Read Frank Turner’s Personal Reflection On Making His Moving New Documentary

Frank Turner has opened up about his revealing new documentary exclusively to Kerrang!

This month, for one day only, cinemas up and down the UK will be screening Get Better: A Film About Frank Turner – the candid new documentary about a very turbulent patch in Frank Turner’s career. But before the film is officially screened with a live-streamed live performance and Q&A on December 13, we asked Frank to write about his experience of putting it together with director Ben Morse, and to shed some light on why he decided to do it, and what he discovered about himself in the process.

You can exclusively read Frank’s reflections below:

“I’ve recently come up with a new greeting, a blessing, or at least the opposite of a curse: ‘May you live long and never watch a documentary about yourself.’ Ben Morse is a great friend. We’ve made a lot of music videos together over the years, and he was on the road with me and my band and crew taking photographs already. So when he suggested switching his camera to “film” mode and documenting some of what he was witnessing behind the scenes, it made sense. It was an easy decision, one I was comfortable with both personally and artistically. Ben made a pitch for his intended piece: it would be one year in the life of the guy who never stops working. It seemed like, as the Americans say, a no-brainer.

A year and a half later, something very different had happened. Ben started filming on a UK tour in 2014 that was supposed to be the lead-in to the recording of a new album. We were at the tail end of promoting Tape Deck Heart, and after a difficult couple of years in my personal life, I had a stack of new songs that were about recovering from the collapse that album discussed, about crawling out of the wreckage and dusting yourself off. I was excited about the material and ready to make the record. I wanted it to be a punk album, one we rolled into making off the road.

Less than a month into Ben’s filming, I had a falling out with my label about the prospective album. In the short term, that meant that the album session got cancelled, and I was left with nothing set in stone in my diary. For the first time in a very long time, I came off the road, went home, and hit a brick wall.

Ben was initially dismayed about all this, because his original vision for his film had collapsed. But he had the good sense to keep filming. Over the next year I went through a very difficult time. The stress and inertia in my professional life led to something of a breakdown in my personal life. My bad habits caught up with me and combined with my inexperience with inactivity to create a perfect storm. Things got pretty dark.

In the end, the record was made the way I wanted it to be. I stood my ground and, with the help of Butch Walker, made Positive Songs For Negative People the way I wanted to. In the experience I learned a lot about myself, my own fragility and mortality. While there is (spoiler alert) a happy ending, it was one of the hardest years of my life to date.

All of this is covered in Ben’s film, Get Better. Strangely, the material I wrote about surviving the end of a relationship came back around and helped me deal with the stresses and trials of making the album containing those songs. It’s funny how life works out. The movie is raw and unflinching, and there are plenty of moments in it that I find very hard to watch. Seeing the people close to me, friends, family, crew, even my mum, talk about me in the third person, often with concern, is a little like a dry run for my obituary. So we come back to where I started this piece: may you live long, and never have to squirm through a cinematic examination of your own faults.

All that said, I think it’s a great film, and if you’re not actually me but someone interested in me and my art, I think you’ll enjoy it. It’s out on December 13^th – in cinemas for one day only, with a live-streamed acoustic set and Q&A. Check it out.”

Frank Turner

You can watch the trailer for Get Better below, and don’t forget to book your tickets for a screening here!