't know what it's like to deal with that as a struggle.

‘Creatively, that song is far from metaphorical. It’s literally the following things happened in the following order – that struck me as the best approach. I'm not going to tell anyone what to think or do, but this happened to me.

‘That song is not really aimed at changing anybody's minds, but probably the most beautiful thing I've had back from that song is a dear friend of mine, he told me his parents had been pretty iffy on the whole trans thing, and that song had forced them to rethink their take on the situation because they like me and they like my music.

‘I don't want to talk about social utility for my music because that's navel-gazing of the nth degree, but there is some utility to that, and I am quite proud of that.’

Frank Turner and The Sleeping Souls, supported by Lottery Winners and Wilswood Buoys are at Portsmouth Guildhall on February 7. Tickets £36.95. Go to portsmouthguildhall.org.uk.