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.
Content from our partners
