The openers were not an afterthought. Derek Zanetti — The Homeless Gospel Choir — took the Newport stage first, alone with an acoustic guitar, and proceeded to introduce each song the same way: this is a protest song. His humor landed before his politics did, and his politics landed hard.
Two Cow Garage followed — Columbus natives wrapping up the final night of the tour in their own backyard — and played with the particular energy of a band that knows exactly who is in the room and what they've earned together.
By the time Frank Turner and the Sleeping Souls walked out, the Newport was ready. Turner is the kind of performer who makes audience participation feel inevitable rather than engineered. He didn't extend songs into extended call-and-response exercises, didn't stop to conduct. He set the thing in motion — splitting the hall into competing halves at one point — and let the crowd find its own level. The crowd obliged. Nobody sang alone.
The set ran twenty-two songs and pulled from across Turner's catalog, with the newest album, Positive Songs for Negative People, woven throughout. Somewhere in the middle he paused to note that Lemmy Kilmister had died on his birthday, then covered Motörhead's "Ace of Spades" — a moment that landed with exactly the weight it deserved in a room full of people who understood what it meant. Turner has a gift for making that kind of gesture feel earned rather than performed.
At some point the guitar went sideways, the body followed, and Turner was crowd surfing — still singing, still holding the microphone, the Newport floor holding him up the way a crowd does when it has fully committed to the night. The photo captures it: hands everywhere, faces lit, Turner horizontal above them, utterly at ease. It is not a common thing to see a headline act that trusting of its audience, or an audience that willing to meet a performer there.
Turner can write a song about the certainty of damnation and make it feel like an invitation. That was the whole night — mortality acknowledged, joy chosen anyway, 1,500 people in a room deciding together that this was worth showing up for. It was.
I remember there was a time when I was a kid, going to live performances just didn’t sound as good as the studio recording. Something seemed to be missing. Maybe it was the music I listened to that couldn’t be recreated live. Maybe it was the energy of the crowd. Maybe it just wasn’t Frank.
When you see a Frank Turner show, you get much more. Who has two opening bands and plays for two hours in Ohio?
Encouraging audience participation, Frank didn’t extend a four-minute song into oblivion in an attempt to direct the crowd into cooperating. He started a competition between the two halves of the hall and let us take it from there.
This may be Frank’s typical set with the Sleeping Souls, but for the evening, it was ours. Those guys on stage made us feel like we were among our closest 1,500 friends and all involved in a reunion of Frank’s biggest fans. You could have a limited knowledge of his lyrics, the guy three rows behind (and everyone in between) had your back. It was all we could do to show our appreciation for the music.
Frank can make a song about the futility of life uplifting, “And we’re definitely going to hell, but we’ll have all the best stories to tell”. This show will be one of those stories, and the next time you and the Sleeping Souls are in town, drinks are on me, Frank.
