Sam Fender: People Watching review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Polydor)
On his third album, produced by the War on Drugs, the North Shields singer-songwriter shows just how gifted he is at pairing stadium choruses with sharp, bleak vignettes

Sam Fender’s third album ends with a track called Remember My Name. It’s clearly a very personal song, about its author’s late grandfather – even revealing the address of his council house, 11 Wark Avenue. The northern British references – “Chasing a cross in from the wing / Our boy’s a whippet, he’s faster than anything” – are amplified both by Fender’s Geordie vowels and the backing, provided by the Easington Colliery brass band. It’s all very specific and individual – you really don’t hear brass bands, or indeed the mention of whippets in pop very often – and yet Remember My Name seems to have something of the self-fulfilling prophecy about it. You can immediately imagine its soaring melody being sung en masse by a huge festival audience, which is, one suspects, precisely the destiny that awaits it.

It’s a reminder of the singularity of Fender’s rise. Both his 2019 debut Hypersonic Missiles and 2021’s Seventeen Going Under went platinum; the latter’s title track sold nearly 2m copies in the UK. He’s just announced a run of vast summer gigs, taking in the London Stadium and three consecutive nights at Newcastle’s St James’ Park: four shows that will see him play to the best part of quarter of a million people. This has happened despite the fact that his music is expressly political, and not in the usual platitudinous box-ticking way. It relentlessly picks away at the bleakest realities of northern working-class life, seldom a fashionable cause: you’d probably have to look back to Design for Life-era Manic Street Preachers – or even further, to the heyday of the Jam – to find rock musicians who made a similar agenda so commercially successful. He is probably the only pop star to have attracted both the praise of august socialist magazine the Tribune for his critiques of “the callousness of British neoliberalism” and the TikTok hashtag #toptierindiebois.

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