Frank Turner today announces details for the Be More Kind 2019 UK Tour – a string of arena dates running through early 2019, heading to Motorpoint Arena Cardiff on 2 Februrary 2019. The details arrive ahead of Turner’s new album Be More Kind, due out May 4 through Xtra Mile Recordings/Polydor and featuring the 6Music playlisted new single ‘Blackout’.
There will be a fan pre-sale for the 2019 dates via the official Frank Turner Store – head here for details: https://store.frank-turner.com/ – with tickets on general sale on Friday April 27 at 10am. To celebrate the tour announcement, Frank is today also launching a special tour edition of Be More Kind, featuring alternative cover art and a fold-out tour poster.
Be More Kind represents a thematic and sonic line in the sand for the 36-year-old. “I wanted to try and get out of my comfort zone and do something different,” says Turner. After the stripped-down, live-sounding previous album Positive Songs…, Turner wanted to try a new approach for the record. With this in mind he recruited producers Austin Jenkins and Joshua Block, formerly of psychedelic-rock Texans White Denim, and Florence And The Machine and Halsey collaborator Charlie Hugall and the idea of recording a more rock-led album with tints of electronic-pop took shape. Be More Kind was made over a period of seven months, giving Turner the opportunity to turn songs on their head, try different versions and shake up the dynamics within his band.
Be More Kind was inspired by a Clive James poem called Leçons Des Ténèbres: “I should have been more kind. It is my fate. To find this out, but find it out too late.” “It devastated me the first time I read it,” he says. “A lot of older, wiser people tend to say things like that, that the things that come out in the wash at the end of a human life are the way you treated the people around you. In the modern world, that’s a lesson that all of us, myself included could do to learn.”
Turner is currently amidst the first leg of the Be More Kind World Tour, which sees him playing 120 dates to over 200,000 people across the UK, the USA, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
