Frank Turner discusses his friendship with Daniel Bryan [Exclusive]
It's no surprise that wrestlers and musicians often end up friends. For one, their lifestyles are much more similar than you'd think - travelling from town-to-town, city-to-city, country-to-country and sometimes continent-to-continent, performing their craft in front of thousands of adoring fans.
And whether it be Bowling for Soup and Alexa Bliss collaborating on a song that gets over a million views on YouTube, or something as simple as a couple of exchanged tweets resulting in both sets of artists attending each other's shows, it's always pretty awesome to see!
Well, the latter is none more prominent than in the friendship between WWE Superstar Daniel Bryan and folk-punk rocker Frank Turner!
Over the years, Daniel Bryan hasn't been shy about his love of Frank Turner's music, often tweeting his praise for the former Million Dead frontman's solo work, and had even somewhat pitched a duet with the Be More Kind man in an interview with Digital Spy back in 2013, and even posted a photo of himself and Brie Bella dancing along at one of Turner's gigs!
In fact, Bryan was even spotted repping a Frank Turner hoodie in a WWE.com gallery recently - but how did the friendship blossom, and are we any closer at all to that duet?
Well, I had the pleasure of asking Frank Turner ahead of his Glasgow show at the iconic Barrowlands Ballroom!
"My friend Ben, who is like my videographer, or whatever, for the music that I make and all the rest of it, he's a big old wrestling fan. I was into, like, WWF in the early '90s when I was younger and sort of lost touch with it since then - I can tell you about the Undertaker and Royal Rumbles and all that kind of business - but he's a big wrestling fan!"
Turner went on to reveal that his videographer was the person who told him about Daniel Bryan, who is quite a big fan of the folk-punk icon's music.
"He came up with the idea for a video which would be me wrestling a pro wrestler and part of the inspiration for it was he's the one who told me he had seen Daniel Bryan wearing one of my T-shirts. Not just one or not just once, do you know what I mean? He's got quite a lot of my merch, and he wears it quite a lot, which is awesome."
Sadly, though, things didn't quite work out as planned...
"I went and read up on who he is and his whole story, and saw some common ground and all the rest of it. Obviously I'm not a wrestler but in terms of his career story and all the rest of it, so we got in touch and we were talking about making this video together, then he got a neck injury right around that time, and we were having an email conversation and he was like, 'Dude, I'm really sorry, I'm not doing anything right now.' Obviously you have to make a music video to go with a certain song, to go with a certain release schedule, and then Ben again turned round and told me about CM Punk..."
CM Punk would then star in the video for The Next Storm, by Frank Turner, which you can watch below. Turner told me all about his interactions with the former WWE Champion, which you can read about here.
Thank you to Frank Turner for taking the time! You can follow Frank here. If you're already a fan of Frank, I also interviewed him about music, mental health and more.