Sam Fender’s giant success could be explained, not just by his similarity to Bruce Springsteen, but by the fact that he is the UK’s first politicised blue-collar solo rock act. How can we not have had one? While the first rockers were largely working class, they moved up through art school and dated the landed aristocracy. They’ve always formed bands, and they don’t tend to sing about working-class things. We don’t have a tradition of heartland solo acts like the US does, with Springsteen, Bob Seger and John Mellencamp. What is our heartland, for that matter? Fender, a 30-year-old singer-songwriter who lived on benefits in North Shields before he made it big, came to represent the Red Wall. He loved Corbyn, then later said Corbyn screwed up; bemoaned Labour’s abandonment of the working class and has now parted ways with party politics. These days, he believes only in “people”, he says – and so we have People Watching, his third album, recorded in Los Angeles. He returns to the north-east for his subjects, with just the right amount of guilt and imposter syndrome.
Fender is an anachronism, in that music was his fortune, enabling him to live the straight life after years dabbling in seediness. He had the perfect rock ’n’ roll beginning – his mother left the family when Fender was eight years old, which is also the age he got his first guitar. When they later reunited, they lived together under the poverty line, she working less and less due to fibromyalgia, he drinking every day. He has the tough background for authenticity, but the millennial facility for talking about it, too – his songs cover toxic masculinity and male mental health: a new one, “Arm’s Length”, is an “anthem for avoidant dickheads”. The age of music as a conduit for the mass message is over, and the “I” is political. But Fender avoids solipsism because many of his songs were written from snatches of conversations overheard in pubs.
Perusing the press release, it becomes clear there is no story, as such, for this new album – no theme: he just wrote more songs, 70 of them in fact, and whittled them down to 11. The big hit this winter is the title track: the song I hear most in it is not one of Springsteen’s, but Don Henley’s Eighties classic “The Boys of Summer” – great for people too young to remember the original, and for us ancients, a pleasant ghostly memory pumping out of Radio 2. I was fascinated to hear that it’s about visiting his community drama teacher, Annie Orwin, in her palliative care home – it’s certainly not obvious, smelling instead of men in work boots with their collars turned up to the wind. “Crumbling Empire” begins with memories of a visit to Detroit, then turns to the UK, “following suit in the Atlantic mirror”: it is funny hearing “it got privatised” sung in a rock song (about his old man’s rail yard). But why not? Tell it like it is.
Fender’s North Shields accent is strong in some songs, and not in others, as he moves back and forth between his personal subjects and the Americana that inspired his songwriting. There is a triumphant Dylan harmonica fanfare on “Little Bit Closer”, about faith (“I was lost in their sermons and lies at God camp/trying to pray the gay away”). In fact, he covers everything: chasing things that never existed (“Nostalgia’s Lie”) – even crystal and wellness (“Chin Up”). “TV Dinner” is a tightly wound “chip on the shoulder tune” (his words) about the fear of being built up by the press and knocked down. “No one gets into my space!” he wails, over an ominous “Pyramid Song”-style pattern of chords. But no one is in his space, and he knows it. Most of his forthcoming tour dates are sold out. People Watching ends with “Remember My Name”, about his grandparents, recorded with the Easington Colliery Band, big and airy as a stage musical. Maybe one day Sam Fender will be like Sting, returning to his roots with his shipbuilding stage show – but for now he hasn’t really left them.
“People Watching” by Sam Fender is out now on Polydor Records
[See also: James Blunt live: a nostalgia karaoke]
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This article appears in the 26 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain in Trump’s World