I hear Sam Fender before I see him. I’m waiting in a west London recording studio when a door opens downstairs and suddenly the hallway is ringing with laughter. Fender, in his broad Geordie accent, is recounting a story about an inadvertently comedic appearance of a schoolmate on Crimewatch, and I, a Geordie living in the south, have the unfamiliar feeling of being at home.
Like most Tynesiders who make it big, the singer-songwriter has a devoted fanbase in the northeast who have eagerly followed his success: Fender’s 2019 debut album, Hypersonic Missiles, and last year’s follow-up, Seventeen Going Under, both went to No 1. Last month he won the Brit award for best rock/alternative act, three years after receiving the Critics’ Choice award for rising artist.
Now he’s about to go global. His second album’s title track went viral on TikTok, with fans using the lyrics “I was far too scared to hit him, but I would hit him in a heartbeat now” to share stories of bullying and abuse. To date, more than 170,000 videos have been made using the song.
“I was on the dole four year’ ago,” Fender marvels. He grew up in North Shields, just east of Newcastle and across the Tyne from my home town, South Shields. He is fiercely proud of where he’s from. He bought his first house there (“I’ve still got an NE29 postcode but it’s got a couple of baths in it”) and it saturates his music: the first album was a bleak yet loving portrait of an industrial community gutted during the Thatcher years; the second, an examination of how, for better and for worse, that community shaped him. His local pride is evident in our interview: later, when I come to transcribe the conversation, I realise we wasted several precious minutes arguing over which Shields institution, Minchella & Co in South Shields or Di Meo’s in North Shields, has better ice cream. (The answer, of course, is Minchella’s.)
He sings in his own accent, despite his vocal coach’s concerns that the vowel sounds strain his voice. He toned it down on his first album, wary of how he’d be received. After all, people outside the northeast didn’t hesitate to mock his speaking voice. “I was interviewed on live TV once,” he says, “and [the interviewer] didn’t understand what I said, and he just went, ‘Why aye, man!’ Because people assume we’re so nice, they think they can get away with it.” Recording his second album, he resolved to sound like himself. “I was, like, I should sing like a Geordie — I am a Geordie. We’ve got a beautiful accent. It’s one of the most melodic accents in the English language. And we should be proud of that, so I am.”
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Fender’s music, which blends elements of Americana and folk with rousing indie rock, draws heavily on the traumas of his youth and early adulthood, from his mam’s debilitating illness — she suffers from fibromyalgia, which causes musculoskeletal pain and fatigue — to his troubled relationship with his dad. “I didn’t get famous until I was 25, so a lot of the songs I write are about my life up to then,” says Fender, now 27. “I don’t really write about my life now. No one wants to hear about me globetrotting.”
He is careful to run his songs by their subjects, he says, but his parents don’t object to his unflinching recollections: “My mam said, ‘Well, it’s the truth, son. It’s the truth.’ ”
Life was simple for Fender at first. “I’m from a working-class family but we did well,” he says. “We weren’t skint. We had good Christmases.” Shirley, his mam, was a nurse; his dad, Alan, an electrician. Both his dad and his brother, nine years his senior, were amateur musicians; after his parents split up when Sam was eight, his dad bought him his first guitar to soften the blow. By 13, he’d decided on a career in music. “It was the first thing I was good at,” he says.
Fender was bullied in the first few years of secondary school, the same boy shoving a palm into his nose, triggering a nosebleed, every time they passed on the stairs outside science class. He grew his hair long and for 12-year-old boys that was reason enough to attack. “My brother had long hair and he was my hero,” he says. “He looked like Kurt Cobain. It didn’t look as good on me.”
After each attack came shame, which deepened as he compared himself to his father, who had been a “proper scrapper” in his youth. “We used to have a punchbag in the back yard when I was a kid and the walls would rattle when I’d be sat having my tea because he was punching it that hard,” Fender recalls. “He used to get frustrated because I wasn’t like him.”
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His dad urged him to hit first when his tormentor approached. “I’d go into school the next day and the kid would come up to us and I’d be ready to do it, and then it just wouldn’t come. And then I’d get hit again. I’d come home mortified and then I wouldn’t tell my dad because I was ashamed.”
A quiet anger began to build. “I never did anything about [the bullying], and I wasn’t the kind of kid who’d take it out on somebody else. I’d just sit at home and imagine the bullies as little tiny people in my hands, and I used to crush them,” he says. The anger swelled until he hit his twenties, when it erupted. “I just started trying to punch people’s heads in, people who were dicks, and it didn’t make us feel any better. I felt like I needed to do that to prove my masculinity, but all that happens is you just wake up in the morning with a sore hand, feeling like shit.”
As a child, Fender used to worry about a mysterious pain in the pit of his stomach that he couldn’t shake. A realisation came years later: what he had been experiencing was anxiety and depression. He was never encouraged to interrogate his emotions. “I was always told, ‘Are you a man or a mouse?’ It’s, like, to be a successful man you have to feel nothing.”
At 13, a close family friend died by suicide and Fender was taught again how a man should and should not feel. “I was crying and my dad was, like, ‘You’ve got to wrap that up and be strong for your mam.’ So then I learnt at that age just to suck it in, push it down.” He pauses. “And then you unlearn that when you’re sat in a f***ing therapy room bawling your eyes out.” Fender started therapy in 2019; the process of excavating feelings long buried ultimately inspired his latest album.
His relationship with his dad informed the single Spit of You; in the chorus, he laments their inability to communicate honestly, singing: “I can talk to anyone/I can’t talk to you.” In the accompanying video, Fender and his father — played by the actor Stephen Graham — argue, cry and drink pints in silence at opposite ends of the sofa. Today, their relationship is better. “We had a big blow-out argument once and that kind of solved everything. Ever since we’ve been thick as thieves,” Fender says. “Spit of You is really about how much I bloody love the guy.”
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When he was 15 Fender’s mother became severely ill, grappling with mental health issues as well as fibromyalgia. Unable to work, she fell into debt. “The DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] were hounding her, taking her to tribunals to make her prove that she was unfit to work, and that was making her more ill,” he says.
His helpless fury as he watched her sink inspired his album’s title track, Seventeen Going Under. “This is a woman who’s worked as a nurse all her life, never had a day off, worked her arse off, and is a wonderful, wonderful woman, and she’s dragged through the mud by her own government when she’s ill,” he says. “There’s a special place reserved in hell for the bastards at the DWP.”
Since rising to fame Fender says he has had “blokes giving us stick for being left wing, saying I’ve got stupid celebrity opinions”. It’s a criticism he resents. “I was left wing since I was 16, mate. I’ve hated the Tories since I was a kid. Nowt’s changed — the only thing that’s different is I’m not skint any more.”
He didn’t set out to write about class, or become a spokesperson for the struggling post-industrial communities of the northeast. “It’s not me trying to strike up a conversation. This is my existence. I can’t write about anything other than what I am.”
Fender went to sixth form in the neighbouring town of Whitley Bay, where the students were wealthier and he felt miserably out of place. “There was a corner of the common room that they used to call peasants’ corner, and that’s where I used to sit,” he says. “But they’re all asking us to play their weddings now. And I subsequently tell them all to f*** off. It’s wonderful.” He started skipping school, spending his days at a friend’s house “smoking skunk and watching Goodfellas”.
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After “absolutely butchering” his A-levels, he began working at a call centre (“I was saying the same thing over and over and over again and it felt like my brain was coming out my f***ing ear”) and pulling pints at a local pub, the Low Lights Tavern. There, a stroke of luck promised an escape from a life that felt increasingly hopeless: Owain Davies, manager to the indie-folk artist Ben Howard, walked into the pub. After playing Davies a few songs, Fender had a manager of his own. Years later he’d donate both of his Brit awards to the Low Lights to be repurposed as bar pumps.
Davies sent him out on the road, supporting the likes of Hozier and George Ezra. The experience sharpened his performance skills, but not his songwriting. “At the time I was so desperate to get out of my situation at home that I was writing songs I thought people would want, as opposed to what I wanted. I was trying to write pop songs,” he says. Record labels kept passing on him, despite Davies’s best efforts. Playing a disastrous show at the Great Escape festival in Brighton, he watched talent scouts walk out mid-song.
Then, at 20, Fender was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, one he declines to name “because it’ll just become the story of everything I do”. He thought his career was over. “I was, like, ‘Well, that’s great — my music’s failed and I’m probably going to die.’ ” Living on sickness benefits and barely able to walk down the street, he spent most of his time in the flat he shared with his mother, staring at the mould on the walls.
Contemplating his mortality, he made a resolution: “If I’m going to potentially die young, then I’m going to release an album that actually means something before that.” Instead, he made an unexpected recovery. “And now I’ve released two albums that I like. Well, one that’s alreet, and one that’s f***ing good.”
Today he’s in “near remission”; he has regular blood tests, takes medication and lives a “completely normal” life. “I should probably look after myself a bit more,” he concedes. “But I’m in my twenties and I just want to live like I’m in my twenties.”
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Fender’s breakthrough was his 2018 single Dead Boys, a reflection on the agony of young male suicide in North Shields. He wrote it after losing a string of friends to suicide; in the years since he has lost more. In England and Wales three quarters of deaths by suicide are male; the region with the highest suicide rate is the northeast. “It leaves people so numb and so full of guilt because everyone blames themselves for not noticing it,” he says. “It’s almost like I’m on tenterhooks looking out for it now.”
Since the release of Dead Boys he has spoken frequently about male mental health, as someone both bereaved by suicide and familiar with suicidal ideation. “I had a moment when I felt down,” he says. “I think most people have moments when they think about it. It crosses your mind if you’re having a shit time.”
He points to The Dying Light, the closing song on his latest album, which ends with a pledge: “I’m damned if I give up tonight/I must repel the dying light … for all the ones who didn’t make the night.” It’s a message, ultimately, to himself: “I should get help and not do that, because I know what it is to lose people in the same way, and I know the pain that causes, so I should do it for them.”
He is inundated with messages on social media from fans sharing their own mental health struggles, often crediting his music as the reason they sought help. It’s a source of great pride: “I try to be a champion for lads to say how they feel.” But it worries him a little too. “I’m not a therapist, am I?” he says. “You don’t want to say the wrong thing.”
So what now for Fender? He is already writing songs for his third album. “I’m not very good at sitting still,” he says, before correcting himself. “Actually, no — I’m too good at it. I’m too good at drinking. When I’ve got time on my hands, I just go nuts.”
He plans to spend six months in New York to record his next album — ideally at Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village. He’s looking for a place to live in London too, aiming to divide his time between the capital and North Shields. His home town, the place that shaped him and his music, the place he loves more than anywhere else, has started to feel a little strange in recent years. “I can’t gan for a pint without doing 30 selfies,” he says. “It’s par for the course, but you never have any normality and it’s important for your head just to be able to sit with your pals and have a normal conversation.”
When I ask how he processes his success, he answers quickly: “I haven’t.” Each new day brings another reminder of just how dramatically his life has changed: a second No 1 album; a single in the top three; two nights sold out at Wembley; a huge outdoor gig at Finsbury Park in London in July, already three quarters of the tickets snapped up. “How can you process that?” he says. “I think if I was born into a world where that was normal craic … but I wasn’t, I was born in Shields. To go from that to here is just ludicrous.”
Part of Fender feels as though he’s floating above himself, watching his body accepting a Brit award from Ronnie Wood, or playing to a sold-out crowd in a Newcastle arena, or being surprised with his No 1 album trophy by Ant and Dec. Another part is always on high alert, waiting for it all to come crashing down. “I always feel like it’s going to go wrong at some point. Like I’m going to wake up from a coma and they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, you actually just got hit by the 306,’ ” he says. Then he grins. “I’d be pretty pissed off if they woke us up.”
Sam Fender plays Nottingham Motorpoint Arena tonight and tours the UK until April 6; samfender.com
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