Bowling For Soup And Frank Turner Australian Tour 2026 Dates And Memories

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Published April 13, 2026 by Ned Tepper

Bowling For Soup and Frank Turner are heading back down under, heading our way May 1st to 11th, a run that cuts across the east coast and into WA.

It’s a pairing that makes sense on paper and even more sense live, two artists built on sweat, storytelling, and the kind of touring grind that leaves behind more than just setlists.

Before they hit stages from Coolum to Fremantle, Jaret Reddick of Bowling For Soup and Frank Turner of Frank Turner and The Sleeping Souls took a second to look back, not at polished highlights, but the strange, chaotic, and very real moments that have stuck with them from past trips to Australia.

What came out of it is exactly what you’d expect. Jet lag hallucinations, near missed sets, punk venues that don’t exist anymore, and absolute mayhem at 30,000 feet.

Frank Turner: My first visit to Australia was in 2010. Chuck Ragan had been telling me for ages that Australia was the promised land of touring, and I eventually was just like: “well, fucking take me then!”. I arrived in Brisbane and I was extremely jet-lagged and hungover/drunk because I’d been hanging out and flying with Ben Nichols from Lucero and was just in a very weird headspace. I’d never been to Australia before, and it was all immediately incredible. I walked around the corner to find some food, and the first person I met around a show in Australia had the lyrics to I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous tattooed down his entire arm. And I was just kind of like, “okay, I’m definitely high now or hallucinating?! This is just weird, weird, weird”. That was my first Australian experience.

Jaret Reddick: (laughs) Yeah, that is good. One of my earliest memories is not as fun, but we were in Sydney and we were staying across the harbour from where we were playing. We were playing at this amusement park, Luna Park, and we could see it from the hotel. So basically we were like, “hey, all we gotta do is get on this ferry and we go over there, we’ll be there in 15 or 20 minutes”. But we’d had a change in our crew and we had to bring a friend of ours to do monitors. This very good friend of ours from Chicago is scared of boats, he will not get on a freaking boat. So it ended up being that we had to take cars around to get to the venue, and the traffic was so bad that it took us four hours to get there.

Frank: Brutal!

Jaret: We almost didn’t make the set just trying to get around that harbour because this guy wouldn’t get on a boat. We got the boat on the way back and he took a cab by himself. I got to see the Sydney Opera House for about an hour on the way over (laughs). He’s still a very good friend of ours but we’ve never let him forget it. Nor have we ever taken him back out on the road.

Frank: There was this venue, Jaret I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it, The Arthouse in Melbourne, and rest in peace, it’s now gone. Everyone had told me it was the CBGB’s of Australia, like the punk venue in Melbourne. I played there, I think it was my second trip in 2011, and it was one of the last shows there because they were closing down. My show was sold out and they said, “hey, we’re closing, the last night is this Friday and we don’t have anyone to play it. You’ve got a day off on Friday and your show’s sold out. Do you want to add a second show and you’ll be the last person to ever play The Arthouse?”. And I said no.

Jaret: (laughs)

Frank: But I said no because I was flying from back from Australia to England to play show #1000, which I had advertised as show #1000 and organised this with my friends. It was a big party in Shoreditch, in East London. I count my shows, and I knew this was going to be my thousandth show. And I couldn’t add another show because it would screw up my numbers. I was trying to explain this to everyone, to The Arthouse people, the label, the promoter…everybody! And they’re all just staring at me and being like, “what is wrong with you?! Play the fucking show!”. I didn’t do it. And then I flew back, played show #1000, got paid in tequila. Then the following day I went to my mum’s wedding, and then the day after that, I flew to Canada and was so jetlagged that I forgot how to speak English.

Jaret: I gotta be honest though man, I agree with you. You’ve advertised that you’re going to do this for your thousandth show, I would’ve done the same thing. I stand by that kind of stuff all the time, but everybody around you just can’t grasp it. Who gives a shit, it’s your thousandth show, you have to celebrate that your way!

Frank: I actually have another memory surrounding The Arthouse. For the show that I did play there, I was about five minutes from going on stage and there was a knock at my dressing room door. It was Dennis [Lyxzén] and David [Sandström] from Refused who’d come to see me play.

Jaret: Wow!!

Frank: They’re one of my favourite bands of all time. I was like, “…what?!”.

Jaret: Crazy!

Frank: But I was also a bit like, “could you have done this either half an hour ago or maybe after the show? Because now I’m stressed!”.

Jaret: Another standout Australian memory for me was when we were there with Pennywise, The Vandals and Sum 41. This was several years ago, maybe like 13 or 14 years ago, something like that. This was definitely during Sum 41’s big party time, and Fletcher [Dragge] from Pennywise can be pretty abrasive. By the way, he mixes his drinks in a Pringles can. But we were flying commercial from place to place, and Fletcher, a couple of my guys and The Vandals had an ongoing poker game for the entire tour. Even when we were flying on an airplane, they were trying to make sure this happened. The first thing that happened was: Fletcher gets on the airplane and just starts telling random people to move. He’s just like, “you, go over there. And you, over there”, all just so he can set up this poker game. And of course all of us are going, “what in the fuck is happening right now?!”. But that flight ends with Deryck Whibley from Sum 41 taking full sprint runs at the lavatory in the back of the plane and trying to break down the door while one of his band mates was in there. And the fact that we weren’t all put on some sort of no fly list because of all of this is insane. But it was a good time. We like to get a little bit crazy, but I was mostly having fun just watching all of that shit.

Australian Tour details

There’s a reason both of these artists keep coming back here, it’s not just the crowds or the venues, it’s the unpredictability of it all. The weird stories that only make sense once you’ve lived them.

If history’s anything to go by, this tour won’t be short on those.