Watch Camp Cope Cover Sam Fender’s “Seventeen Going Under”
Australian trio Camp Cope are getting ready to put out their new album Running With The Hurricane next month. They recently went on CBS Saturday Morning to perform several songs from it, including a new one called “Sing Your Heart Out.” But today, they went on Australian radio station triple j to perform someone else‘s song. They covered English musician Sam Fender’s “Seventeen Going Under,” which is a big hit in the UK right now, changing it from a song about growing up in the UK as a man to a song about growing up in Australia as a woman.
“When I first heard this song it really resonated with me, growing up and living still in Western Sydney, because this is a song that’s about growing up poor and then wanting to experience life as a child but then that being your home life,” Camp Cope’s Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich says. “So kind of wanting to go out and experience the world but then the world being a very hard place to navigate as well. And then when I brought it to the band, I knew that they could relate to it in a lot of ways too because it touches on themes about toxic masculinity and boys’ clubs which we’ve done before with our own music.
“Part of the reason why we chose this song is because it went viral on TikTok because a lot of women were using the line ‘I was far too scared to hit him but I would hit him in a heartbeat now’ to voice their experience of gendered violence,” adds Camp Cope singer Georgia Maq. “The fact that it resonated with so many women was just incredible and also completely devastating.” Watch Camp Cope’s rendition of the song and their interview about the cover and why they chose to do it below.