‘TV Dinner’: Unpacking Sam Fender’s complex consideration of celebrity
The ‘tortured artist’—that’s a myth told a lot. A person with a talent so looming that it becomes too hard to handle—but wow, doesn’t that pain lead to a great song? It’s easy to fall into thinking that culture demands casualties, as if suffering is the price of great art. But since that weight is always placed directly onto the shoulders of the artists themselves, we rarely look at the murderers surrounding them. Sam Fender, though, is staring it all down on ‘TV Dinner’.
All too often, Fender’s music is brushed off as mere indie anthems. You look at the crowds at his shows—with their football scarves, pints, and arms in the air—and his impact is often shrugged off as just another soundtrack for the ‘bucket hat brigade’. But Fender has always been aiming for much more, and the scale of his crowds is only proof of how effective he is at doing that. Whether tackling poverty, mental health, war, or addiction, he’s never shied away from big topics or getting political—he’s simply able to do it in a banger.
But on each album, there’s a moment where he drops that. Across all three of his records, there’s a song where he stares straight down the barrel, delivering his message more like a spoken word piece or a political speech than a tune. First, it was ‘White Privilege’, then ‘Aye’, and on his new album People Watching, it’s ‘TV Dinner’—his most confrontational song yet.
It’s confrontational as he points a figure directly at the music industry and spits, “You’ll sell me, you’ll kill me”. But it’s more complex than just another consideration of how the creative world packs the pressure on.
Across the whole of People Watching, Fender’s politics are now sung with an acute awareness of his privilege. As he sings about scenes back home in North Shields and working-class communities, he’s more than aware that his success has now removed him from it. But as he analyses that on other tracks, still singing about the desire to be a voice for people back home, ‘TV Dinner’ sees him turn his attention to the suits in the big cities and the way they’ve cashed in on that conflict, on Fender’s position as a voice for a historically voiceless area and the carelessness that artists shouldering immense pressure have always been treated with.
Let’s start on a small scale, on a personal scale. “Am I up to this?” Fender sings over and over and over, questioning if he can handle this world anymore. In recent years, it’s a question that has seemingly plagued him as he’s cancelled shows due to health issues and taken major steps back to protect his mental health. But that’s not something specific to him, it’s something we see year upon year with artists like Lewis Capaldi needing to take an indefinite hiatus, The Last Dinner Party cutting their intense tour schedule short due to burn out, and countless other examples of hyped new artists bucking under the pressure piled onto them. But yet still, year on year, era on era, the same story continues as no one higher up ever seems to learn or adapt the way it all works to protect people from either their schedule, their mental health or even the public onslaught of critique that artists face up to.
In ‘TV Dinner’, Fender highlights a poignant example we all know. “The darkest days are yet to sing / Like Winehouse, she was just a bairn, They love her now but bled her then,” he sings, boiling the tragic story of Amy Winehouse’s life and career down to the simple fact that people rever her now but utterly tortured her when she was alive. As one of the most visceral examples of the music industry, the media and the pressures of being an artist essentially killing someone – her story is a cautionary tale that Fender is saying no one has learnt from.
But in Fender’s argument, there’s also a broader point about the way that the industry not only fails to protect people from suffering but markets it, uses it and cashes in on it. “Fetishise their struggling while all the while, they’re suffering,” he says, feeling reflective of the fact that while songs like ‘Dead Boys’ or ‘Seventeen Going Under’, two deeply personal songs about Fender’s and his community’s issues, were blowing up, he was sinking under them. While labels were busy finding ways to market these tracks about pain, they failed to care about him being it in.
There’s a political element to Fender’s experience, too. As an artist who has always sung about the issue of class, and as a person who is aware of his vital platform as a successful voice from an area that is rarely represented, he sings on ‘TV Dinner’ about that feeling exploited. “They reared me as a class clown / Grass-fed little cash cow / I cashed out, headed hellbound / And now they point and laugh,” he sings, talking about how his position as music’s favourite little funny working-class northern boy was used to market him, but as he sings about it all, no one ever wants to take him seriously.
But ‘TV Dinner’ is a demand that they do. With little on the track to direct from the message and featuring some of his most pointed, savage lyricism yet, it’s a hard song to ignore – and that’s the point.
