A shout from the north-east: Why Sam Fender’s music is so vitally location-specific
On the final track of Sam Fender’s third album, People Watching, his voice is joined by a big band. Singing a love song for his grandparents, turning ‘Remember My Name’ into a memorial of their memory and their legacy as working-class people who built a beautiful life despite monetary hardship, Fender’s voice becomes truly cinematic amongst the horns behind him. But it is vital to note who the band is—Easington Colliery Band, a miner’s band from the north-east.
What to many would just sound like liner notes or performer credits is actually far more important than that. “My mam’s side of the family were all down the pits so I wanted to have a miners’ brass band on there,” Fender said of the decision. When we talk about the north-east, and especially about issues of class, poverty and opportunity in that part of the country, the context of it being miner’s country is essential. Often brushed off as long-gone history, the impact of that industry, and specifically the death of that industry under Margaret Thatcher and conservative rule, is still prevalent today. In Fender’s own words, tweeted back in 2021, the “sheer penury she put these communities through” is still there. As the pits were closed, decisions made by the government utterly economically starved these areas. Once thriving communities with strong workforces, their major industry was wiped out, and nothing cropped up in its place.
So when Sam Fender is singing about poverty and kids being pushed towards dealing on ‘Seventeen Going Under’, or about the death of town centres and rise in addiction in songs like ‘Spice’, or dealing with the ever-growing divide between the working people and those in charge on ‘Aye’, it is always and inseparably contextualised by Fender’s origin because he is born from these consequences. It’s in his blood as it is in all north-easterners, but it’s also around him, day-to-day in boarded up shop front, increased homelessness and the lives of those he grew up with.
“I’ll always end up writing about Newcastle,” Fender said when discussing People Watching, and this album was no different from his other projects. Obviously, every word Fender sings comes through in his thick North Shields accent – but even that feels important. “People do think that speakers in the north of England are less intelligent, less ambitious, less educated and so on, solely from the way they speak,” Dr Robert McKenzie, a researcher at Northumbria University, found. As Fender’s political messages often seem to get lost amidst crowds of fist-pumping indie fans, perhaps that’s the reason. But there is also a level to which Fender’s ever-growing success, spreading way, way beyond his hometown, dilutes his tunnel vision. It’s a good thing that others find ways to relate to Fender’s lyricism and that his messages are spreading, but the specificity of his context and the location in which all his songs live is essential.
Let’s take a song like ‘Leave Fast’ as an example of material that feels more specific to its surroundings. Not only is the track littered with personal references to home, like the Nautilus or the lowlights, two local pubs. But the central idea, “leave fast or stay forever”, while widely relatable, still feels specific. Anyone from the north-east with any level of creative drive or desire will understand it. Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, and many other northern cities still have strong cultural ties, scenes and industries. With their past musical legacies, record labels keep an eye on them. They’re also cities with better finances and more government support. They’re cities less burdened by the sheer levels of neglect that the north-east specifically has faced, meaning that even as a city, Newcastle can’t keep up with its neighbours.
“You don’t want anyone who’s actually talented or passionate about music to think they have to go somewhere else,” Henry Carden, the organiser of Middlesbrough’s Twisterella festival, said about this issue. But it is still something that needs extra work as artists and creatives feel the need to leave en mass, flooding to bigger areas with better opportunities and better chances to make it work.
That’s the sentiment behind the song and a sentiment specific to his home as Fender sees it in action. “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,” he recently told The Sunday Times.
But that’s what makes Fender’s success so powerful. Here we have an artist who has defied the odds – forced the world to take his accent seriously, broken through anything that would’ve held him back, and is now on stage, singing in distinctly north-east slang songs about distinctly north-east lives, scenes and issues.
People from elsewhere will try to argue back, claiming that these issues are never place-specific, and they’re right. However, for a historically forgotten area, it is important not to forget it in Fender’s music. He leaves the markings of the north-east everywhere. They power his passion on ‘Dead Boys’, crying out for support amidst the area’s major male mental health crisis as he told the Times, “Well, I’ve noticed that my drug addict friends who are posh go to rehab, but my mates with issues up there just die.” It powers the story of ‘Two Kids’, of generational trauma and poverty cycles. It haunts tracks like ‘Poltergeists’ and ‘The Dying Light’ as he sings out to the people he’s lost under the weight of these issues, promising to give them a voice.
The specificity becomes more complex on People Watching. He is unable to deny that his success and fame have now separated him from these issues and made his life easier while he watches his friends, peers and people he grew up with still struggle “on the bones of their arse”. The album unpacks this, with Fender dealing with the conflict between wanting to, or feeling a duty to, be a voice for the area but also feeling uncomfortable with that fact. “They reared me as a class clown / Grass-fed little cash cow / I cashed out, headed hellbound / And now they point and laugh,” he spits on ‘TV Dinner’, taking aim at an industry that seemed to almost fetishise his upbringing and his position as the working class kid from the northeast only to cash in on it and then trivialise it.
But as it ends on ‘Remember My Name’, with the final sound on the album being the sound of a miner’s band, playing over a hauntingly beautiful song about turning a council house into a home in memory of working-class northeastern grandparents who did their best to make it all work – it is poignant and pointed. It is a shout of not only survival and strength, but of success as there is always a feeling that Fender shouts especially hard for everyone at home without a voice.
