Sam Fender peered out at the crowd filling the Mojave tent at last month’s Coachella festival — possibly the highest-profile American gig to date for this 31-year-old singer and songwriter from the north of England — and said he was going to play the stupidest song he ever wrote.
A thrashing three-chord punk tantrum inspired by a tasteless joke Fender saw on Facebook during the COVID pandemic, the song was “Howdon Aldi Death Queue,” in which he describes a bunch of pensioners lined up at a supermarket near his working-class hometown of North Shields, near Newcastle.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa — keep your distance,” it goes, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa — that’s less than two meters.” At Coachella, Fender punctuated the song’s climax with a messy guitar solo that seemed to lampoon the whole idea of guitar solos.
Why perform something so dumb with so many eyes on him?
“Because it’s great,” Fender said with a laugh a few days after the show. “Sometimes you can do a daft song that’s just fun. Not every song needs to f—ing say something.”
Yet most of Fender’s do.
Part of a lineage that stretches back through the Clash, the Jam and the filmmaker Mike Leigh, Fender writes with searing honesty about the real lives of everyday British people: veterans navigating a neglectful bureaucracy, teenagers struggling with depression, workers left behind by globalization. At home, his music — which sets those thoughts against hearty arrangements stacked with electric guitar and wailing saxophone — has touched a nerve that’s made him one of the U.K.’s biggest rock stars, with three No. 1 albums and three Brit Awards to his name and a summer tour that includes sold-out dates next month at London Stadium and Newcastle’s St. James’ Park.
On Thursday, Fender released a music video for his song “Little Bit Closer” directed by Philip Barantini and starring 15-year-old Owen Cooper — a duo familiar to millions of viewers from their work in the much-talked-about “Adolescence,” which according to Netflix is the streamer’s most-viewed British series of all time.
Said Elton John of Fender in an interview a few years ago: “He’s a British rock ’n’ roll artist who’s the best rock ’n’ roll artist there is.”
Now the singer is making a go of it in the U.S., several months after the release of his latest LP, “People Watching,” which might be the most convincing rock record so far this year.
“It’s kind of ridiculous: We’re playing to 80,000 people in London, then we come over here and I’m playing bars,” he said during a late-afternoon stroll around Pan Pacific Park. Fender was in Los Angeles on a break from the road between the two weekends of Coachella, and though he was underselling the size of his shows — he’d been hitting theaters, not bars — you took his point about the whiplash.
“I actually love these gigs,” he said, dressed in a gas station attendant’s jacket over a ratty Replacements T-shirt. “It reminds me of the early days.” He added that he’s not necessarily aiming to fill stadiums in this country. “The only goal is to make it pay for itself, because right now when we come over we’re not breaking even.” He laughed. “All I want from America is to not lose money.”
For Fender, the visit to L.A. represented a return trip after he spent a month and a half here last year recording “People Watching” with Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs. He’d fallen in love with that band’s 2014 “Lost in the Dream” album while laid up with a serious illness — “I’m not gonna fully disclose what it was because I just don’t know if I want to be constantly talking about it,” he said — and jumped at the opportunity to “learn from somebody who I really look up to.”
Like Fender’s first two LPs, “People Watching” lashes anthemic choruses to surging grooves in a way that makes clear he’s always thinking about his rowdy live show. But as they experimented in Granduciel’s gear-stuffed Burbank studio — “a dreamland for us,” as Fender put it — he and the members of his band leaned into the producer’s richly atmospheric sound, texturing the songs with luscious vintage-synth parts, as in the coolly ecstatic title track, and occasionally slowing the tempo for a tune like “Crumbling Empire,” in which Fender sings more movingly than you’d think possible about the privatization of the British railway system.
The album showcases the most expressive singing Fender has put on record, not least in the gorgeous “Arm’s Length,” where he dials back his desperate yelp to find a soulful new register.
“I really appreciate that because I get very self-conscious about my voice,” he said. “I’ve got quite a high voice for a tall lad” — Fender stands sturdily at around 6 feet 1 — “and I’ve always kind of associated the highness with how good I am. As you get older, obviously the range has changed, so losing a bit of that top made me think: S—, I’m not good anymore.”
Asked whether he took care not to clutter the arrangements at the expense of Fender’s singing, Granduciel scoffed. “You couldn’t get in the way of that vocal if you tried,” the producer said.
Reviews of “People Watching” have nearly universally invoked Bruce Springsteen, and the critics aren’t wrong: With its gauzy keyboards and arpeggiated electric guitar, “Crumbling Empire” has some undeniable “I’m On Fire” energy. But Fender thinks the comparison to the Boss is “a bit lazy” and that “there’s more influences than just Springsteen in my music.” To his ears, the synth lick in the title track echoes Dire Straits, while the chiming “Nostalgia’s Lie” recalls the Byrds or the La’s. “Maybe it’s a bit Tom Petty,” he said. “But my vocal sound is nothing like Springsteen” — true enough, given the pronounced northern English accent Fender makes no attempt to hide.
“I’m sure 20 years ago, you’d have some A&R guy who’s like, ‘Don’t use the word “lads,”’” Granduciel said. “But Sam’s a proud Geordie, as he says, and you can tell in his voice. Where he’s from is such an important part of his identity and his songwriting.”
Fender learned to play guitar and write songs as a teenager living paycheck to paycheck with a mom suffering from fibromyalgia. At 18, he was performing in the North Shields pub where he also worked when the guy who’s now his manager walked in and beheld a star in the making. (One reason Fender’s still on Facebook — “even though it’s not my generation’s preferred social media,” he said — is to “keep an eye on all the old people I used to serve in the pub.”) His debut album, “Hypersonic Missiles,” came out in 2019, followed by “Seventeen Going Under” two years later.
England’s NME called the latter the best album of 2021 thanks to songs like the anguished title track — “I see my mother / The DWP see a number,” he sings of the U.K. welfare agency — and “Spit of You,” an almost unbearably poignant tune about his complicated relationship with his dad for which Barantini directed a video with “Adolescence’s” Stephen Graham as Fender’s father.
What’s Fender think about these days when he sings “Spit of You,” in which he describes watching his dad deal with the death of Fender’s grandmother? “I’m thinking: God, this is gonna suck when he’s not here,” he said. “I can’t think about it too much because then I worry about him going.”
Songs like that have attracted plenty of famous fans: Last year, Noah Kahan drafted Fender for a new version of Kahan’s hit “Homesick,” and the singer recently told KROQ that he’d been invited to a so-called Joni Jam at Joni Mitchell’s Bel-Air home — but that he didn’t go because he was too nervous. “I completely bottled it,” he said, adding that it was one of his great regrets.
At Coachella, Matt Bellamy of Muse took in Fender’s set (along with Bellamy’s movie-star ex, Kate Hudson) and later went backstage to say hello. “I wanted to be like, ‘Ah, dude, I loved ‘Knights of Cydonia’ when I was 13,’” Fender recalled of the meeting. “But I didn’t know for sure if it was him or not, so I thought best not to just in case.” With a laugh, he admitted he’s made that mistake before.
“I told Danny from McFly that I liked ‘Naïve,’ the Kooks song,” Fender recalled. “I was like, ‘That was a great tune,’ and he was like, ‘What tune?’ I said, ‘You know, “Naïve” — was a good one, wasn’t it?’ He was like, ‘Uhhh …’” Fender shook his head. “He probably doesn’t remember that, and now you’ll put that in the article, and he’ll be like, ‘F—ing hell.’”
Fender’s dealings with the notoriously aggressive British media have made him hyperaware of what he says to reporters and how it’s framed in stories about him. For starters, he rejects the idea that he’s become kind of a spokesman for young British people (though of course no spokesman worth listening to has ever embraced that role).
“People bandy about those terms all the time, and it’s ridiculous,” he said. “Saying that somebody’s the voice of a generation — I’m not, honestly. I’m an idiot. I’m just writing about my experiences and the experiences of people I know, and people attach such weight to it.”
Indeed, Fender made headlines this year after he told London’s Sunday Times that “white boys from nowhere towns” are being drawn to “demagogues and psychos like Andrew Tate” because they’re “being shamed all the time” for enjoying the advantages of a white privilege they don’t perceive.
Seated at a picnic table in the park, Fender said he doesn’t understand why his comments caused such an uproar.
“The young lads I know — my nephews and things like that — they’ll be watching some YouTuber,” he said, “and then, a couple of clicks away, they’ll end up on Tate,” the controversial online influencer who’s been accused of rape and other abuses of women. “They’re looking for role models — for people to help them become men. I just don’t think it needs to be drowned in misogyny.”
Fender’s also made waves with his comments regarding the class dynamics of a music industry he believes is “rigged” in favor of the well-to-do. “Because of Brexit, touring has become impossible in Europe for starting-out artists,” he said. “The venues and the grassroots scenes — they need to be protected at all costs.” He’s quick to acknowledge that he doesn’t know how exactly to do that — so quick that you can tell he’s accustomed to being asked.
Said Fender: “You’re allowed to point at stuff and say, ‘That’s f—ed up,’ without having the answer.”
Not every song Fender writes reaches for some sweeping sociocultural diagnosis. The new album’s closer, “Remember My Name,” is a brass-band love song “from the perspective of my granddad to my grandmother when she had dementia and he was looking after her,” the singer said. “Arm’s Length,” meanwhile, is “about not being good at dating,” he said with a laugh. “It’s about people who’ve got an avoidant attachment style.”
Is it autobiographical?
“Little bit of me in it,” he said. “I think I always felt more comfortable in chaos and uncertainty because of my childhood. So whenever things were nice, it was like: If I don’t blow this up, it’s gonna blow up on its own.” As he spoke, Fender pulled a canister of nicotine pouches from his pocket — a habit, he pointed out, that’s proved tougher to kick than cigarettes. “Anyway, I’m trying my very best these days to feel comfortable in comfort.”
Is dating harder or easier now than it was before he was famous?
“A lot easier, because I’m not dating,” he said, smiling. “I don’t want to talk about it. Well, actually, it doesn’t matter — it’s already out in some of the papers in the U.K. I’m seeing somebody, and it’s great. That’s all that matters.” (The Sun reported in March that Fender has been “secretly dating” Rosa Collier, a young actor from London, since 2022.)
For all his reluctance toward certain aspects of celebrity, Fender onstage embodies the offhand fervor of a natural rock star — which isn’t to say he puts a tremendous amount of thought into his look.
“I probably should think more about it,” he said. “I look like s— most of the time.” Playing England’s Reading festival in 2023, he sported a mullet haircut that “kind of happened by accident,” he said. “Some of my favorite Geordie footballers had terrible mullets in the ’80s — Paul Gascoigne and Kevin Keegan — and I always fancied it. I’m not gonna lie: I looked at the photos of myself and went, ‘Oh, Christ.’ But you know what? I kind of want the mullet back. It was so s—, I kind of love it.”
After his U.K. stadium shows and a run of summer festival dates in Europe, Fender is due back in the States this fall. If he ever concludes that things couldn’t get any bigger at home, would he consider moving to L.A. to break in America?
“Elton told me, ‘Just move there — that’s what I did,’” he said. “I’d be tempted to do it.”
There’s a lot of lore about Elton John’s days in L.A., beginning with the night at the Troubadour in 1970 that changed everything.
“Sooo much lore,” Fender agreed. “But the lore is always bollocks. I mean, he played the Troubadour so many times — he really grinded. In the biopics, you play one gig and then you’re in Dodger Stadium five minutes later. The thing about rock ’n’ roll lore is they always forget the hard work.”
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