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Frank Turner at Manchester Academy: Keeping the bardic tradition alive one gig at a time

The modern day bard was back in Manchester for the 38th time, but we dare say he still has all the same energy as his very first.

Danny Jones - 6th April 2025

If there’s one artist we believe has never quite got the credit he deserves, it’s Francis Edward f***ing Turner – Frank to his loyal legions of followers around the world and the roughly 2,600 gig-goers inside Manchester Academy on Saturday, 5 April 2025.

Don’t get us wrong, Frank Turner and his long-standing touring band The Sleeping Souls are no minnow in the music industry: the 43-year-old is now two decades into his solo career and even during his time as the frontman of Million Dead, he had plenty of die hards right out of the gate.

What we mean is that for someone with the longevity, stamina, charisma, commitment to grassroots and such a rich back catalogue, he doesn’t get anywhere near enough the level of recognition he should.

It doesn’t matter which of the 10 albums he pulls from; the connection with those in the crowd is as strong as it’s ever been, if not even more powerful than the last time they saw him and the Souls, mainly because those lot up on the stage put in the same amount of energy as they always have.

You can’t help but love that @frankturner and them @SleepingSouls. 🫶

We still believe, and so did everyone inside @MancAcademy last night. 🎶 pic.twitter.com/2Drwhnyg21
— The Manc (@TheMancUK) April 6, 2025

Even the most avid fan would admit the Hampshire-born bard of the modern age has such an extensive back catalogue that you can be forgiven for not knowing every B-side and deep cut from back to front.

The man himself joked, “You’ve had a whole year to learn these f***ing songs”, but in all seriousness, that’s not what a Frank Turner gig is about. As he has the audience repeat back to without any need for a prompt at this point, the rules are simple: “Don’t be a d***” and don’t be ashamed to dance around.

Just like he told his Manc congregation this past weekend, “If you’re at this show, you probably were never that cool to begin with”, so if he and his truly brilliant live band can put their “aging knees” through the ringer hundreds of times a year, those watching him best reciprocate in kind.

And they did, from start to finish, as a Manchester Academy crowd or any venue in the city will always guarantee for that matter.

But more importantly, we suddenly realised something as he introduced the cult favourite track ‘Jinny Bingham’s Ghost’ from his eighth studio LP, Tales From No Man’s Land (2019), which was released with an accompanying podcast about historical female figures whose stories he wanted to shed light on.

It only took us seeing him for the fourth time to fully understand it, but we got there in the end…

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We used that word ‘bard’ before – i.e. the old storytellers, musicians and orators, performers, comedians, historians, genealogists and so on that used to chronicle people’s lives, events taking place and the wider world around for centuries – but it felt like this most recent gig spoke to that oral tradition.

There have always been moments like this in his albums, in truth, and we only now realise that we had the same feeling the first time we heard ‘Balthazar, Impresario’ but Turner, we feel, is one of the few current artists truly keeping that almost time-travelling bard culture alive.

Be it conducting an orchestra of tipsy Northerners as they sing back in perfect harmony (just about), organising a crowd-surfing race between two mates who chose the concert as the stag do, teaching them literal historic tales of a young woman who drowned in the River Seine back in the 1800’s, he’s a rare breed of performer.

There’s plenty of call and response in Frank Turner’s music, but there’s also a real sense of history, politics and culture, not to mention a sense of proud Englishness that contemporary society can find difficult or at least a somewhat cumbersome topic these days.

Undefeated, underrated, criminally underappreciated and absolutely unbelievable live.