The Observer
Music 04.08.19 21used to pull pints and perform and
where got his break with manager
Owain Davies, who spotted him
and offered to take him on. “I went
to the toilet and burst into tears
because suddenly I felt like this is
the moment I can change things,”
he says, although the journey from
there to a record deal was by no
means instant. “Granted,” he laughs,
“it took seven years.”
This is the cheeky chappie I’d
read about in past interviews,
self-effacing and not afraid of
making the odd Ed Sheeran jibe.
And yet, while the musician I meet
is sweet and sailor-sweary, the guy
you’d prop up the bar with, he is
also, in his own words, “a bit of an
anxious mess ”.T
his is, to be fair,
possibly the worst
time Fender could be
doing an interview.
Tomorrow’s show
is the fi rst since his
voice went on strike a month ago.
The following day he is due to
support Neil Young and Bob Dylan
in Hyde Park. Last month, his
voice problems meant he had to
cancel his scheduled Glastonbury
appearance ; until yesterday, he
didn’t know whether he’d be able
to sing this week at all, let alone do
a press interview. “I did too much
and haemorrhaged my vocal cord
on the right side,” he says. “I’ve not
stopped touring for two years, and
then I crashed and burned. I realised
that you can’t maintain that high.
And now I’ve got myself back on my
feet and I’m naturally a bit scared.
Because this thing, it can destroy
you, it really can.”
The month off to recuperat e gave
Fender time to refl ect on how fast
his career is moving. Last November
he released his debut EP. A month
later he won the 2019 Brits critics’
choice, the award for breakthrough
musicians, previously won by Adele
and Sam Smith. He’s now at the
stage where he’s appearing on The
Graham Norton Show and can’t walk
down the street without being asked
for a selfi e. “Nothing feels the same
any more,” he says. “I’ve spent my
entire life wanting to be successful,
trying to get away from hardship,
or from seeing my mum sad. And
I’ve got that now and it’s very
strange. So many amazing things
have happened in this last year – it’s
no wonder people turn to drugs
because it’s bonkers. And there’s a
lot of paranoia.”
For Fender, music was a way to
get out of his situation. His father
and brother were local gigging
musicians but when his parents
separated he moved in with his
mum on a council estate and
abandoned his A-Levels while trying
to look after her and bring in money.
“Me and my mum were below the
breadline. She was mentally ill and
didn’t work full-time and she was
constantly going to tribunals about
having to go to work again. That’s
why I’ve got a thing against the DWP
and the Tories, ’cause they werethe George Ezra s and James Bay s
had achieved and I was like , ‘I need
to try and write some love songs
that connect,’” he says. “I hated my
job, I hated being in the fl at with m y
mam where we lived at the time. I
was desperate to get out of that. I did
everything I could to write the songs
that I thought would get us there.”
But then he had a health scare,
quite a serious one. He isn’t ready
to discuss it publicly because, he
says , “I don’t want to become a
charity case, or for it to look like I’m
capitalising on it as a way to make
people like my tunes”, adding : “I’ll
probably talk about it eventually, just
not now.” But it was, he says, a “crazy
traumatic experience” and that his
recovery refocused his song writing
efforts. “I started writing for myself,
as opposed to what I thought people
wanted to hear. If you don’t know if
you’re going to live [it makes you]
want to write songs that actually
mean something to us.”
Some of those song titles do come
across as if they were chosen from a
social issues randomiser. If the kids
want someone authentic to tackle
the big themes, Fender has them
cued up: Millennial (social media
addiction), Poundshop Kardashians
(more social media addiction) and
Play God (faceless politicians). But
he also writes convincingly about
the bleak scenes in his backyard,
kitchen-sink songs like Leave Fast ,
Friday Fighting and a new one,
The Borders. He says, seriously,
that he can’t divulge details about
the last one “because I don’t want
to get my head kicked in” but it’s
broadly about feeling guilty that
his life turned out well while some
of his peers got left behind. Dead
Boys , meanwhile, was written
after two friends from Tynemouth
killed themselves (the suicide rate
in the north-east is the highest in
England ). After his gig, Fender tells
me shakily that he could see their
houses and workplaces from the
stage.
While people have got in touch
to say that songs like Dead Boys
have saved their lives, he has also
faced some backlash. For Greasy
Spoon , a song about “a girl whoLEFT
Sam Fender
performing at
the Mouth of the
Tyne festival
last month.
John Millard/
NewsGuardian.
co.ukBELOW
Winning the
Brits critics’
choice award
in February.
Jeff Spicer/GettyMy mum was
ill and being
pushed to work
when she
wasn’t fi t to.
I saw what it
was like to
struggle
Continued from page 19was being sexually abused ”, he was
criticised for trying to embody the
female experience. Then Poundshop
Kardashians, his takedown of
Geordie Shore wannabes, with biting
lines such as: “Beautiful people
devoid of emotion... thick as fuck
and soulless”, was seen by some as
too simplistic, even nasty. Tellingly,
it will not appear on his debut
album (due in September).
“With hindsight, I think I was
quite naive,” he says. “Maybe that
came across a bit too heavy-handed.”
But he does feel that some of it has
been taken out of context. “The song
is about my home town and then it
starts to talk about celebrity culture,
but it’s been perceived by a select few
as having a pop at girls for wearing
makeup, which is just ludicrous. I’m
talking about people being famous
for nothing.”
It is perhaps for this reason that
he says he’s already distrustful of
journalists. “Do you reckon they
drafted you in to annihilate me?” he
says bashfully, before asking what
I think of the album. He reckons
that cynics will “probably slate it
because I’m on a major label and I
write pop songs ”, even though he
eschewed an expensive London
studio to work with his usual
producer , the bizarrely monikered
Bramwell Bronte , in sheds and his
mum’s front room, before moving
into his own studio. He seems gently
perplexed that, while the bands he
admires like I dles and Fontaines DC
are signed to independent labels
and praised for being authentic, he
is sometimes treated with suspicion.
“Everybody sees you’re on a major
label and they just assume thatyou’re mass produced,” he says.
At least he is attempting to put
songs like new album track White
Privilege on Radio 1 – a song
on which he “spewed out” our
confl icted political discourse, and
“my bipolar thoughts about it all
as well ”. Brexit, of course, has an
honorary mention. Says Fender:
“One minute I consider myself
leftwing, but then I feel like there’s
also a lot of really condescending
people on the left that alienate
working class people.”
But the song also acknowledges
his own entitlement. “I can’t ever
escape being a white boy with a
guitar, and that is privilege in itself,”
he says. “And I’m not doubting that
I can write a little bit of a tune here
and there, but I do think that it
would have been harder if I wasn’t [a
white man], you know what I mean?
There was a list of Radio X’s top
100 British songs the other day and,
of those, there were three female
artists in that entire list and I had
three songs on it alone. How fucked
up is that?”F
ender says that while he
writes politically minded
songs, he doesn’t have
any answers. He is, like
his hero Springsteen,
just saying what he
sees – except when it comes to
dating. “Nobody wants to hear about
my horrendous love life,” he says.
“I’m soppy and boring. If I write
about stuff that grinds my gears or
something that actually affects our
country, then it becomes something
worth singing. I’m not clever enough
to fi x these problems, or lead the
charge. I just write about something
that’s stirred me up enough on a
Tuesday afternoon while I’m battling
my way through a pack of chocolate
digestives, drinking tea, watching
daytime telly.”
He is, perhaps, selling himself a
bit short. At the Tynemouth show,
a group of local lads, all 23, are
cracking open tinnies and bantering.
I ask what they like about Sam, and
two of them, Declan and Adam ,
are so sincerely on-message that
they could have been planted by a
marketing executive (they haven’t).
“The northeast has got a lot of
things to say but no one wants to
listen,” Adam says. Which is why,
continues Declan, “the Dead Boys
song means a lot. We connect
with that because we’re all north-
east boys. He knows the battles
that we’ve been through. Up here,
people top themselves on a daily
basis ”, which means it’s even more
powerful to see thousands of fans at
the gig sing along to it.
Fender, they say, is helping to
change perceptions. “A lot of people
here are portrayed as a bit thick,”
says Adam. “ Severely working class,
nothing going on. But there’s a lot
of really eloquent, intelligent people
with a lot of things to say, like Sam
Fender. He’s giving our generation a
voice – and not just our generation
but the area on the whole.”Hypersonic Missiles is released on
13 September on Polydoralways breathing down her neck
and pushing her to work when she
wasn’t fi t to. I saw what it was like to
struggle.”
He stops himself. “[I sound
like] I’m playing the whole ‘poor
northerner boy’ sympathy card. I
hate that. You don’t want to cling on
to the whole ‘I’m a class hero’ thing,
because it can seem not genuine
at all, like. Technically, I started
off quite comfortable. I lived in a
council estate for half of my life, but
not the beginning of it. Before my
parents split up, we lived in one of
them terraced houses, which was
quite nice. And my dad was working,
and my mum was a nurse. But if I’m
honest about it, the past 10 years of
my life were tough. It wasn’t easy.”
It’s why he grew up having “a
chip on my shoulder” when it came
to music. “A lot of the bands that I
knew around town were kids from
the private schools. I used to hear
about the Tom Odell s of the world
and be like : ‘It’s easy for you.’” And it
wasn’t just a class thing: even when
he started “touring with the Nick
Mulvey s and George Ezras” he says
he couldn’t shake the “feeling like
I didn’t belong... I used to feel so
thick ”.
Still, when he was 18, he says he
desperately tried to write the “bluesy
crappy songs” they did, because he
assumed that’s what you needed to
sound like to make it. “I saw whatРЕЛИЗ
ПОДГОТОВИЛАГРУППА"What's News"VK.COM/WSNWSРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS