Bowling For Soup x Frank Turner And The Sleeping Souls
‘Bowl My Bones’ Australian Tour @ Roundhouse Sydney 03/05/2026.
The energy’s set, the pins are lined up so grab your balls and step up to the line! (bowling balls that is). U.S pop-punk knock outs Bowling For Soup, and U.K brother in musical arm Frank Turner and his band The Sleeping Souls, have teamed up for a sweeping strike of a co-headline tour. Racing down the lane of Sydney’s Roundhouse these two bands are ready to bowl the bones of this all-ages packed audience tonight!
Here at the side of the venues front barrier, I feel like I’m bowling pins needing to brace myself for high intensity impact, from the ball that is sure to be the crowd tonight. After all, It’s a pop-punk high energy show and is all-ages. Typically meaning they’ll be an abundance of 15-17 year-old boys that have way too much testosterone and too much to over compensate for, with crowd surfing, pushing, circle pits etc.
When Frank Turner and his band roll on up, he brings the energy nicely with an instantly catchy sound that’s easy to bop to. Between songs he introduces himself for those who aren’t familiar and expresses his excitement for touring with his friends in Bowling For Soup. What’s that? He says he’s old and been doing it for a while? He only looks like an 18 year old to me.
What I find amusing is how he encourages everyone to be safe and look out for each other, but acknowledges this is a punk-rock show. He instigates a circle pit, but makes sure everyone starts slow, building up momentum ensuring no injuries in the audience. At another point in his set, he instigates a wall of death BUT, insists that instead of a wall of death resulting in everyone charging at another, meeting in the middle with fists and arms flailing, this is going to be a wall of hugs. That’s right, he instructs everyone that when the beat drops, they’re to charge at the other side with their arms open ready to catch/meet the incoming person/people in a hug. This brings a nice feel-good positive energy to a type of concert that typically results in injuries and aggression. The energy and punk-rock vibe is still there, but its simply fun without lasting pain. A bit like contracting an STI after a one night stand, no one wants that.
Frank Turner’s set is well balanced in its energy and very easy to enjoy, with the energy being projected into the audience nicely, getting the crowd singing and moving along. I do feel however that the crowd’s holding back energy in receiver for Bowling For Soup though.
Bowling For Soup charge onto the stage to the sound of an intro song chanting “here comes Bowling For Soup” to excite the crowd. Frank Turner’s set was like a friendly round of bowling where everyone encourages each other and cheers one another on, but at the end of it the scores were pretty high, but nothing extreme to write home about, it was just simply fun. Bowling For Soup on the other hand, is like getting your mates together at a bowling alley with a bar and live music, with everyone laughing at each other’s funny blunders, drinking and taking the light piss out of each other like scallywags.
Very reminiscent of when your talking and carrying on so much, you just lose track of time, the band talk between every song have a ball on stage (pun intended). A bit like that mate who jokes around about how he’s so sexy and has a huge… finger, the band talk up how good they are and how their second last song ‘Girl All The Bad Guys Want’ is the greatest song in the world. I do feel like they’re talking a bit too much, but they do still manage to fit in 20 songs in the one hour set somehow. This is probably because all their songs go for no more than 3 minutes each, they do speed up a few or cut a few short. I’m personally not a fan of the way they significantly speed up the tempo of their iconic hit ‘1985’. The band did the same thing when I saw/heard them at Soundwave Festival 2014 and apparently again at their Good Things Festival side show 3 years ago. They might do this so they can fit more songs into the set, but I’d rather quality not quantity personally, I want to hear the song I grew up hearing the way it’s meant to sound when it’s the original band performing it.
The set is filled with heaps of classics like ‘High School Never Ends’ and ‘Stacy’s Mom’ (which the singer stuffs up the second verse singing the first verse again) apart from the two I previously mentioned, but sadly they didn’t play their big hit cover of ‘I Ran (so Far Away)’ or their new hit the Sum 41 cover ‘In Too Deep’.
As expected, the crowd were holding back with Frank Turner. The energy around me is high with a flurry of singing and cheering moving bodies, but to my pleasant surprise, no injuries from people carrying on like idiots like I initially expected!
The sound mix at this venue I find is a bit hit or miss. For both bands tonight, the mix is loud and punchy, but all layers are clear and I’m able to focus on just the guitar or bass or drums or vocals on their own which is nice. For Frank Turner, his vocals are loud enough sure, they sit comfortably and even in the mix but I’d personally turn it up just a smigen so they shine ever so slightly more and you don’t have to second guess what he just said. For Bowling For Soup, they do increase the vocals ever so slightly to my delight and it makes all the difference I feel.
The other interesting novelties of Bowling For Soups set, is how they reach out and take an A4 piece of paper of a fan with the message on it “G’Day c**ts”. The band member reading it tells us how there’s no way they could say that back home in America, but they here in Australia, so upon the crowd chanting for him to read it he shouts C**T! The other thing is randomly during the set, the band stop and say, this is the time to take photos of us. The band proceed to pose in different positions, also bringing out Frank Turner to pose with them to the sound of ‘Photograph’ by Nickelback playing. This is like when you do an epic strike at the bowling alley and do a smug pose for your friends.
At the end of the day, this show wasn’t perfect in my opinion but punk-rock pub concerts aren’t meant to be. It was simply bombastic raucous fun!
Until next time…