Episode 12 — Frank Turner, Trumpet Mafiosi and not talking about Jimmy

This episode is an interview special built around one deceptively simple question: what is the point of music? Steve puts it first to New Orleans trumpeter, educator and bandleader Ashlin Parker of Trumpet Mafia, backstage on Frenchmen Street, to talk about Black American music as real-time spiritual practice, community training ground and joyful resistance — and how trumpet gangs, trading choruses and high-pressure jam sessions stay supportive without losing their bite.

Then Steve takes the same question to singer-songwriter and former hardcore kid Frank Turner, using UK hardcore history — from Discharge and the D-beat to Napalm Death, Crass, zines and squats — as a lens on DIY ethics, extremity, UKHC vs happy hardcore confusion, and how that world shaped his album FTHC, work ethic and attitude to "selling out".

What we cover

• What's the point of music? Ashlin and Frank give radically different but overlapping answers on art as communication, hope, resistance and play.

• Trumpet Mafia & New Orleans: Practice gangs, trading, healthy competitiveness, Frenchmen Street realities and live music as community service.

• Black music & oral tradition: Learning by doing, blues as problem-solving and transcendence, and coded histories in folk and spirituals.

• UK hardcore history: From Discharge, GBH and Exploited to Napalm Death, D-beat, grindcore, squats, zines and DIY networks.

• Genre wars & hardcore vs happy hardcore: Why labels get silly, plus the internet accidentally sending Steve into rave territory first.

• Ethics, work & FTHC: How punk/HC values around graft, community and independence still underpin Frank Turner's world.

Further listening & links

• Ashlin Parker — official site

• Trumpet Mafia

• Frank Turner — official site

• Discharge — UK hardcore pioneers

• Napalm Death — grindcore & extremity

• Crass — DIY anarcho-punk

• D-beat — drum pattern

• Hardcore punk — overview

• Frenchmen Street, New Orleans

• UKHC in the 90s — scene archive

• Patreon — bonus UKHC track & full interviews

Full Transcript

Verbatim transcript, reflowed for readability only. No wording edits.

Hello, my name is Steve Pritty, I am a musician, composer and performer from London. And this is my podcast, Steve Pritty on the Origin of the Pieces. And welcome back, musically curious people. How you doing? Hope you've had a good couple of weeks. Things are all good over here. Lots of fun stuff going on. And as ever, lots of interesting podcast stuff to come. I can guarantee you that. Just before we go any further though, just a quick recap on what we did last time. If you haven't checked out the show from last episode, episode 11, do go back and have a listen to that. We had the fantastic Hannah Davis. Really enjoyed that interview with her. I think she's got so many fascinating points about New Orleans and life in New Orleans compared to life as a musician in London and all sorts of things. Gender politics, all manner of fascinating stuff about music and about being a musician in New Orleans. And of course, we also did a little track breakdown or mix breakdown, I suppose, of a track I mixed for the hip hop artist Mararis. So go and have a listen to that too. And finally, we had a look through the genre tombola at Deep Funk courtesy of my friend Pat LeVette, fantastic drummer. And we did a kind of tribute to the brilliant New Orleans band, The Meters there. Go back and have a listen if you haven't done that yet. Meanwhile, thanks as ever for all the brilliant feedback. I've had some lovely feedback about the last few episodes and some great reviews. Do keep them coming. They really help. We're an independent podcast. Every little helps. Coming up on today's show, we've got a bit of an interview special today because we've got two, I think, really fascinating, quite in- depth interviews. One of which is with the great Frank Turner, a very well-known presence in the UK music scene and kind of internationally as well. Fantastic singer-songwriter, band leader, all-round force for good, force of nature. And I'll explain why, but later on we're gonna be revisiting UK hardcore. You may remember back a few episodes ago, that we looked at UK hardcore. Well, turns out UK hardcore has many forms. So I'm gonna talk to Frank Turner about the other kind of UK hardcore. Then before that, we've got a really interesting interview with another of my guests from New Orleans, Ashlin Parker, who is an absolutely phenomenal trumpet player and band leader, and again, all-round force of nature. So stay tuned for that. So since it is an interview special today, I thought I would do something slightly different, because in this section, I normally have a little chat to you about something I've been up to that week, or I've been thinking about in the musical sphere. But actually, this time I thought what I would do is play little excerpts of each of the interviews I've done today before we move on to the main interviews. And that's because for most of the interviews I've been doing in the last few months, what I've been doing is asking my guests this same question. That question is, what is the point of music? Nice, small question. And that kind of came about because I spend most of my time at the bottom of my garden in this glorified shed where I'm talking to you

from now, or of course out doing gigs, but basically making variations on different silly, sometimes hopefully beautiful or interesting noises. And it feels like a kind of strange way for a person to spend their life in lots of ways. The name of the show is of course this allusion to Darwin and evolution. And as I've spoken about before, we don't really know with any certainty the evolutionary basis of music, whether it's as Steven Pinker, the neuroscientist claims, auditory cheesecake. In other words, it's nice to have, but it's not essential. Or there's been a lot of counterclaims to that as well. So that debate will play out over subsequent episodes, of course, as I speak to musicians, neuroscientists, comedians, all sorts of people with views on that subject. This question, what's the point of music? It's kind of central to how I think about my day, day to day, when there's so much suffering in the world and there's so many other things that I could be doing to benefit the planet. Why is it that I'm spending my time making silly noises and talking to you guys? Well, of course, there's lots of reasons for that. I don't really think it's a complete waste of time, obviously, as you've probably gathered, I'm very passionate about this, but I think it's a genuine and important question to ask ourselves as musicians, what's the point of this, to try and interrogate that rather than just going about it on kind of autopilot. So let's hear their answers. First up, we've got Ashlin, and this interview was recorded backstage at one of his gigs. So you'll hear quite a lot of noise from the band and things. As I've mentioned before, with some of these interviews, particularly in New Orleans, if I'm backstage, it's very difficult to completely mitigate the noise. I've done my best, so hopefully you'll be able to hear all right. But this is Ashlin Parker backstage on Frenchman Street in New Orleans. What's the point of music? Well, to me, it's a spiritual practice to deal with. It's like comedy to me. It's like, what was this cat that said? He defined comedy as the inability to accept the facticity of life. So there's this mirror that I like to think that I'm putting up on the world, you know? And I just think it's just, I just try to show the beauty and the ugly, you know? I think music is the only art that's in real time. So I love the music that I play because it's in the moment. If I had to play this certain thing at the certain time, every time, blah, blah, blah, I probably wouldn't be a musician. That's not the part that benefited me the most. You know, it took me a while to see that, but that's where my liberty is. That's where I get the American liberty. You know, we have that. We have liberty. No, I'm just kidding. Oh my God. I'm just kidding. Sorry, I took a turn. You know, other than that, like I want my music to touch people. I think it's the international icebreaker. Something that's real special about this music though, and black music in general, is really interesting on how popular it is. And how, when I say popular, I don't mean it like on charts and stuff, like how many people it touched. Yeah. It touched a lot of

people, you know, historically, and it still does. And it's only getting bigger. And it's beautiful because it's for everybody. But I feel like academia is in kind of a conflict with how they teach black music. It's an interesting thing to try to teach. Because there's not the linch chiffre, or there's too much linch chiffre, or... How long can you talk about cooking gumbo before you turn the stove on? I think it should be more like this, and some kind of participatory thing. And then we go talk about what happened, and then we make lesson plans and technologies from breakdowns. That's where anything was invented, at a breakdown. Nothing gets invented unless there's a breakdown. But it's also, I guess, there's the history of black music, and in fact, not just black music, a lot of folk music from all over the world and many sorts of music is an oral tradition, right? And it's playing by doing it and listening to it, not writing it down and discussing it and then doing it. It's like you play it, you listen to it, you absorb it, and then you write it down afterwards based on what you just heard. Absolute. And a lot of the stuff, this blues, this song right here is almost, I'm basically a blues. It's all problem-solving kind of issues. Blues is the last part, that hope, that upturn, it's like that's the part people are like, oh, sad music. I'm like, yeah, but if you listen to the end of the thing, it's not my dog died and I'll never get another dog. It's like, I found a new puppy with the watery eyes, whatever, it's always, you gotta get to it. So it's about overcoming. And that's the kind of, that's the, to me, that's the point of this music, is to transcend the conditions. Try to better the human condition with music, yeah. And this is Frank Turner, not backstage, not in New Orleans, in his living room in the UK. Try and ask most of my guests this, and the question is, what is the point of music? There's plenty of quotes you can dig out of the cupboard about how like, you know, I think it was niche without music, life has no meaning. And people talk about like, if an alien species arrived, they would regard music as our highest form of communication and this kind of thing. I do think ultimately, art is a form of communication. It's, I think it's one of the more complicated, ineluctable things that we do as a species. And I think, I'm referring to all art at this point, you know, what a strange thing for an animal to do. But it's clearly kind of psychologically useful for us as a species, otherwise we wouldn't keep doing it. Music specifically, I think is kind of the most immediate visceral art form. I mean, I would say that I'm a musician, but I mean, ultimately, you know, the sonics hate you. And if you throw in kind of performance and dancing as well, it's a very, very primal sensory experience on one level, but it's also an extremely exalted psychological experience or can be at the same time. So I think it kind of, yeah, it tickles our highs and our lows at the same time, which I think is something that clearly, not everybody, but most people enjoy and indeed even benefit from at

certain points in their life. I mean, that's experiencing music. And then once you've identified that as being a thing, personally, I'm like, I want to have a go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so here we are. On the I want to have a go thing, it's something, again, I've talked about a lot on the show, about the fact that what I really admire in the punk scene and all the aesthetic of things we've been talking about today is it comes from people saying, I want to have a go, and not letting their relative inexperience on their instrument or as a singer or whatever stop them. You kind of learn on the job by creating stuff. There's a bit of a conflict sometimes between the more classical side of education and jazz and things where people feel like it's not until you reach a very high level of proficiency in your instrument or your voice or whatever that you're even allowed to start performing in public, let alone making your own music and creating your own scene. Yeah, totally. I mean, those of us from the punk world are aware that that opinion exists and we're kind of like whatever, man. Well, I mean, it's funny because I sort of, you know, have a bit of a foot in both camps and having a great ability on an instrument is great, but that comes from sitting for hours and practicing in the room. It's a different thing in a lot of ways to creative expression. You know, they do obviously over that, but they're distinct things. Strongly agree. Yeah, we're talking about two separate things, but you know, art and craft are two separate things. And as you say, they are often very closely linked, overlapped, indistinguishable in many cases, but like, I think that at the base, they're two separate concepts. So there we are, two fascinating answers, I think. Very different, lots of contrast there. You'll hear a lot of contrast in the interviews coming up as well. Although a surprising amount of commonality as well, given that with Frank, we're talking about basically hardcore punk, and with Ashlin, we're talking about very high level jazz. Speaking of which, let's go over to Ashlin over in New Orleans again, and hear what he had to say. I caught him backstage at one of his gigs, as I mentioned. This is with his band, Trumpet Mafia, which as he'll explain shortly, it's kind of less of a band and more of a movement, I guess, a kind of musician led way to think about practicing, way to think about playing, but also an incredible band of musicians who I saw in New Orleans, some of whom were absurdly young and absurdly good. I'm going to play a bit of their music before we head over to Ashlin backstage. And once again, apologies for the noise, but as you'll hear, you probably can understand why it might have been a bit noisy. Bye-bye. Hello, Editing Steve here. Now, I'm editing this on the road while I'm on tour with the band, so apologies for the slightly different sound, but I just wanted to interrupt this incredible drum solo from the trumpet mafia gig that I went to to say that there is some language stuff here that I should probably explain. Firstly, there's some swearing from Ashlin, which I've mainly tried to bleep out

using his trumpet so that those with a sensitive disposition or kids or whoever can still enjoy it. But also, there's some use of one of the better term, jazz lingo. So you'll hear me sounding probably a bit different from normal by going to kind of jazz musician chat mode. So we talk about shedding, which in this context means practicing, practicing your instrument. I say man, a great deal, classic jazz lingo. And there's a few other bits and bobs that come up along the way. We talk about Frenchman Street, which is the main music street in New Orleans. There may be a couple of other bits that come up as well. Drop me a line if you need anything clarifying. Also, it was pretty late at night, and I may have had a couple of beers when in New Orleans. Anyway, over to Ashlin and the Trumpet Mafia. My name is Ashlin Parker, Trumpet player, educator. We met in Switzerland in the summer. Yes. Remind me what town? It was in Ascona. Oh, it was in Ascona, right? Yeah, for the festival day. Yeah, yeah, man. That was a, and I saw you like, it was like late at night. Oh, yeah. And I sat in at the jam, and then you came up, and I stopped sitting in the jam, because you killed it, man. Oh, man, thank you, man. Where did this come from, then, man? Where did the trumpet mafia come from? It was a practice group that we had over 10 years ago in a hot summer, like in July, where all the gigs were like kind of dried up. Swept. Really hot, nothing else to do but to shed. So we got all the trumpet players together. Well, we kind of did an everyday thing from like 10 a.m. until your gig. And it's like every day, every day, every day. Every day from 10 a.m. until your gig. Yeah, exactly. That's a lot of shedding. Yeah, yeah. And then after a while, we're shedding stuff in harmony and stuff like that. And it's like, yo, we sound kind of good. We didn't think about it as like a performance. What were you shedding the style with? Just like tunes, melodies? Whatever, no, mostly like horn related stuff. And then we would get in there's some kind of tunes, but a lot of breathing, a lot of horn stuff. And just creating a forum to even talk about some of that stuff. Who, what's the issue? Who knows the most on that? That kind of thing, you know? So it's creating a community. A lot of supportive music. Well, yeah, this is the city that birthed the idea of this music, the old African proverb. I'm going to paraphrase it, but the kid that you forget about is going to be the kid that burns the village down. Yeah, right. And so, you know, No one defines something. Yeah. And I guess another analogy is this. We could probably be maybe painfully honest and tell somebody they

suck. Like, no, that's not your chops is terrible. What you doing at noon tomorrow though? That's the difference. Like come by, come by. What's this called? You need to go by there. You need to like, I'm on my block. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's bad. Your problems are shared, folks. You know what I mean? So, find your cat. And it's like, that taps into the history of it. I'm quite interested in like the history of how jazz has come up and like, whether it's competitive or whether it's supportive or like those. It's a thin line between collaboration and competitive. It's the same domain. It's a social situation, you know? And it's like, it could go either way anytime. And it's just, it's just a healthy amount of that. We push each other and we trade and it's a push. I don't know if it's a competition. I don't know what the f*** we win that day. Like, you know what I mean? Except for the enjoyment of getting out of your own mundane stuff or monotonous stuff, and you're pushing each other and I wouldn't have done that if I just soloed by myself. Sort of a sharing of ideas, but with a little bit of competition mixed in. Yeah, which I think is healthy. I mean, you know, if we're all... The thing is way too nice. That's just not really the music. You know, the tone of this music in New Orleans should have a certain edge or a certain urgency to it. When we're playing it, there's got to be a certain kind of edge to it. So a lot of people talk about how I have something to say. Well, the black experience is almost like you have something to say, but I'm not listening. So then there's like this extra little thing you have to kind of, you know, that's kind of the tone of the whole thing anyway. You go justify. Yeah, you got to get in there and state your case. I don't I feel like it's OK if it feels like the lion's den. You know, you know, there's a lot of love in there, but we're serious, you know, we're serious. But if it's intimidating, you need to get through that because we want you to succeed. We're not, you know, have you ever ever been any kind of gig where you're listening to music and you like want somebody to play wrong notes or get lost or ruin the song? No, I don't never met. I've asked so many people that and we've never met anybody that actually wishes that on somebody, even my worst enemy. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't mess up the tune, dude, you know, for people to get rid of their stage anxiety. It's a great platform for that because you got everybody playing all this blah, blah, blah. And it's like high pressure, but it's way low pressure too. It's like, well, how bad could this be? You know what I mean? It's an interesting point. You talk about like stage anxiety these days as an educator, you must have to deal with people's mental

health is really the forefront now, right? And people are talking about it. And so when you're dealing with competitive situation like this, you must have to deal with that, like the history of the music being kind of competitive, like you're saying, like a lion's den, but at the same time, looking after people, like you're right. This is just having watched that first set. What's a lion's den for lions though? Like, you know what I mean? What if you're a lion? Lions are like beautiful creatures. If it's your job to like interact with them, you got to get rid of that anxiety. To the point where like, oh, this is cool. Lion's den's warm. It's like if you want like the protection of a lion's den, it's probably pretty comfy on that end. But it comes across as very supportive on stage as well. And it always is. It always is. We want the music to be successful. Just getting back to that trading thing, because like the audience of this show doesn't necessarily, they're not necessarily jazz specialists, they don't necessarily know what that means. Would you mind just like talking about that for a second? When you're saying trading, you're saying trading phrases back and forth. So I say this, it's not necessarily call and response, it could be a little bit longer than that. It can be, we call it bars. So we trade four bars or trade eight bars. And it's basically a split solo, where you're going back and forth. And the horror scenario of this is, you play a solo for eight bars, I play a solo eight bar, you play a solo eight bar, and there's no interaction of the two. It's like pressing on and off. And none of the two things, let me do my stuff, and you're going to do your stuff. I feel like that's where it becomes like this weird battle. Yeah. And it's not musical. It's supposed to be a musical conversation, you know? I could play two octaves above everybody's solo, but that would be the worst trade ever. So it's a conversation you're trying to get, and it's one solo, you know? So I love to watch folks do this, because you're part of the thing. You have to make the whole thing work, not just your side. It's a conversation, you know? It's like a duet. Yeah, yeah. It's a little mini-duet, mini-improvised duet. Absolutely. And it'll be a part where you're playing together, probably. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Highlighting the collaborative nature of what this really is, and that's where it ends up, of course, at the end. Not with a winner and a loser, you know? Yeah, yeah. And when it works well, it's the most beautiful mode in jazz, as far as I'm concerned. Absolutely. Two players interacting. Absolutely. And it's all super subjective at the end of the day, because you got one guy playing like Chad Baker, one playing like Maynard Ferguson. That's fine.

As long as, you know, really, when it gets weird is when the player accepts defeat or something like that, or like sees it back in that frame and not the collaborative frame. So if Vango and Picasso are beside each other having a draw off, whatever that is, pain off, and you're doing great, and you're doing great, but then Picasso turns around and looks and is like, holy ****, I can't do that. And then forgets what the hell he was doing. When he goes back and loses focus and doesn't do his best anymore, that's when it does actually competition wins. Otherwise, it shouldn't be either that, or when you don't listen to another person. That's when competition wins. But otherwise, it's not supposed to be like that. And if it ever it is, it better be heli-theatrical and entertaining. And also on the same level. I love going head to head with cats with similar facilities, and maybe because we can really push each other on other levels, almost less pressure of building some profound statement that has coherency and thematic development and arches and all the things you want in a good solo. Now you can just go back and forth with a cat and have a conversation. Yeah, have a chat. Just have a chat, see where it goes. If we start talking about Silicon Valley or rock science, then that's just where it goes. Maybe we'll see how far we can get with that. I'm a bottle rocket expert. That's about as far as I can go. One of the unique things about this town, I think, is the way that music works in bars, in the sense, like the tipping culture. A friend of mine was talking about musicians being part of the service industry. In a bar situation where there's no cover charge, you've got the bar and you've got the musicians. And the tension between the high art of jazz and the incredible skill and work that goes into getting there, but also being in a situation where you've got tourists coming in from the street, it's different from a concert hall situation. Just wondering if you had any thoughts on that dynamic. You can take tips, which is an amazing way of saying you enjoyed the band, give us some money, you know, but like that doesn't happen in many other places, right? Right. So first of all, here, this spot's very different. This is why Trump and Mafia has a residency here. We have a guarantee here and there's no cover, which is crazy. That's amazing. Well done. Congratulations. It's unheard of. Now, all these other places, there should be a copper charge everywhere you go. And that makes this thing livable. But, you know, I played those gigs for a decade at 20 percent of the bar and the bar profits and and tips, you know, and like during recessions and stuff like that. Yeah, maybe going home with $26, you know, and that's just what it is for a four hour gig. Yeah, right. And so but I mean, also when it's Mardi Gras, we could go home with like $600 or whatever, you know. So I think like the level of the level of skill work that goes into getting to a stage where you're playing those gigs is it's it's insane. And yes, in the service industry, not many of those folks are

holding a tray in front of a mirror since they were a child. Right. You know, for four hours a day, owning the waiting, waiting, waiting, you know, with all respect to that industry. Of course, we are definitely seen as that in this musicians. And it's not unique to America or New Orleans. There's a lot of places I feel like musicians are put down a class. Other places, like Cuba, like, you know, there's other places that are highly respected. And then obviously New Orleans famous jazz musicians are respected abroad. Yeah. Well, we met at a festival in Switzerland, which is all about New Orleans jazz and on a beautiful lake in Switzerland. Right. Right. A lot of respect for it. Right. Right. The way we're selling music right now, there's no money. The way we're playing music, there's no money. So there's got to be a large kind of shift coming. I understand that's where it's at right now, but it's just not going to sustain. Well, you know, you shouldn't have people coming through, right? And then you have AI on the other side, ready to take the gig. So I write a lot of music in the studio and all that. And I think AI will clean up a lot of that stuff and take some of that away. But I can't see a situation where we're not going to have live music, like we have in this town or anywhere in the world, right? I mean, particularly in this town, like people always want, no matter how far AI gets, people are always going to want to come down Frenchmen and listen to live music, right? I can't see that going away. Can you? No, no, no, no, no. And yeah, I mean, that's not unique to New Orleans, but it's interesting to think about New Orleans being the last place would be the last place that AI will take over or something at the AI Armageddon, you know? This would be the last place holding Fort. We'll all come back to New Orleans at that point, yeah. But I still think, even if Frenchmen changes or whatever, it feels like people are still going to want live music of some sort, right? Like AI is not going to be out of place at the gig I just saw. Absolutely. But I've played 25 year olds that were like, is that a trumpet? That's the first time I heard a trumpet live. It's really cool. Bless their heart. I know people that said they don't like music. I think excellence is not celebrated like that, you know? It's just mediocrity. People don't necessarily want to hear the best version of the song. They just want to hear their song. And they're like, that's cool that you guys can play it amazingly. I can just play the song. People don't really want to hear excellence. They don't want to hear musicianship. It's not celebrated the same. A guy in the subway playing the Million Dollar Strativarius, playing, and he sold out the next day. But he's just saying, if anybody stops in the subway, and only like this one curious little three-year-old, that's just like, that's on fire. That little kid's not in The Matrix yet. New Orleans isn't in The Matrix yet.

That's a depressing way of putting it. So here's the thing. It's inevitable that we're going to have Silicon Valley, we're going to have that tech thing, we're going to have all this other, it could be another layer to the gumbo, or it could change the whole thing. You put all that tomato in a gumbo, it's f***ing ruined. Who's running that conversation? If New Orleans could use the technology, let us use it. But if they could use New Orleans, oh Jesus. And I guess black music came from this trauma, right? Even singing in the fields, that's where it comes from, that's where blues comes from. So it's cathartic from why they're singing. They are out there for 15 hours in the sun, and then they sing about, you know. What happened to those melodies? Those Africans were singing happy, happy major, major melodies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What happened? I was talking to a South African musician about township music. Same there, right? They're living in apartheid, and there's this beautiful happy music, you know, and this, I guess, is the way of processing it, and the way of bonding. Well, some of that stuff is coded, though, you know. The melodies are... Hold on, what is that? I love those. Ours are coded, but not like on... We didn't really have those... We didn't have rebellions, you know what I mean? Listen, man, thanks so much. Absolutely. That was great. We could do that all over again and do a... And do a different one, you know? My thanks once again to the incredible Ashlin Parker. He honestly is one of the greatest trumpet players I've ever heard, pretty much, and very generous with his time. And yeah, just I think a real force for good in the jazz scene in New Orleans and further afield, given that we met in Switzerland. Anyway, on with the show. So I know we've already heard from Frank today. I alluded to this at the beginning, but the reason I have Frank on the show is a bit of a backstory. And that is that when, you may remember a few episodes ago, I looked at UK Hardcore. Do go back and have a listen to that episode. When I got assigned this genre at UK Hardcore, I started looking into it. And the first thing I did when I got that genre was to contact Frank Turner. I knew that Frank had released an album called FTHC, in other words, Frank Turner Hardcore. And I knew that Frank had a background in UK Hardcore music and things. Now, a little bit of a glimpse behind the magician's cloth here. I contacted Frank. He wasn't available right then to do the interview. So I had to kind of park that interview for a few weeks. And meanwhile, I looked at that other type of Hardcore music, which is kind of happy Hardcore. So that's why if you go back and have a listen to that episode, I remixed the podcast theme in a kind of

early prodigy, happy Hardcore kind of style. So yeah, as I say, go and have a listen to that. If you want to check that out, we talk about that scene and electronic music in general and that kind of stuff. But then of course, I was able to speak to Frank a few weeks later. So Frank and I had a really informative chat. I then went and made some Hardcore music, some UK Hardcore music with my friend John, which I'll explain more about shortly. But then we played it to Frank to see what he thought. Anyway, enough from me. Here is my interview with the legendary UK musician, Frank Turner. Hi, my name is Frank Turner. I am a singer and a songwriter. And with relevance to today's topic, I grew up listening to Hardcore punk music and did that in the UK and participating in a certain version of the UK Hardcore scene, the UK HC scene in the 1990s. I mean, I think that I'm sure you've encountered this before. I mean, there is a problem of definition with any genre. And I feel this may be just from where I'm standing, but I often feel like arguments about definitions within the punk and sort of metal world are perhaps even more charged than they are in other places and commensurately pointless, I might add as well. Like- It's a bit like the left wing arguing with itself, right? It's essential. Yeah, it gets into a kind of very kind of train spottery people arguing for the sake of arguing. I mean, like, is there a difference between crust and thrash and, you know, I mean, the number of people who really care about this can be counted on two hands. And that's how it should be. And it's funny that you mentioned the other type of hardcore. As a kid growing up interested in hardcore punk, I would often have conversations with people who'd be like, oh, hardcore, and then sort of play me a rave CD, and I would be furious about this. I mean, in point of fact, the word hardcore was used to refer to hardcore punk before it was used by anybody in the dance music community because it was a thing that developed in the United States. And I guess this is where we get into what does the word hardcore mean in the context of hardcore punk. And again, people can argue about this forever. And I'm sure that some people listening to this will disagree with what I'm saying. And I'm here to tell you, I don't really care. But broadly speaking, you have the punk rock explosion of the late 1970s, which sort of burned itself out on both sides of the Atlantic pretty quickly by, I mean, a lot of people would argue that punk died in 1979 with the breakup of the Sex Pistols. The clash continued, but they sort of became much more easily diverse. Some would say musically soft, I suppose. Some people would argue poppy. They certainly, they were on major labels and they rode around in limousines and sort of did fashionable drugs with famous people and that kind of thing. Non-punky activities. In lots of different places, in slightly different ways, there was a kind of a remnant, one might even say a hardcore, of people who've been involved in punk, whose the thing that they had enjoyed about punk was the

musical extremity and the kind of ideological, I suppose extremity you could say, but it's kind of like just the sort of sense of different, sense of apartness, sense of the ideas about kind of do it yourself, about tearing things down. Anarchism is kind of a part of it at various different points. So those people are kind of left in the late 70s kind of saying to themselves, well, the Sex Pistols broke up and the Clash of Dunn, Sandinista or whatever, and like, what do we do now? And the answer on both sides of the Atlantic is hardcore. The word is first used in the United States with a reference to a band called Black Flag. Yeah. Black Flag are still basically a punk band, I think musically. They're just, they're a little bit shoutier. They're a little bit faster, but they're broadly speaking still a punk band. Then you get bands out of Washington, DC who start playing very, very fast. And they take the punk rock template and they make it much, much faster. If you listen to Minor Threat and then you listen to The Sex Pistols, I mean, it's nearly double the speed, Minor Threat. So that's the kind of central defining musical characteristic is just that it's faster. And then rhetorically, it becomes a bit more extreme around then as well. Over in the UK, it's a slightly different thing. I mean, the fastness is part of it, but essentially you have bands like GBH, Discharge, and The Exploited are the three kind of main ones. And essentially they're playing faster. In the UK, it was quite fashion conscious, as in it was the enormous mohawks. It was the millions of studs on the leather jacket. There'd been a bit of that in the 70s punk in the UK, but the term postcard punk gets used quite a lot. I mean, a lot of it. The people had really quite insane hair. And the expositors are kind of like startlingly angry and fast, and that's great. In my opinion, the crucial first wave UK hardcore band is Discharge. Yeah, that's the band I've been mainly checking out. Right, and Sina Weble, Hina Weble, Speak Weble's an absolute masterpiece of a record. It's totally bleak. And I suppose that if you listen to the Sex Pistols and then you listen to Discharge, clearly there's been a shift between the two. You can sort of see there's some DNA strands going in there. The other band that's really important to mention in this historically is Motorhead. Yep. Motorhead are kind of this complete anomaly in that they were sort of a metal band. They were sort of a hard rock band who sort of engaged with some of the aesthetics of punk, but were never quite a punk band. But like at a moment in time when music was very Balkanized, famously Motorhead with a metal band, it was okay for punks to like and the punk band it was okay for metalheads to like. I guess what they helped everybody get faster and they also showed the punks that it wasn't at the end of the world if you could actually play your instrument a bit. So, and there's a kind of dirtiness to Motorhead that really I think discharge doesn't happen without Motorhead. But so discharging, you're then full into kind of lyrics about nuclear war, about anarchism, about animal rights, about this kind of thing. The

music's much faster. It's got nothing at all to do with the major label world. The Clash and the Sex Pistols are both on major labels. Discharge, absolutely not. You could say that's because of the music they were making being unpalatable, but I think there was an ideological choice in there as well. Hardcore punk at this point, UK hardcore, is really developing into this idea of almost like a countercultural community idea. Yeah. There was a band in the mid-70s called Crass who exist all the way through all of this, who aren't, well, Crass are a hardcore band, maybe, but like they were almost, they were like a hippie community, an angry hippie community. And the central thing about Crass was that they sort of existed completely outside of all mainstream societal structures. And so by kind of the mid-1980s, UK hardcore is a thing. So that's the, and discharge is the main thing. I mean, discharge of a band, they gave the world two things. They gave the world the D beat. Okay. That's something I've been, again, I've been sort of playing around with some ideas. And that's something that seems to keep coming up. The D beat is a very fast kick and snare pattern. There it goes, do, get, do, get, do, get, do, get, do, get. Discharge used it so much and so iconically that it became known as the D beat after them. And to this day, any punk band in a rehearsal, you're like, should we try a D beat section? Like you will say that now. And so you have this kind of, that's kind of what I would call the first wave of UK hardcore is that kind of 1980s thing. It then gets quite a lot more complicated and I'm ready to dive in whenever you are. Before we do, just want to talk a bit about like the, so discharge, am I right in thinking they're from Stoke? Yes, yeah, I'd say a lot of this scene is not London based. The original punk scene had been quite London centric, but you're talking, yeah, they're from Stoke, they exploited it from Glasgow, I think I'm right in saying. I mean, I'm quite interested in, given the time, you know, the 70s and the early 80s and things, a lot of disharmony in the UK and a lot of that. Yes, absolutely, yeah. And presumably, it's angry music, right? It's like, it's fast, it's angry, it's aggressive. Before we move on to like the, you know, the next wave about like the kind of social history of that. It's interesting that you're talking about people who come from the Midlands of the North, kind of post-industrial areas. I mean, also, if you look at it, historically, most of the good extreme music that's come out in the UK has come out in the Midlands. So, you know, famously Birmingham gave the world Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin. Quite a lot of what we're about to talk about in the next section also comes from that kind of area as well. But yeah, you're talking about the early 1980s, you have a recession, you have the Thatcher government in play, you have, you know, great economic deprivation,

deindustrialization going on, all this kind of thing. And I think as much as I love it, the first punk wave, I mean, you could make an argument that it was a middle-class fashion. And like this very much is not. You say it's angry music. If anyone listening to this has not heard Discharge, try some, but brace yourself because it is. Because of this, when this genre was first chosen for me by the internet gods, it was just before Christmas. So I spent most of Christmas listening to Discharge and stuff. Right. I mean, that's one way of doing it. It's worth adding, and I say this hopefully with no disrespect to anyone in Discharge. Discharge are a band that have continued for a very long time and sort of turned into a medium metal band at a certain point. If you are going to listen to Discharge, you want to start at the beginning, and particularly with a record called See No Able Hear No Able Speak No Able, which is this sort of, I mean, they made other good records, but that is widely regarded as the kind of foundational document of UK hardcore. If you have sensitive people in your house, use headphones kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, I've got two young kids, so I had to be careful. And it's interesting because, I mean, I have a conversation with my wife quite often who is not somebody who's interested in extreme or aggressive music generally, and she finds stuff like discharge very hard to pause. Personally, I always compare it to like eating a Vindaloo curry. It's like, which I can't do instantly. If you're the kind of person who can handle really hot curries, that doesn't mean you can't eat all the other food that there is as well. It just means there's sort of a corner that's for you that might not be for everybody. As I say, this is not particularly my world, but more in my world, in the sort of more jazz side of things. There's obviously a lot of the avant-garde stuff. Similarly, very hard to listen to, in a way. But there's a place for it. And you don't want to listen to it all the time. And you have to kind of be in the right headspace to get into it. It can be sonically difficult, just physically difficult to listen to because there's a lot of scritching and anger and prejudices. It's funny you should mention that, actually, because there is a bit of a crossover here. Personally, and I know a lot of people for whom this is true, having got into kind of extremity as a concept, so punk and then hardcore, I spend a lot of time listening to John Zorn or Nat Coleman, the later period Coltrane, all that kind of thing, because you do, at a certain point, tune into the idea of just... It's almost kind of performance art, the physical extremity of sound. But definitely bands like Discharge and GBH are kind of pushing that. And I mean, so that then leads us to the next part of the story, which essentially is about a band from Birmingham called Napalm Death. Again, we can have a long argument about whether or not Napalm Death are a hardcore band, but they certainly come from the hardcore scene. And Napalm Death invented a new genre of music, which is a subdivision of hardcore, which is called Grindcore. And the principle of Grindcore is how fast can a human being play the drums.

A guy called Mick Harris played drums to them, who famously took the springs of his kick pedal, which means that the only way of getting, of playing it, is that you have to use the rebound of every beat. So we're talking bands who are trying to play 200, 250 beats a minute. I mean, it is so fast, it's so fast it doesn't really sound like a drum beat. Napalm Death is unquestionably the originator of this. And this is what I mean about extremity becoming a value in itself within the music. Napalm Death, as the name might suggest, retain the kind of the social commentary, the sort of Cold War rage and paranoia, disgust with Western foreign policy, all that kind of thing. And indeed, animal rights are still a big part of this at this point. But musically, it becomes almost a blur at a certain point. Interestingly, with Napalm Death, this music is so underground that John Peel, the BBC DJ, was really into Napalm Death, and they recorded enough songs as BBC Sessions with him that you can get compilations of the Napalm Death BBC Sessions, which sounds so much better than the albums because they were in a proper studio with decent engineers. So if you are looking for a route into Napalm Death, the BBC recordings are worth checking out. But at the same time, it's worth adding that it is the kind of music that is not for a lot of people. Like it is very, very extreme. Famously, they had a song called You Suffer, which is two and a half seconds long. It just goes, You Suffer, but why? That's it, with some very fast drums. But, you know, so they... And I mean, at that point, like the boundaries between metal and hardcore start to kind of blur and break down. And this goes back to what I was saying about this, at some point becoming essentially just a train-smarting argument for nerds. Yeah, well, we had a few episodes ago, the genre picker chose me Deathgrind. Right, so Napalm Death feed into that, absolutely. Without Napalm Death, there's no Deathgrind, for sure. And I have lots of time for Deathgrind in my life. But I mean, yeah, you get to a point where you're literally talking about two, maybe three bands for genre. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, this is what I just spoke to Andrew O'Neill, the great... He was an old, old friend of mine. And in fact, Andrew and I played in grind bands together when we were younger. I know Andrew very well from the, you know, from the comedy scene and from being... Right. Yeah, I had a really great chat with Andrew. They had said that, yeah, there's like some of these genres are defined by one band. Yeah, right, which at a certain point is kind of like, is that really a genre? But then, as I've discussed a lot on this show, the whole concept of genre, for musicians at least, is essentially redundant. It's a kind of marketing term that's obviously convenient and allows us to have this conversation and discourse about it. But they all bleed into another ultimately.

Of course, of course. But yeah, so there's a kind of, so I would say the late 1980s for UK hardcore, there's a sort of period of time where it's kind of fracturing and diversifying and there's a lot of bands. You get into it, so crust becomes a thing. I guess it's quite disparate for a time. Meanwhile, metal has evolved into thrash. And thrash and hardcore are really not that far away from each other anyway. And Metallica as a band were kind of interested in some hardcore bands. These divisions are much more, I think, about personalities than they are about sonics at a certain point. Or indeed how skinny your jeans are, or whether you're wearing trainers or boots and all this sort of thing. But anyway, so metal is coming back into hardcore. Essentially by the early 1990s in the UK, there's a kind of sort of revival thing happens. It's bringing more of the metal thing into it. This is the period of hardcore that I was involved in. I was sad to see that Wikipedia decided that this was a period where nothing happened in the UK hardcore. Yes, it did. And I was there. So by this point, hardcore is almost closer to metal than it is to punk, I would say, certainly sonically. Some of the defining markers are hardcore has short hair, slightly shorter songs, and generally political lyrics rather than lyrics about horror movies and goblins. Anyway, so there was a bit of revival kind of sparks up. I started going to shows around this time. There was a lot of great New York hardcore in the 1990s, and their kind of shows, so bands like Sick Of It All and Agnostic Front were playing in London. The UK hardcore bands would open for them, and that was sort of the beginnings of a new scene, and that was kind of where I was into it. But at this point, the political stuff, anarchism and straight edge and feminism and things like that are a really important part of the scene. And DIY is a hugely important ethic as well. This is completely divorced from any considerations, not even just of major labels, but of large independent labels as well. This is a completely self-contained scene, and I started going to shows around that time. And that's what got you into it, and you started going to shows and presumably making it yourself and getting into bands. How long did it take from you going to see shows to starting to play and make this music yourself? Not long. I was playing in a broadly ripped pop punk band when I was a teenager, and then I discovered hardcore. So it all came together. There was a wonderful moment for me when I was a big nerd, record collector type kid, read a lot of books about music when I was a kid, and then I suddenly discovered that this kind of music, hardcore, wasn't just a museum artifact. It was happening in London. There was House of Lame Records, and I remember going, I went to my first all-dayer, it was Aerial Effects last ever show at the New Cross Gate in 1997, I guess, it was my first hardcore show, and it was full of UK hardcore bands who were existing now, doing things right now on the stage in front of me. And my pop punk man stopped being a pop punk man very quickly. Shortly after the last thing. Interesting, after you discovered this, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, so just a slight diversion, but I think it's sort of relevant to all this, which is you're talking about the DIY aesthetic of it and stuff. And I know something, particularly over the pandemic, but in general, you talk a lot about small venues and independent venues and stuff. It's something I've talked a lot about on the show and how important that is. And things like, for these sorts of genres, which obviously they do go mainstream from time to time, but a lot of these genres don't exist without those small venues. As you say, the New Crosses, places like that, but they are basically homes for whole genres that couldn't exist without those. Yeah, I think, yes, absolutely. So all across Europe, there are lots of very, very well-organized, very large squats that quite often have state support. The state support part is not part of it in the UK, but there are lots and lots of squats around the UK. And again, I was fortunate enough to play a few of them. The massive one was always the one in 12 in Bradford, which is kind of almost like a row of terraced houses that have been knocked through and turned into it. And it's a community center almost before it's a venue, and it's about anarchism and animal rights and all this kind of stuff. I mean, it's worth saying that I remember, even at the beginning of my involvement in this, that there was a bit of an issue, because I started trying to put on shows as a kid. There was an issue with quite a lot of people on the scene were quite young, which would be an issue for pubs, of course. The other major issue pubs was the straight edge, which is so straight edge is a kind of concept developed by Minor Threat, who is arguably the first hardcore band. It's not necessarily the same thing as hardcore, but it runs in parallel with it. And it's the idea that you don't smoke and you don't drink and you don't take drugs. It's a T-Total aesthetic, and you put a black X on the back of your hands. And so Ian McKay from Minor Threat was the guy who sort of came up with this concept. He, incidentally, has since kind of backed away from it a bit. It gets a little bit culty in places. But straight edge was certainly in there were straight edge bands and non-straight edge bands, quite a lot of straight edge bands would have an X at either end of their band name. Strife, for example, wrote their band name X, Strife X. I was straight edge for a few years when I was a kid. I had X's on my hands and my shoes was how straight edge I was. Right, okay. And then, of course, in certain parts of the world, like in Salt Lake City famously, it got quite violent. People would go to shows and beat up somebody who was drinking a beer and this kind of thing. So the militant straight edge became a thing and there was, again, this gets all quite obscurantist. But as far as the UK goes, so straight edge was kind of a strand of it, but that made putting on shows again harder because, as anyone who's ever put on a show or run a venue knows, a huge part of the way that the venue makes their book in the night is alcohol sales. And if you have 200 people come to a venue and everybody buys a Coke or tap water, then the venue's not going to ask you back next month to do a second show. And that did happen quite a few times. But then

I remembered at that time, playing stuff like the Woodford Community Centre in Leeds, they put on shows there, kind of village halls, YMCA's kind of that sort of vibe. Again, the problem with it was, because the music and often the dancing was so violent. And the dancing was, generally speaking, dancing in a slightly performative way. It wasn't literally trying to hurt people, for the most part. There were a few moments where it got like that. And of course, one of the other strands that we haven't mentioned through all of this is that there is the kind of the ghost of skinhead culture kind of runs through UK hardcore, particularly in the 1980s. Skinhead culture, which is originally not specifically racist, is kind of white kids who are into reggae, actually. But it's quite aggressive, white working class kind of vibe. A lot of skinheads got into hardcore music in the 80s, but some of them, many of them became overt racists, even Nazis. You've got Ian Stewart and a band called Screwdriver doing that. And broadly speaking, the hardcore scene wanted absolutely nothing to do with those people. But a lot of the music was quite similar. A lot of the Nazi kids would try and come to hardcore shows either to start fights or to recruit or both. And so there was a bit of a gray area thing going on there. Napalm Death released a famous song called Nazi Punk To F*** Off in the mid 80s, which was related to all of this. And I remember as a kid, there were one or two hardcore shows I went to where there would be a band, for example, there was a band called Gundog. Gundog were not racists or Nazis, I don't want to say that about them, but they were much more in the skinhead scene. And that meant that a bunch of people who we didn't know showed up, who were terrifying. Yeah, right. And also who were a generation older. We were like 17 and sort of windmilling in the pit and stuff. And then these like a bunch of kind of 30 year old skinheads would come in and just like absolutely flatten us. But so a lot of venues would kind of put on one show and then see this kind of what looks to the untrained eye like a fight. And nobody's drinking and they're kind of like, yeah. Yeah, I can understand that. Yeah, so it was venues was a bit of a struggle in my period of hardcore. The other thing I think is really worth talking about, which leads us on to the next phase as well. There was zine culture was a huge thing as well and zines and distros. So because a lot of these labels were DIY, because we're doing before the internet, but a lot of shows you'd have a thing called the distro. And often what a distro was one guy stood behind a table with a suitcase open in front of him, which would have boxes of CDs and they have five of each kind of thing. And so they were kind of portable record shops kind of thing, but they would be European wide or even international. So friends of mine who ran distros, when they went to Belgium to go to Ypres Fest, for example, they would meet up with other distro guys and they'd swap five of this for five of that. And that kind of thing. And then they'd come home and they'd sell them. So if you that's because no record shop sold like Underground

Hardcore. That just was not a thing. And as well as the CDs, there would also be zines. And some of them were, you know, single issue photocopied nightmares, like the scene that I did. One issue of which no one will ever know about. Because it was the worst thing ever. The biggest one in the UK was called Fracture Zine. And when I was a kid, Fracture was just the Bible. It came out sort of quarterly, roughly, I guess. I seem to remember it famously was free. They were the first hardcore zine to do a thing where they would pay for printing just with adverts and then hand out the zine free. And it was based in Cardiff. They're not people I knew personally, but everybody knew their names. And they documented the UK hardcore scene and indeed the European hardcore scene. And that was a huge kind of underground telegraph. You know, it almost felt like Samistat. People would text each other on their knockers saying, there's a new Fracture coming out, and so you'd have to run around and try and find one and then read every single word. And like half of it was record reviews, but when I say record reviews, everything from demo CDs up to usually slightly snarky reviews of Green Day. But I mean, I had demos reviewed in Fracturzine and I cut them out and laminated them and felt like I'd made it kind of thing. So yeah, there was a real kind of underground sense of community around the scene at that time. I think it's very interesting. And again, it's hard to imagine now, obviously the music distribution is so different now, that it's hard to imagine the only way you could get hold of this music to listen to in your own time rather than just at gigs was literally a bloke at the back with a case of CDs because it's not just that obviously you couldn't stream it clearly, but it's just, as you say, you couldn't buy them in shops. You couldn't just go to an H&B and get it. Yes, it's a completely different mindset. And it's a funny thing talking about the internet more broadly because on some levels, there's a sense of the internet made everything that we were trying to do in an underground scene much, much easier because it's all about making connections between isolated nodes, isolated individuals to build a community. At the same time, because it made it much easier, it made it much less precious to a lot of people. And there was a real sense of community. You would get to know the same faces week in, week out, whatever. There's an Instagram feed started up recently called UKHC in the 90s. And I looked through it, and as well as discovering myself in quite a lot of photos, there were just tons of people who, quite a lot of them, I don't even know their names. They were just people I saw every week for five, ten years. And there was a big thing about if you were in the band, and you watched the rest of the show, do you know what I mean? You did not sit backstage. So there was a communitarian kind of vibe to it, which was really exciting and cool. There wasn't really any sort of potential of crossover with the mainstream and that whole pre-internet thing about selling out, which was a huge political

issue in the punk scene for a very long time. That didn't really come into it because there was no opportunity to do that. So we were quite a happy little family in the 90s, I would say. In the sense that selling out would basically go into a major label. Signing to a major label. But I mean, at a certain point, because of the punk rock scene broadly, and hardcore in particular, reliance on kind of independent countercultural structures, there was a huge suspicion of the mainstream. There's a lot of anti-capitalism anyway. And all of that, I think, could often be quite healthy and quite cool. There was a moment where quite often that would just blur into essentially hatred of any kind of success. If you played to more than 200 people, someone was going to call you a sellout. I mean, I remember as a kid, we played in all day, loads of all day shows at a pub in Norwich, and the headline band, Goop Patrol, had a van with seats in, and all the other bands stood around and basically went, yeah, f***ing sell-outs. And we weren't kidding, do you know what I mean? We meant it. Goop Patrol, great band. And I feel foolish in retrospect for this. So you started making music in these sorts of bands in that period, in the mid-late 90s? Yeah, so I did my first shows in 1997, I think. We did my first tour in 1998. Again, these tours, the first tour I did was me and my friends booked from a payphone in our school, and we booked two weeks of shows, and more than half of them, like less than five people came. It was kind of a catastrophe. We all got flu and we lost money, and we all thought it was the greatest thing ever, and wanted to do it again. I remember it was the last show. We showed up in Salisbury, and the venue had never heard of us. That was fun. We played the railway in Winchester to no one at all, and everyone looked at me because it was my hometown, and I was just like... Sorry. So yeah, formative experiences. Knee Joke The Band I Was In broke up in 2000. There was a period of time from 2000 for a couple of years where I lived in London and was in nine million different bands that all had the same people in. And that's where Andrew O'Neill comes into this story, incidentally. There was a lot of different bands, which was a little group of us, like I say, just constantly forming bands. The music started to diversify at that point, so there's an ingress of kind of melody, should we say. So essentially Hardcore, broadly written, has kind of got... The emo thing is more... At the beginning it was more just writing songs about feelings, essentially, and about personal experience, as opposed to about nuclear war and animal rights. Which, believe it or not, was kind of a radical development in the late 90s. Imagine writing a song about feelings. So you have this kind of... Hardcore is sort of starting to branch out and diversify. There was a thing called the LBU, the London Beatdown Union, which was a kind of borderline gang culture thing that was around pure hardcore underground, that had nothing to do with the emo thing or the post-hardcore thing.

So that did continue to exist. I think it's important to say out loud, so that anyone watching this who's fuming with rage knows that I know this, that almost anybody who tried to give an overview of any genre, but particularly UK hardcore, would tell a slightly different story. The same thing happened when I spoke to Andrew. They said there'll be people saying, oh, we should have included this. Yeah, yeah. And they're saying that if they were to write it again tomorrow, it would be a completely different band. It's entirely personal, basically. Of course, of course. And again, it just speaks to the limitations of genre and all those things. It's really, really fascinating. In terms of, well, there's a couple of things that I'd like to talk about. First of which is, of course, that your amazing record from a couple of years ago is called FTHC, right? Sure, yeah. Which is a conscious sort of rhetorical nod to the scene that I grew up with. I'm not especially interested in arguing about whether or not that's a hardcore record or not. No, I mean, obviously, I listened to it when it came out and loved it then, but I just re-listened to it in the last couple of days ahead of our chat. And it definitely, having now listened to quite a lot of hardcore, I can hear some of those elements. Sure, there are two songs on that record, which are self-consciously hardcore songs. The first song, Don't Serve the Ambers. And there's a song called My Bad, which is actually kind of a pretty straight up stylistic nod to the band In Balance from Grimsby. And I sent them a copy when that record came out to just say, you guys are responsible for this. And it was very nice. They were very touched. One of the things I would say is that my experience with hardcore broadly read is that it is, it gets in your bones philosophically. There are musicians who I've encountered around the world who you just can tell that they grew up listening to hardcore, even if they're playing jazz or for I remember, for example, the band Godspeed You Black Emperor, a post-rock band from Canada who I adore instantly. They, when I was listening to them before it's in life, I was like, I just know that this sort of got something to do with hardcore. And I remember going to see them for the first time and the guitarist had a black flag tattoo on his leg. And I was just like, I knew it. I have since met members of that band on my travels and have had it confirmed that they were basically hardcore kids trying something else. But even like there are people who I knew from the hardcore scene in the 90s who are now major league promoters, tour managers, label guys and stuff like that. But there is a sense of ethics to the way that they carry themselves and do their business, which is very much learned in the hardcore scene in the 90s, in my opinion. Yeah, and also something that, let's be honest, can be a bit of a rarity in the commercial music circle sometimes. Absolutely. It's not just the ethnic thing, it's also a sense of hard work as well. There's the DIY thing of just like, get on with it, just do it. I think particularly if you were a teenager in that kind of scene,

it was a small insular scene that didn't necessarily matter that much to the world at large. But on an individual level, I learned everything I know about kind of work ethic and ethics generally, the cold face of hardcore punk. And I think that's kind of why I wanted to call that album FTHC. I think I carry that with me where I go, whilst at the same time, definitely not really making records that sound like discharge. So I've got to go and try and make some hardcore now, which is as it is every episode. I always start off with a preliminary apology for this is not going to be hardcore. This is not going to be, you know, this is going to be something like in his shed trying to sort of listen to it. So as I do that, have you got any particular tips from a musical point of view now, I suppose? I've sort of started, you know, just putting some drum ideas and stuff down. And so I've already got, I think I'm like 230 BPM, so very fast. Lovely. Well, one thing we didn't talk about musically is a thing that came in in sort of 90s hardcore is the breakdown. The break. So in a tradition, by the mid 90s, a traditional hardcore song goes like this. Very fast in the beginning. T'gag, t'gag, t'gag, t'gag, t'gag. Lots of shouting, probably a verse and a chorus, maybe even two within the space of a minute. Brevity is the soul of wit. That's really, really important. Maybe a sing-along chorus, but that's about it. And then it stops, it goes, but the whole thing should probably be less than two minutes long. There was also a band in the early 90s, hardcore adjacent band called Fudge Tunnel, who released... I've managed to contain my reaction to some of these band names up to now, but come on. Fudge Tunnel are amazing. Their main guy, Alex Newport, is now a respected record producer, and I made a record with him a while back. Lovely guy. But they released what I think is the coolest title for a hardcore record ever, and it will give you a musical point of the song. The album is called Hate Songs in E minor. So generally speaking, quite a lot of low E5 power chords and feedback, and then, you know, fast bit, break down, speed it back up, get very fast to the end and then stop. And then quite a lot of the sing along, so the finger pointing is a big thing in hardcore, but it's. Just total nonsense. I'd be interested to hear it for sure. It's an interesting thing because like stereotypically, punk musicians are less talented than other musicians because of the whole anyone can do it sort of vibe, which is, that applies less to hardcore than to punk, I would say. But I mean, one of the things I always find interesting. So for example, the new drummer, as of four years ago in my band Calum, is one of the most incredible, highly trained drummers in the world. He can play jazz, he can play rock, he can play Tower of Power. Do you know what I mean? Like this guy can play. But the first kind of rehearsal he and I had, I was trying to get him to play a D-beat, and he just had no idea how to do it. Because it was outside of his palette, not

because he was physically incapable of it. But he, so when you play a D-beat, a lot of people who don't know will essentially kind of put the emphasis on the one and the three, because it's sort of rock-a-liver, they'll go, du-gut, du-gut, du- gut, du-gut, du-gut, du-gut, du-gut, du-gut, du-gut, like that. The whole point of a D-beat, arguably of hardcore as a genre, is that it leans on the two and the four. Some people argue that hardcore was kind of the first kind of like sexless music genre, because it lost the kind of the bass thump of the one that James Brown was all about. So it's, du-gut, du-gut, du-gut, du-gut, du-gut. Listening, as I did in the last couple of days, and trying to put some drum patterns together, the snare is so prominent, and you can barely hear the kick drum sometimes, you know, it's like, tak, tak, tak, you know, the snare's really hammering it on the 2s and 4s, and you can kind of like, I think there's a kick drum in there somewhere. Yeah, so I mean, you know, stereotypically, a D-beat, you've got a kick on the 1 and then on the 3 and, but the 2 and the 4s is where all the action is, and that gives you a sense of kind of almost falling over, do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, if you're tottering forwards like this, and that's what gives it that sense of desperation and energy. This is good, this is good tips. All right, well, I'm going to go away and see what I can do, and kind of running up and asking everyone. You can tell me how terrible it is. So as I mentioned, I then went away and recorded a song with my friend John Lumley. Now you may recognise John's Dalsit tones, because John was also featured in the tune I made for Episode 1, the heavy metal song for the primary school teacher. Go back and have a listen to that if you haven't checked that out yet. So I went away and made a bit of a backing track, and then John came over to my studio, and we had a really enjoyable evening writing this song together. So I hope you enjoy it. It's called We Don't Talk About Jimmy, and you'll maybe hear why shortly. So John and I made a track, as I mentioned, and we just wanted to get your sort of take on it, and I deliberately didn't want to send it to you before, because we wanted to get your live reaction either positive or negative. So no obligation to like it in any way. It's obviously just a little kind of experiment and a kind of exercise as much as it should be. And I was talking about our conversation. Yeah, so Steve and I met at uni, and we've been playing in bands ever since. The sort of music that you've been talking about is something that is really close to me as well. So Steve asked me to come along and get involved, but the chat that we had was around, he said that your conversation was really, really insightful in terms of the history of the genre and so on. But particularly the bit that you talked about where you've always got these fringe elements where you don't feel so comfortable. And so Steve said, OK, well, let's have a bash at some lyrics in five minutes, ten minutes. And the idea that we quickly came up with was we've got this incredible feeling of family around that sort of any

sort of musical subculture or genre. It creates that real sense of community. But then you've always got these bits at the side or at the edges where it makes you feel less comfortable. And so take just by extension that concept of family, we just picked a name out of the hat and came up with the concept of Cousin Jimmy. And no one wants to talk about Cousin Jimmy. The rest of the family is great. That means a huge amount to you, but there's always the dark horse. So that hopefully will make some sense when you hear the lyrics. But that was the inspiration for it really. Off the bucket, you'll chat with Steve. Cool. Understood. Three, two, one, go. And there it is. There it is. Live reactions. Live reactions. The only thing I want to preface it by saying is that the weird glitch in it is because I reversed the F word because I tried not to have swearing on the podcast. Fine. I mean, I think it sounds great. What I would say is that it put me more in the mind of, in terms of more recent bands, stuff like Idols and that kind of territory of band, a band who get very shirty if you call them punk or hardcore, but I think arguably are a punk or hardcore band, or at least certainly were, on their first couple of records. And then maybe even going back to the slightly more kind of artsy end of hardcore, which I'm not sure we really talked about stuff like Killing Joke and that kind of territory of stuff. To be more kind of bang in the middle of hardcore, I would have made that a lot faster, would have been my thoughts. I mean, that to me, as a hardcore song, that's a mid-pacer. Wow, that's interesting, because that's like 260 BPM or something. I mean, to hum a drum beat at you, it's kind of standard d-beat hardcore beat. It's like, kind of thing. And the pattern was a d- beat pattern, for sure. And I mean, you know, this is getting into technicalities rather than aesthetic judgment here. So yeah, so that was definitely, if a band played that show, you'd be like, oh, a breather. A ballad. A token ballad, yeah. I thought the vocal styling was bang on the money. Interestingly, I thought that the riff was kind of doing a one to four kind of pattern, right, sort of a similar thing, which arguably is a little bit too musical. Okay, okay. I would say, I mean, well, it's not in the sense that there are bands who have done that, but if we're talking about generic, in the literal sense of that word, I would say that possibly that was almost, I was like, oh, that's a bit jazz. Well, he can't help himself, Frank. I mean, there are a lot of songs, if you listen to tracks by bands like Infest or Discharge or whatever, it's literally just sort of four chromatic chords. For 40 seconds, and that is the entirety of the guitar work of the song. I started on the bass and I really don't play the bass. I have the bass in the studio from a project years ago, but I don't play the bass, but that chromatic line is what I was going for, something

like that. But then I think I just couldn't resist the movement of chords. Because we chatted the other day and you were sort of saying that your background was more musical, perhaps. I don't want to be rude about hardcore genre, but perhaps more kind of technically musical than a lot of hardcore bands. That was kind of my impression of that bit, is it was like, yeah, he can't help himself. Jazzy bastard. And then I guess the one other thing I'll say is that I didn't grasp all of the lyrics and that is a good thing because I can't tell you, I'm not sure if there's any hardcore songs where I've ever figured out what the guy was saying all the way through from the first lesson and I'd almost be disappointed if there was. Yeah, good to hear. That's good. I was definitely grasping parts of it, but it's a genre that's based around reading the lyric sheet. Right, right, right. Well, one of the things that we talked about before was as well, that I think, to my mind, it's as much about the vocal channeling emotion as it is about the lyrical content. So it's about the energy that comes with it, as it is about the words themselves. Absolutely. And once you get into the more kind of extreme metal adjacent bits of hardcore, the sort of approach is very much that the vocal is another instrument. It's another sonic texture. And almost, I mean, there was, they weren't British, they weren't UK. There was a famously a American grangle band called Combat Wounded Veteran who had write the lyric sheets after they'd finished recording because the recording would just be guttural noise. Wow. And then they would write really quite good poetry afterwards to put in the lyric sheet, but there was no actual connection between the two. So what's interesting about that is that we were talking briefly, you mentioned that once you kind of get a taste for hardcore sounding music, I mean that in the most, in the broadest sense, that you said you then got into other hardcore sounding things, not hardcore as a genre, but like, you know, intense musical things. So you're talking about like, you know, listening to sort of later Coltrane and stuff like that, sort of on the noise jazz sort of end of things, avant-garde jazz. And actually, like what you're talking about with lyrics, and that's, I mean, that's very much how I often hear songs. I don't, I'm not really listening to the lyrics. So it's interesting, like the commonality that that has for an instrumentalist, almost, that you're thinking it like, you know, I really like good lyrics, but at the same time, I'm mainly listening to the tone of the song, you know, maybe the production to a degree, obviously the songwriting, you know, all of those sorts of things, the emotion of what it's trying to do, purely musically without the words being involved. Sure. Yeah, I mean, like I say, I think that that does very much come apart there. I mean, there's plenty of hardcore songs that I love, where I couldn't tell you what the second verse was. And tracks I've listened to since I was like 16 years old, or whatever.

Right. Interesting. Well, that's great. Thanks. Thanks so much, man. All the best, man. Nice to see you. Thanks again, Frank. Cheers, man. So my thanks once again to Frank Turner and of course John Lumley for his fantastic contribution to that song. So that was a longer interview than usual. I hope you enjoyed it. Do let me know. As always, drop me a line on podcast.stevepretty.com or if you go to originofthepieces.com, there's all the details there. I just thought we had a lot of really fascinating ground to cover there about the genre and about the kind of social history and everything else. And of course, Frank is just such a brilliant, knowledgeable and generous interviewee, so I wanted to make sure we gave him plenty of airtime on the show. That said though, I did cut a lot out. There's a lot more detail that we went into, including a lot of band names and things like that. So if you want a much more in-depth look at UK Hardcore, do go over to my Patreon. If you could go to originofthepieces.com, you'll find the details there, or patreon.com/, I think it's Steve Pretty, on the Origin of the Pieces. Then you can find that full interview. It's about an hour and a quarter long. And yeah, you get the full kind of blast of Frank's expertise. There's also, I should say, a brand new tier for patrons, a slightly cheaper tier. I think it's just gonna be one pound a month. For one pound a month, you get access to most of the assets I'll be putting up. There's also the existing five pound tier, which is gonna have a whole load of extra bonus stuff on top of the one pound tier. And again, as always, if you sign up, it just really helps me to make this show. So thank you very much to those of you who've done that. And please do consider doing that if you're able to. Even just a pound a month will really help. And apart from anything else, to be honest, what I'd like to create there longer term is a bit of a community, a bit of a discussion hub, a way to kind of ask questions that you might like answered on the podcast, a way to submit interview requests and that kind of thing. So go over to originofthepieces.com and sign up on the Patreon through there. Meanwhile, thank you again to my guests, Ashlin Parker and John Lumley for the track and of course, Frank Turner there for the brilliant interview. The music is by Angelique Kidjo, Hackney Colliery Band and me. We're going to be back in two weeks' time as always. That's the first week of April. So stay tuned for that. We've got a really, I think, insightful episode on all sorts of stuff coming up, including, I hope, Ebo Rap. You may remember I've now learned how to pronounce it. My genre that was chosen by the genre tombola last episode was Ebo Rap, which I had no idea how to say whether it was Ebo, Igbo, Lgbo, whatever. But I now know, I feel foolish for not knowing, but it is Ebo Rap, and I'm hard at work trying to source some Ebo Rap to listen to and to study and to maybe chat to someone about that. So, come back first week of April. Bring your musically curious ears

to that. And meanwhile, thanks for tuning in. Spread the word, go and review, rate review, all of that business. It really genuinely helps. Thank you very much to those of you who have done it so far. Sign up to the Patreon, and we'll see you next time.