The indie anthem Sam Fender used to listen to when he “was 17, going under”
The British indie sensation that is Sam Fender didn’t grow up around The Kooks as much as can be imagined.
The influences that had the biggest inflictions on his formation came from much further into rock, with Bruce Springsteen and Oasis being fundamental to his awakening passion for music. Yet, growing up among the working classes of Northern England, the emotional vulnerability and raw storytelling of 2000s’ indie had its pull.
When disclosing his favourite indie anthems of all time to BBC Radio 1, one of his choices could not have been more stand-alone. Fender named Arcade Fire’s 2010 track ‘The Suburbs’ from its eponymous Grammy-winning album as “the song that I used to listen to when I was 17, going under…when I was 17, and I was in college, this record was my favourite record at the time”.
The reference to the song that launched him into success, ’Seventeen Going Under’, did not go unnoticed, as both his and Arcade Fire’s tracks narrate the bleak frustrations of coming of age on the edges of a city, of a meaningful childhood.
Recalling his time as a turbulent 17-year old in a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone UK, Fender said, “That was the age where I started having to grow up. I was old enough to know what was going on, and that upset us. It was horrible to see [my mum] like that, to see the way she was being treated, but I wasn’t old enough to be able to financially help her. That’s when my rose-tinted glasses fell off.” His mother’s mental illness, which he reflects on frankly in the song, singing, “I remember the sickness was forever”, is a touching exploration of a deprived, challenging childhood.
Propelled by an urgent guitar riff and seductive saxophone, the UK number one from his 2019 debut album Hypersonic Missiles pulls in the listener with its themes of desolation, much like the naked setting in his much-beloved song ‘The Suburbs’. The Montreal crew captured the insatiability and escapism present in Fender’s disarrayed adolescence, with lyrics like: “And you told me we’d never survive, Grab your mother’s keys, we’re leaving”. The apathetic rendering of a grey childhood was an effortless muse for a creative appetite like Fender’s, who made something much more visceral out of Arcade Fire’s inspiration.
The Canadian ensemble’s The Suburbs album captures the essence of a listless upbringing on the outskirts of something bigger, as the song’s lyrics surrealistically point out, “but by the time the first bombs fell/we were already bored”. The title song echoes how it feels to be lost among a world of class divisions between those who care and those who don’t, with this lyrical content taken straight from singer Win Butler and keyboard player William Butler’s upbringing in The Woodlands, a suburb of Houston.
The brothers rushed to clarify that the album did not intend to romanticise this setting, with Win Butler explaining to NME that it’s “neither a love letter to, nor an indictment of, the suburbs; it’s a letter from the suburbs”.
Although in Arcade Fire style, their themes are kept to an abstract anonymity, Fender took his life experiences to the canvas. His triggering portrayal of a teenager “spiralin’ in silence” may have stayed with audiences for its open wounds, but to the songwriter, the song is “a celebration of life after hardship”, as he told Rolling Stone UK, “It’s a celebration of surviving”.
