The Gathering

Album: FTHC (2021)
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Songfacts®:

  • Following a year spent locked down due to COVID, Frank Turner returned to live music with a run of summer shows between June and September 2021. This stomping number finds him celebrating performing live again. "It's a song about what we've been missing, that sense of coming together, and how ready I am to get back to it," Turner said. "The last year has been incredibly difficult and frustrating for everyone, not least the people who work and revel in live music."
  • Turner spent lockdown teaching himself production and uploading weekly charity livestreams that raised £400,000 for struggling music venues. Though he spent the long period at home gainfully, he found it difficult to adjust.

    Yeah, but we're pent up and we're pissed off and we're perilously close to the precipice
    We're butterflies in ballet shoes and Brothel Creepers coming out of our chrysalis


    Said Turner: "I am the guy who tours, this is who I've been since I was 16. This is the longest period of time I've slept in the same bed continuously since I was seven."
  • Muse's Dom Howard played drums on this track and American singer-songwriter Jason Isbell handled electric guitar. Both musicians tracked their parts for the song remotely from the US.
  • Frank Turner dropped the song on May 6, 2021 as the lead single from FTHC. Its release coincided with his announcement of the summer shows known as The Gathering: Summer 2021.
  • Rich Costey (who helmed 2013's Tape Deck Heart) produced FTHC over the summer of 2020. For most of the recording, Turner was holed up in a studio just outside Oxford, England, and Costey was in Vermont. The singer-songwriter had the producer on a laptop balanced on top of one of the speakers.

    "I was wondering if there was really going to be any kind of vibe there of it would be productive, but weirdly it was, because we couldn't do anything other than work," Turner told HMV. "We couldn't spend a morning mucking around with different guitars and different amps trying to get some weird, fun sound, or we couldn't spend the first 20 minutes of every day showing each other funny cat videos we'd found online or whatever. So it ended up being a really focussed way to make a record."
  • FTHC stands for "Frank Turner Hardcore." Turner's ninth studio LP, it became his first UK #1 when it debuted at the top of the album chart. Turner's previous best placing had been his 2015 album Positive Songs For Negative People, which peaked at #2.

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