“The most bad ass opening to any song,” according to Sam Fender
The world of Sam Fender has dramatically changed in recent years. Going from a humble North East lad to a global megastar is not a journey many expect to take. But what’s more, Fender has managed to do it with authenticity. And that’s because, underneath it all, he is an artist first and foremost.
Keith Richards once mused that “a painter’s got a canvas, the writer’s got reams of empty paper,” and a “musician has silence”.
How best to break that silence? That is a conundrum that has stared every songwriter unerringly in the face. It is, in many ways, the hardest moment of the song, because, given the laws of music, it essentially dictates where it goes next. With ‘Seventeen Going Under’, Sam Fender created a riff that proves as instantly recognisable as the sound of a beer cap being cracked off.
It was a magical intro that sent Fender’s career to new heights as the song ramped up the charts. However, breaking the silence with something that instantly clicks into the psyche is one thing; breaking it open with a belting wallop of bravura is quite another. Steely Dan faced-up that battlefield of silence like Genghis Khan’s marauding empire, so assured in their craft that they knew no caution was necessary and they could play bombastically from the get-go.
So, thanks to their seismic skills, they came up with more than a few inventive song openings. But for Fender, they cracked one of the greatest of all time with their track, ‘The Caves of Altamira’. “My dad proper loved Steely Dan,” the Geordie musician told BBC 2, “he loves all that jazz rock stuff from the ’70s.” As a fellow musician, along with his brother, Liam Fender, their home was filled with music, and this bold intro stirred Sam from the off.
“‘Caves of Altemeera’ is just like when I first heard it I thought it was the most badass opening to any song with the horns and all the ‘baaaduuuum’. It’s just that huge brass section. And it has got such a good groove. They’re the best groove players, Steely Dan, because they always have the best session musicians in,” he said of the 1976 classic from The Royal Scam.
Beyond the opening, theirs is a tale of a “loss of innocence” that Donald Fagen describes as “a pretty straightforward story about a guy who visits the caves of Altamira [in Spain] which have famous drawings by prehistoric men or women as the case may be, and he registers his astonishment.” Fittingly, the intro may have astonished Fender, but now he has his own personal connection to the song much like the protagonist within the track.
“That was constantly played around the house and in the car,” he said of the anthem, “and it is such clever music that I was just absorbing all this mad jazz stuff when I was a kid because my dad was always playing it, and I genuinely think that had such an effect on my ear as a kid because it’s really interesting and intricate stuff that it was just subconsciously being soaked up.”
Now, he says, “It just makes me think of my dad because we have a proper connection over it and whenever I go out to see my dad – who lives in France now – it is always our go-to. We’ll sit and have a drink, and when it gets dark, we’ll always have Steely Dan and sit and dork out about how clever it is.”
If there is one thing you can comfortably say that most Steely Dan fans will enjoy, then it is “dorking out” about just how delicately complex and brutally forthright they are in their pursuit of musical perfection. For some, this can be a turn-off, but if you’re a Dan fan, then there’s a good chance every single note can feel like an essay waiting to happen.
