Frank Turner: “I’m going to tell you guys a story. It’s set in Australia.”
Crowd member whoops.
Frank Turner: “Oh that’s great. Are you Australian, or are you just excited? Essentially the same thing I guess.”
Frank Turner brought his magnetic stage presence and his best stories to the stage Thursday night at the Double Door for a Lollapalooza aftershow. That particular opening was to a story surrounding “The Way I Tend to Be.” “I don’t know if you guys know this,” Turner explained, “but koalas can only eat eucalyptis, and it gets them high – kind of like if a person could only eat hash cookies. Anyway, when I went to Australia I got to hold a koala, and immediately I got a whiff of eucalyptus, and my ex used to only use eucalyptus shampoo, and it inspired some of the lyrics to this song.” Turner then proceeded to give the crowd a huge wink when he sang, ‘And then i catch myself, catching your scent on someone else.’
Turner kicked things off for the night with “I Still Believe,” “The Next Storm,” and “Try This at Home.” Backed by The Sleeping Souls, he explained “We’re like the most jet lagged band on earth right now. We’re going to re-tell the exact same jokes tomorrow at Lollapalooza.” However, as Turner hurled himself headlong into “Recovery,” “The Road,” and “Long Live the Queen,” it was pretty clear that a jet lagged Frank Turner still has far more energy than the average person after 10 hours of sleep.
Segueing into “Opening Act of Spring,” Turner told us that we were about to encounter “the easiest sing-along in rock n’ roll.” He told us to hold a single note when he held up the neck of his guitar, and then drop it when he lowered it. The crowd complied. Turner joked, “Okay. That’s fine Chicago. If you want to go home to your children tonight, look them in the eye, and tell them ‘yeah, we were a four out of ten crowd’ then that’s fine.” The crowd upped the volume about ten fold. “You guys were sharp,” Turner deadpanned.
Moving into “Photosynthesis,” Turner told the crowd “Jesus, you guys need to move. It’s like a high school disco in here.” The real dancing came though when Turner told us that it was just about his bedtime, especially since he was going to play another show in about 12 hours, but that he was going to send us off in style. Launching into “Four Simple Words,” Turner crooned and mooned for the crowd as he pirouetted and hammed it up for the slow and languorous first minute of the ballad until all of a sudden bursting into a pinwheel of motion, yelling that he wanted “lust and a love and a smattering of romance!” Don’t we all. That and a ticket to Frank Turner’s next show.