Frank Turner on playing 50 US states in 50 days: “It was brutal”

nme.com:

Frank Turner has spoken to NME about the “brutal” experience of playing shows in 50 US states in 50 dates.The punk troubadour told us how he became the third artist ever (and first non-American) to complete the challenge of playing 50 states in the space of 50 days, after George Thorogood did so in 1981 and The Melvins in 2012.Speaking to NME from an airport in Hawaii after he and his band The Sleeping Souls finished the trek this week, Turner described his mood as “shell-shocked”.“I had the idea of playing 50 states in 50 days prior to the pandemic, and it’s been on ice for the last little while,” he said. “In the context of post-pandemic touring, it seemed like a cool way to hit the ground running and a re-statement of intent.“I’m on my ninth record and my 17th year of touring as a solo artist, and this isn’t a bad thing to have a hook to hang a tour off.”However, Turner revealed that the tour didn’t come without its fair share of obstacles.“Insanely enough, I actually got COVID for the first time immediately before the tour,” he said. “I basically had zero recovery time, which made the start of the tour particularly brutal.“For that reason, I had to play some two-show days in order to buy travel time down the West coast of the country.

Those two-show days were genuinely quite front-loaded, so I recovered from COVID, jumped on a plane, and then did something like 20 shows in 12 days.

That was brutal. It would have been brutal at any point of my career, but after having had two years off and having turned 40, that proved quite challenging!”He went on: “We also had some scrapes on the tour.

Our bus driver got very sick at one point, which meant we nearly missed the Salt Lake City show. My new drummer got food poisoning.