COVER STORY | Sam Fender Rises With the Sun

The youngest son of a nurse and an electrician, Sam Fender was born in North Shields in 1994. His dad, who became a music teacher later in his life, played with other tradesmen in social club bands on weekends. Gas men, guys who worked in plastering, plumbers, folks hustling from one opportunity to the next—creative blue collar workers making an honest living. “My dad would be going around, sortin’ out people’s fuse boxes in their houses,” Fender recalls. “Then, they would load up a transit van with Hammond organs and amplifiers and go play gigs.” He remembers musicians always coming and going in his house growing up, “Geordie blokes,” as he calls them, who would tower above the kids and moonlit as rock stars in Tyne and Wear. “I used to find that so exciting as a kid. Even when I was in my pram, my mum would take me down to see him playing at the pubs. [I had] no ear protection, it’s probably why I’m deaf as a post now. That’s probably because I’ve been going to gigs since I was two with no muffs on.”

Looking back, Fender considers those days a privilege, having a music education through osmosis. It was natural, he says, with an ear-to-ear smirk, and never unusual for him and his brother Liam to be running around the house singing their guts out. “A lot of people grow up and they get embarrassed to sing because, if you sang in the household, your brother would take the piss out of you. In my house, it was second nature to just play songs and sing along, which was lovely.” Liam was a drummer who, as Fender claims, was “always smashing the kit,” so it was normal for a racket to be echoing in and out of the bedrooms in their parents’ terraced house. “I could always hear it, and I always used to sneak in and want to play on his kit,” he continues. “I probably wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for that.”

“This” is an understatement. Fender is, arguably, the UK’s biggest rock star under the age of 35. He’s the country’s “answer to Bruce Springsteen,” as some outlets have generously put it. A comparison like that is nothing to scoff at, but it’s also incredibly hard to live up to. No one can be Springsteen, as he’s practically a mononym by now. Fender’s ties to the Boss, who is undoubtedly an influence, haven’t deterred British outlets from believing in the stories sweating out of his pen. If you look at the reception around his newest album, People Watching, you’ll see perfect review scores from the likes of The Guardian, Dork, The Observer, DIY and The Skinny. American-based outlets, like Pitchfork, have landed on the more critical, ambivalent side when it comes to Fender’s work. Most of the Boss’ offspring—the Gaslight Anthem, the Killers, the Hold Steady, Josh Ritter, Bleachers—are from the States, and understandably so, considering his East Coast lineage. It’s harder to impress the critics on the western side of the pond; we’ve been listening to Springsteen imitators for generations.

But the truth of the matter is that Fender is Springsteen for his homeland even if he’s not Springsteen for mine, and he’s damn good at filling that role. On People Watching, there’s a line in “Wild Long Lie” that I’ve been thinking about, when Fender sings, “I think I need to leave this town over and over.” He grapples with fame and displacement, but he also pays tribute to marred streets, broken homes, friends in pain but out of sight and the misfits starry-eyed by the promise of getting out. Like Springsteen, Fender understands that there are those of us who tell stories, those of us who live them, and those of us who get to do both. And he walks the walk, sometimes without filter, declaring that, if somebody says he can’t sing a line like “Those were times where we all had nothing, most of my friends are still against it” or keep fighting for the person he once was and the people his loved ones still are, then “they can go fuck themselves,” because having more money now doesn’t erase his entire childhood and young adulthood. Stepping into the context he occupies among his English contemporaries, you start to understand why he gets lauded with the same respect that Oasis, the Jam, Pulp, the Specials and Billy Bragg got when they were writing music for the common folk. The chip on his shoulder, as a working-class kid who slipped in and out of poverty until he signed his first record deal at age 25, hasn’t fallen away now, even when he’s a Mercury Prize nominee or a perennial concert headliner.

And what’s neat about Fender’s music is that it’s grown his audience well into the millions, nabbed him more than a dozen total nominations at the Brit and NME Awards and landed him on a tour with Springsteen in Italy, but he’s still singing like he’s gigging with his mates at a local pub, slagging off toxic masculinity, rigged industries, British neoliberalism and coming-of-age memories colored by drug-dealing and drug-taking. Even on a widescreen album like People Watching, and on the cusp of Newcastle shows where he will play to 250,000 people across four nights, he generously remains salt of the earth.

Because this is the same guy who, as a teenager, considered selling drugs to financially support his in-debt mother, who had recently retired from nursing after a fibromyalgia diagnosis and a rejected application from the Department for Work and Pensions. During our conversations, talks openly about how grassroots bands are failing in England because there’s no money in touring. “It’s disgraceful,” he says. “Even on our first Academy tours, where we were playing to 2,000 people in the UK [every night], we were still just breaking even. There’s no profit.” He mentions that his music industry is “90-percent filled” with kids from private schools, kids who grew up more privileged than him and his bandmates. “The only people who can actually afford to tour a band are people who don’t have to work,” he says. “The only reason I got into a place where I had that freedom was when I was really ill when I was 20. I ended up on sickness benefits, which allowed me to have a bit more time to write and be creative, because I was too ill to work.” Before he had a label deal, Fender worked with a manager who invested money in his records, and he imagines that he would “still be [working] in the bar or the call center” if that kind of endowment never came.

I go backwards and ask Fender what he picked up from watching his dad play all those years ago. “To be honest with you, it never looked that good!” he replies. “My dad always used to look really stressed. He’s very interested in the production side of stuff, and he loves doing the sound. He would set all of the gear up, set the PA up. He’d be plugging XLRs in and then trying to mix and do a soundcheck of his own band. I think, for him, it was a lot of work, and none of the other guys really did that. So it became a bit of a chore for my dad. I don’t think I learned much from watching it, other than that was probably what I wanted to do… at some point.” Instead, Fender has learned a lot about playing music through his stories and advice about ego. “He always told us to play with people who are better than us. He says, ‘You won’t learn anything if you don’t. Don’t pick somebody out of pride, because you want to be the best in the group.’”

Fender mentions his first music friend, a childhood prodigy named Jack who was “an incredible drummer by age eight.” “He was one of those kids who just had so much talent pouring out of him, and still does,” he says. “I think there was, maybe, a bit of a friendly rivalry. I mean, sometimes it was not friendly, as well, because we were only 10 years old. There was definitely a little bit of a sibling thing going on, and that really made me excel. When you’re a little kid, and you’re seeing everybody go, ‘Oh, wow, isn’t Colleen and Ian’s son so amazing?’ I wanted a bit of that, so I started really practicing my guitar.” By the time he turned 13, Fender had already started his first band, with his longtime collaborator and friend Dean Thompson, and they would play at Liam’s busking nights or sing Jimi Hendrix covers at birthday parties—“the classic stuff you do when you first start.”

A curly-haired Thompson came into Fender’s life on his golden Mongoose BMX bike in the mid-2000s. “I used to think he was the coolest,” Fender chuffly remembers. “I was like, ‘Who’s this kid?’ I went over and started chatting to him, and [we found out] that we both played guitar. He used to get me to go around to his house and, in the little garage, he had a Les Paul. I used to play on his guitar and we became the best of it from then on.” Thompson isn’t just an aces sideman, but he’s bang-on in the engineering department, too. And he’s largely responsible for Fender breaking out of North Shields.

In the mid-2010s, Thompson was the protégé of Bramwell Bronte, the pseudonym of a guy named Tom who produced Fender’s first two albums, Hypersonic Missiles and Seventeen Going Under. “Tom was ready to quit, he was working in a studio in Newcastle that was on the verge of being shut down all the time, and he was working with a lot of artists that he didn’t really enjoy,” Fender says. “He was losing the passion for it, and Dean said to Tommy, ‘You’ve got to hear my friend, he’s got these really good songs. I think you would love to work with him. It’ll reignite your fire for it all.’ And Tom was like, ‘Yeah, fucking whatever.’” Eventually, it was arranged that Fender would lug his twin reverb amp and his Stratocaster all the way from North Shields to Tom’s home in the city. “I played him all my songs, and he was like, ‘Fucking hell, we’ve got to do this.’” Together, they made an EP called Dead Boys in that city flat, a shed and in Fender’s mother’s front room.

Seventeen Going Under was festival-ready, politicized and to the gills with brave, saxophone-dressed anthems sung like a novelist’s karaoke party, and I mean that in the best way possible. Even Fender’s reflections on teenage nihilism, Brexit, father-son relationships and patriotism never lingered too grimly, colliding urgently with syrupy choruses while surrendering to shockingly gorgeous guitars and big-budget-sounding songs, especially “Getting Started,” “Spit of You” and “Aye.” All of it was celebratory even in its fullest vignettes of struggle.

My first introduction to Fender’s music came not from the man himself, but from Camp Cope, the now-defunct Aussie punk trio who, upon entering the triple j studio in February 2022, covered his high-charting hit song “Seventeen Going Under.” It’s a song that got a big push on TikTok before then (though its commercial crossover with American audiences was nearly non-existent), as users took the lines “I was far too scared to hit him, but I would hit him in a heartbeat now” and used them to share their own stories of gendered and domestic violence with scrolling audiences willing to listen.

I interviewed Camp Cope for MTV a week after that triple j video went live on YouTube, as they were doing the press rounds for Running With the Hurricane, a triumphant effort but their final victory lap together. In their performance, Camp Cope changed the “Crying like a child, and the boy who kicked Tom’s head in still bugs me now” lyric into “Crying like a child, and the boy who took that from me still bugs me now.” The DWP became Centrelink; Bizzies became cops; fist fights became first times on the beach. That article now lives in the Wayback Machine, but I remember how passionately vocalist Georgia Maq spoke of Fender’s work during our Zoom, how she felt compelled to take his template—a boy growing up in an abusive home in the United Kingdom—and transform it into this striking portrait of what it means to be a woman growing up in Australia. Because his songs never lecture their listeners, it’s easy to turn Fender’s words into the ones you need. I think there’s a guy from Jersey who’s done that a time or two.

After Seventeen Going Under came out in October 2021, Fender got to work writing new material, having wiped the hard-drive in his head. He says that, toward the end of making an album, he tends to get writer’s block, because he’s so focused on “trying to deliver the songs that [he’s] made” and get the mixing and mastering across the line. Fender and his band toured those songs for a lifetime, or at least it felt that long once they took a three-month break from the road at the beginning of 2023. In those pockets of time off, he, Thompson and keyboardist Joe Atkinson would go to Sleeper Sounds, a writing room in West London’s Kensal Rise neighborhood, and get ideas down. It’s where they wrote “Rein Me In” and “Wild Long Lie.” It was a baptism of fire from that point, Fender admits, pointing to how he brought new faces into his inner-circle for the first time, like producer Markus Dravs. “We did some wonderful stuff with Markus, but then it hit a point where I wasn’t quite satisfied with the sound of things, and I wanted to try something else.”

So Fender and his team went back to the drawing board. He uses a phrase alien to most Americans: “shy bairns get nowt,” which means “shy children get nothing.” “You’ve got to have the balls to ask for things,” he clarifies. “I love Adam Granduciel and I love the War on Drugs, they were a huge influence on me, especially when I went through a period of being quite ill and I was in the hospital for a condition that I had. At the time, it was life-threatening, you know. It was worrying, so I had a real brush with mortality, at the time, and Lost in the Dream became my crutch.” While figuring out how to live with a compromised immune system, Fender turned to songs like “Disappearing,” “Eyes to the Wind” and “Under the Pressure.” And then it dawned on him: “I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve got to go and ask [Adam] and see what happens.” Fender got Granduciel’s number from his band’s label and gave him a call. The two musicians hit it off. It made sense, as Fender puts it. “Within an hour, we realized that we’re both into the same stuff,” he furthers. “We were both referencing Tom Petty and the Waterboys and the Replacements… Springsteen, Warren Zevon. We were both really into it. It glued really quickly.”

Fender came to the States to finish People Watching with Granduciel in Los Angeles, and the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn (whose next solo album is also produced by Granduciel) stopped by the studio to sing harmonies on “Something Heavy.” “What’s it like coming over here to make a record, as opposed to doing something at the Grouse Lodge in Ireland?” I ask him, and he doesn’t miss a beat in his response: “There’s less drinking.” He goes on to say that he drank a lot in California, too, becoming a regular at Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood during his month-long stay. It makes sense he’d go to a place like that, a WeHo bar famous for housing decades of A-list patrons, spanning from the likes of Clark Gable, Judy Garland and Rita Hayworth to mystics of the Sunset Strip, like Jim Morrison (who got thrown out of Barney’s for pissing on the bar) and Charles Bukowski. It’s where Tarantino supposedly wrote the Pulp Fiction screenplay, and it’s credited with supplying the “vibes” on Big Brother and the Holding Company’s song “Turtle Blues.”

Making Seventeen Going Under at the Grouse Lodge was strange, according to Fender. He had an album’s worth of songs, and COVID-19 lockdowns were still ongoing. “It felt like we’d won the lottery,” he says, “because we were the only people that were working.” There was still pandemic paranoia afoot, but there was also an unlimited supply of Guinness and home-cooked food. Los Angeles was different for Fender, who calls the city a “work town,” picking up on how the Laurel Canyon mythology of the 1970s has been substituted with a hustler’s mentality, and that the millions who call it home can often feel quite separated from one another. “I’m not from a big place, I’m from a fishing town in Shields,” he admits. “I’m very used to community—and I have that same sort of disconnection even when I’m in London. I find London has pockets of community that I attach myself to.”

A lot of People Watching was written back home, but Fender came up with the title track’s “very American” chorus once he got to LA. “People Watching” isn’t just his stadium-filling, stratosphere-reaching tabula rasa; you can feel Granduciel’s influence all over it, from the meld of gargantuan ‘80s synths to the strobing guitars you can hear roar across a War on Drugs song like “In Chains.” “There’s been times in the past where I’ve attempted, when I’ve been producing with Dean and Joe, to try and capture that War on Drugs thing… without it being the War on Drugs,” Fender says. “They use all of them old OB-8 synths, and we wanted to capture a bit of that, but I would always be a little bit unsatisfied with it. On Seventeen Going Under, I never quite achieved it. Just going to the man himself was obviously the best thing we could have done.”

Granduciel let Fender and his band in on some of his tricks and, in turn, “captured the sense of [instrumental] space” that allows Fender’s songwriting to be muscular, filling the sonic backdrop with lines like “Above the rain-soaked Garden of Remembrance, kittywakes etched your initials in the sky. Oh, I fear for this crippled island and the turmoil of the times. And I’ll hold you in my heart till the day I die” captured with binaural heads and contact microphones. It may sound grand, but it’s far earthier and more three-dimensional than Fender’s previous efforts. “We could be hammering away on something for hours on end, but it would never be laborious, because Adam understood the way I am wired,” he says. “I like things to have pace, and I like to keep moving. I hate being stuck. I won’t sit and do 14 guitar takes.”

Fender’s music has never been a stranger to bombast, a common mode for him especially on Seventeen Going Under. But on People Watching, he embodies a true singer-songwriter identity, most obviously on the pensive, granular closing track “Remember My Name.” Fender’s vocal is front-and-center, while horns provided by the Easington Colliery Band swell behind him and an atmosphere drones inwards. “Humor me, make my day,” he sings, his octave scaling upwards into a glass-shattering cry. “I’ll tell you stories, kiss your face, and I’ll pray you’ll remember my name.” “It can sort of feel like you’re quite naked, when you do a vocal that’s that exposed,” Fender jokes. “But, before I had the band, there was a lot of years where I toured on my own with an acoustic [guitar]. That’s how I began everything.” He gestures toward the fragility in his voice: “It’s not perfect, by a long stretch. Some of it’s flat, some of it’s a bit husky. There’s a bit where you can hear my voice crackling up.”

That’s where Fender’s family’s influence comes in, as he remembers sending his dad a demo of “Remember My Name.” “I says, ‘You know, I’m thinking about doing the vocal take again, just to try and clean it up a bit,’ and my dad was like, ‘Fuck that!’ Some of Van Morrison’s best vocals are the ones that are flat as a fart, he says, because they’re just so real. ‘That’s what you want.’ So, we kept that.” The song was one of the last parts of People Watching that Fender and his band finished, after completing the hugeness of the title track and finger-picked, mandolin-facing, folk jaunt-turned-full band ripper “Wild Long Lie,” which features Granduciel “riding the synths like a mad man.” Fender pauses for a second, considering whether or not “Remember My Name” was a challenge to make. “You know what it is?” he says. “I think I embraced it.”

A lot of Fender’s appeal comes through in his lyricism. On People Watching, phrases about ordinary people are ballooned by indie-rock expanse and colossal, swaggering hooks. Even the listicle, wounded declarations of “TV Dinner” beckon a fist-pump. Though he’s now 30 and reckoning with a level of fame that’s reached an all-time high, Fender still fills his record with the motifs he’s confronted for nearly a decade, taking aim at the intersection of mental health and masculinity (“Oh, I have friends who were cast aside / A young, meek lad with a curious mind / Just terrified of what the church would have to say”) and the government’s systematic abandonment of England’s lower classes (“Just another kid failed by these blokes and their crumbling empire”). Grabbing the baton from Jarvis Cocker and Paul Weller, Fender is unafraid of singing about the ugliness sown by the hands of boot-on-your-neck privatization and bleak, distressing capitalism. They’re political songs, sure, but they’re his diary entries, too. The first line in “Crumbling Empire”—“Road like the surface of the moon, a Detroit neighborhood left to ruin”—came from one of Fender’s American tours, when he and his band traveled across the country in a Winnebago driven by their tour manager, the Grammy-winning “Gill” (Fender doesn’t disclose his last name, but it was likely ex-Old Crow Medicine Show guitarist Gill Landry).

Fender couldn’t believe how many potholes plagued the freeways running in and out of Detroit, a comment I laugh at, as I remember the always-under-construction Interstate 76 in nearby Akron, or the sharp-toothed blacktop giving risk to the backroads in my small hometown. But Fender pulled into a neighborhood that looked like it was falling apart, and it reminded him and his bandmates of their home in Shields. “I said, ‘Jesus Christ, look at the state of the roads,’” he says, before putting on a twangy American accent: “Gil was like, ‘Yep, these are the scars of my crumbling empire.’ I was like, ‘Fuck off!’ That immediately turned into a song.” In “Crumbling Empire,” Fender talks about his parents, especially his mum, who “got left behind by the system when she was unwell.” He summons the truth about his stepdad, who was in the army and then homeless for two years, because the English government “doesn’t look after veterans,” by mentioning the “Atlantic mirror” and critiquing the harmful similarities shared between the US and UK.

Fender has been vocal about his ADHD diagnosis for years, which makes his song-making process more sporadic than that of musicians who carry a notebook around or dedicate periods of time to writing. He’s not an organized person, he tells me, citing that he gets distracted easily, but that he’s always been that way. “But with that comes those hyper-focused moments where I’ll just go, ‘Okay, I’m gonna have to do this now,’ and then I will sit for hours and work on an idea or a song,” he says. “Sometimes it’s five minutes, sometimes you have these really ridiculous ones that fall out of the sky. But then there’s the other side of it, where you’re just laboring away on something and then it sounds shit after six hours and you go, ‘Why the fuck did I do that?’”

He reveals that he does—albeit rarely—write while on the road, usually before he goes on autopilot, which happens around the fourth or fifth show on a tour, according to him. “You end up falling into the routine of it all. It’s like a muscle memory. That’s not normally when creativity strikes, in those little pockets of time when you’re sat in a green room, or hotel, or whatever. As long as you don’t write about the green room or the hotel, I think you’re doing okay.” One of those “ridiculous ones that fall out of the sky” was “Arm’s Length,” a laughing menagerie of platinum strums, a droning undertow of electronics and a lead guitar that puts light into the air like paragraphs falling out of a jarfly’s summertime glow.

“TV Dinner” came together slowly, the song’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics falling out all at once. Fender couldn’t get the melody right, even though he could see rhythm within the stanzas, until he started noodling around on the piano. But it was “People Watching” that took ages to finish. Fender wanted to honor Annie Orwin, a friend of his who had passed away in October 2023—a surrogate mother figure he’d stayed with for five days while she was in palliative care. “She didn’t want to be alone when she was dying, so I slept on a chair next to her bed with my friend Joe and her wonderful nieces,” he remembers. “We all took turns looking after her. It was heavy, but it was also an honor to be there with her at the end. I wanted to write something to honor her, because she used to always complain about the fact that I never mentioned her, because she did so much for my development as an artist. She used to always be like, ‘Why don’t you mention me in any of these bloody speeches?’ So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll write a song about you.’”

Fender wanted to write about his relationship with grief, to help him find a place to go in the aftermath of lines like “The beauty of youth had left my breaking heart, but it wasn’t hard when you love someone / Oh, I stayed all night till you left this life, ‘cause that’s just love.” It was a cathartic undertaking, and months passed before he finally came up with that “I people on the way back home, everybody on the treadmill runnin’, under the billboards out of the heat, somebody’s darling’s on the street tonight” chorus. “I must have done about fucking seven different choruses over that time,” he says. It and the song’s middle eight came “like a strike of light” in Los Angeles, and he made good on his promise to Annie—only to up the ante and name the best record of his career after her song.

Fender is among his generation’s most strong-willed folk heroes, one whose lyrics are never final words but doorways into new perspectives and real-life corruptions hollered into focus by working-class voices. He’s been on the rise since 2019, but it was the platinum-certified, multi-million-copy-selling Seventeen Going Under that turned him into a mouthpiece for his native North East coast of England. And, in an era where much of the UK’s biggest musical exports are pop acts oft-born into privately-educated, middle-class environments, it should be improbable that a Geordie boy would go from toiling away in call centers, bars and restaurants for coin to being a siren for a part of the country currently grappling with high child poverty and unemployment rates. But, in the company of Sam Fender’s music, we can be reckless and loving, carrying each other through the streets even when the city’s tired. In the company of songs that capture who he is and who the people and places he cares for are, we can all rise up with the sun.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.