- Folk-punk singer Frank Turner said he made peace with his estranged father after transitioning from male to female.
- The couple bickered over infidelity and neglect issues, with almost no contact for nearly ten years.
But when he met Miranda in 2018, he “immediately realized that this was a much more cautious man,” the singer told The Guardian. “Miranda is a very nice person,” he said. “That’s not my father.” One of Britain’s most prolific concert writers and performers. Turner also wrote a song about his reunion with his parents, entitled Miranda.
“My dad’s name is Miranda these days,” she sings of glamor rock. “She is a proud transgender woman, and my grudge is starting to fade. This is in stark contrast to Rosemary Jane, the 2019 song she dedicated to her mother.
There, the 39-year-old praised his mother for keeping the family together despite a husband “who died for himself and others.”
Turner said he began teasing his father, a city investment banker, as a child. After being sent to boarding school at age eight and then to Eaton, where he “cried every night. I find it very traumatic,” he said. “I have a long history of self-harm and mental health problems caused entirely by it as a child, and I have the scars to prove it.
As a teenager, he argued with his father about his tattoos and punk lifestyle. Saying that the atmosphere at home was “never violent, but it all depends. The singer finally broke up after his father’s affair ruined his parents’ marriage. He and his father didn’t speak for nine years. And Turner told his wife, “I wouldn’t go to my dad’s funeral if he died.”
Their relationship only thawed after the death of Turner’s uncle, “who was a surrogate father to me,” the musician told the in 2019. “There have been a few moments of reconciliation in her illness,” the singer said, “
but the story is long and complicated and something I don’t want to discuss publicly.”
Speaking to The Guardian, he announced that his uncle had arranged a reconciliation on his deathbed in 2018, at a time when his father was living as Miranda. Turner was immediately impressed by the change in his personality.
“He’s so funny, he’s very talkative, and he cares,” she said. “[He] cares about who I am and what I do, which my dad never did. So it will always work, but we’re fine. Miranda later joined Turner on tour, and the song would appear on her upcoming album, FTHC.
His ninth studio album comes after a year in which musicians fought tirelessly to save space and musicians whose livelihoods were destroyed by the pandemic. The singer, who has played more than 2,500 concerts in his career, has raised more than £200,000 through a series of live charity concerts. Helping dozens of venues avoid bankruptcy.