The Dream is Over (Again)

I was -15 years old when The Beatles broke up, so I couldn’t very well shed tears of artistic bereavement for their sakes. I have liked bands since; some I have even loved, particularly in recent times – the present one seems to have turned into the year of gigging dangerously, and I like that. But there’s only been one other band whose music has seeped into my soul with the same hectic, boundless energy as that of the most renowned Scousers who ever breathed. A band without which the year of gigging dangerously, to be perfectly frank with you, would probably not be happening. That band was The Ark, and by “was” I mean to say that as of precisely a month ago, they are no longer.

The break-up, against all odds in such cases as these, was a thing of sheer beauty, hardly deserving such a jaggedly hyphenated accolade. No pointed fingers, no bitter accusations or back-stabbing press releases, just enough maturity to realise that the dream had run its course. To the fans, the gift of an epic farewell tour I can only egoistically wish had included my neck of the woods, and the desire that the end of an era may mark the beginning of another, full of wondrous new possibilities for all of us. Triumphant in their unadulterated joie de vivre to the last, they went and upheld everything they meant to me and others.

I would feel shock at their not being bigger than they were, except bigness is not measured in the pervasiveness of brand names, but rather in the staying power within ears and hearts open to being wooed and won. I would say their songs changed me forever, except what they really did was help me to find a self which I thought I had lost – which is everything. Their happy beat in my step and awakening words in my lungs, I have shouted out my identity to the world loud enough to be heard inside my own head, where it was needed most. Hand in hand with their gleeful take on the life worth living, I rose from the ashes whereto I had burned myself, a beaming little phoenix. I would say I worshipped them, except what they really did was pat me on the back as we jointly revelled in one another’s awesomeness.

I’ve got nothing to say to them, then, except this.

Thank you, boys. Thank you for the laughter of recognition and the refusal to give in to sadness; thank you for the pride and the dancing, the tenderness and the bold choices, the ideals but never the anger. Thank you for saying things that needed saying in a tone that begged to be sung along to, never giving in to pity, always fighting shame with love. Thank you for dreaming in such spectacular Technicolor, and most importantly, thank you for letting us dream by your side.

I would say R.I.P., except you’ve gone and made yourselves immortal.

Frank Turner, England Keep My Bones

If questions of musical taste were relationships, and how could they be otherwise, my relationship with Frank Turner’s work would be a whirlwind romance: three months ago, I wouldn’t have known him from Adam. Having stumbled across tickets to his 1,000th gig at Strummerville, I earned bruises on my shins and a thirst for knowledge of the man’s discography. The bar was set high – Sleep is for the Week, Love Ire & Song and Poetry of the Deed had been (respectively) haunting and incessant, joyfully anarchic and punctuated with anthemic gems. In my best of all possible worlds, I expected England Keep My Bones to keep up the good work. Honeymoon periods can only last so long, surely.

Or can they?

Juxtaposing funereal and assertive classic rock sonorities, opening track Eulogy reprises the involuntarily optimistic preoccupation with mortality that had characterised The Ballad of Me and My Friends and Richard Devine. The proactive anger of those earlier songs has matured into a matter-of-fact statement of the point of being alive; the uncompromising vein of Devine, in particular, gives way in EKMB to a more emphatic approach encapsulated by Nights Become Days and Redemption, a two-part reflection on the possibility of outliving one’s mistakes.

I Still Believe, a love song to musical ideals off Turner’s Rock & Roll EP, raises the spirits in preparation for the tranquil sense of belonging permeating Rivers. Through this geo-historical exploration of collective consciousness, Turner contextualises within a strong identity the travelling troubadour’s instinct expressed in I Am Disappeared. The names of Dylan and Hemingway are not merely dropped but integral to Turner’s constant process of understanding where he comes from and is therefore going to, just as Baudelaire and Kerouac hadn’t been invoked in vain in POTD’s title track. The itinerant-versus-homecoming dichotomy meet in the playful intestine war of If I Should Stray, only to be problematized again by the pride of Wessex Boy and the restlessness of Wanderlust.

English Curse, whose a cappella arrangement showcases Turner´s pleasantly modulated rasp, single-handedly dispels all claims to low culture previously advanced in To Take You Home. Delightfully exemplary of the off-handedness with which Turner tackles high themes, One Foot Before the Other is a frenzied defence of everlasting life, secular-style, a humanistic perspective which seamlessly feeds into Glory Hallelujah. Song for Eva Mae, dedicated to Turner’s goddaughter, perfectly complements Peggy Sang the Blues, a tribute to his grandmother – together, the tracks reinforce the Turnerian tradition of celebrations of the life worth living. Balthazar, Impresario, is an ingenious little oddity of a song about breathing the theatre, and a fitting close to an album named after a line in Shakespeare’s undeservedly underperformed King John.

EKMB synthesises its author’s rock solid foundations into an offering at once as epic as the highlights from POTD and as impeccably consistent in quality as LI&S. Turner has steamrolled over the bar of his own standards with alarming ease. No “must for fans of” and “sounds like”: Frank Turner sounds like Frank Turner.