Live Fast Die Old
The last two years Frank Turner has played here it’s been in the Lock Up tent and he pretty much packed it out on both occasions. Today however it’s a real step up to the NME/Radio 1 tent, this tent is huge and it’s by far the biggest stage and potentially the biggest crowd we’ve seen him play to yet. We should know never to worry about Mr Turner by now however, the tent fills up rapidly and the reaction he receives as the band take the stage is nothing short of amazing!
Kicking off with ‘I Knew Prufrock Before He Was Famous’ it’s quite a sight to hear such a big crowd singing along with every line and thinking back only a few short years to his first solo dates the difference couldn’t be more marked. He seems unphased by the step up in crowd size but then having recently returned from playing to occasionally hostile crowds in America supporting The Offspring this partisan mass should be a breeze! Pretty much every song gets the same treatment; he needn‘t bother singing for much of the set as ‘Father’s Day’ is followed by ‘Long Live the Queen’ (which receives the biggest cheer of the set) and new single ‘The Road’.
It’s inevitable that as his popularity grows that feeling of intimacy is going to diminish and so it proves with the between song chat cut down to more basic introductions. That’s really the only down side however as ‘Photosynthesize’ and ‘Reasons Not to be an Idiot’ ensure that the mass sing along continues. His voice strains a couple of times but that’s all part of the appeal and the performance, pushing himself to the edges. It’s all over too soon as the band leave Turner standing alone for the traditional ending of ‘The Ballad of Me and My Friends’. I told him to do a bad gig once in a while so we can write something different and stop coming over like sycophants but the bastard won’t listen, he nailed it again.