The young British rocker Sam Fender has a lot going for him. At home in the UK, Fender's heavy-hearted, Springsteenian slice-of-life music has tapped into the cultural zeitgeist. His first two albums were both platinum chart-toppers. He just released his third LP People Watching, and its title track is already a top-10 hit in his homeland. Fender recorded much People Watching in Los Angeles with the War On Drugs' Adam Granduciel, who calls Fender a "musical savant." He's doing good! But Fender is aware that he's an exception, and now he's talking about how the music business is "rigged" against people from working-class backgrounds.
Fender is from the Northeast of England, near Newcastle, and many of his songs are about the way that people struggle up there. In a recent Times profile, Fender explains why he puts the names of so many people that he knows into his songs: "It’s because their stories won’t be told in the current climate. The music industry is 80%, 90% kids who are privately educated. A kid from where I’m from can’t afford to tour, so there are probably thousands writing songs that are ten times better than mine, poignant lyrics about the country, but they will not be seen because it’s rigged."
Fender also describes how industries like the music business ignore young working class white men and how that makes it easier for malevolent forces like Andrew Tate to find audiences among those communities:
People are very unaware. We are very good at talking about privileges -- white, male, or straight privilege. We rarely talk about class, though. And that’s a lot of the reason that all the young lads are seduced by demagogues and psychos like Andrew Tate. They’re being shamed all the time and made to feel like they’re a problem. It’s this narrative being told to white boys from nowhere towns. People preach to some kid in a pit town in Durham who’s got fuck all and tell him he’s privileged? Then Tate tells him he’s worth something? It’s seductive.
In the Times article, Fender also addresses the lyric -- "They love her now, but bled her then" -- that he wrote about Amy Winehouse. Fender says, "It’s the British culture of building them up to knock ’em down. It was wild. I wrote that, then Liam Payne died. You think of the amount of times he was getting dragged through the press, and he didn’t help himself, did he? Bless him. I remember watching some videos he was in and being, like, ‘God, what a tit.’ But the reality was that he was just a young lad, famous far too young, who had addiction trouble -- and everyone hit him with the pitchforks."
People Watching is out now on Polydor and Fender tells the Times he's now “desperate” to make a punk record. Read the feature here.
