Day 189: Sam Fender – People Watching

‍ I’ve sort of avoided Sam Fender. I thought of him as a bit of a Temu Bruce Springsteen and I mainly knew him as the guy who posted a photo of a famous wifebeater and called him a hero, which tends to be a sure-fire way to make me avoid listening to your stuff. But he apologised, whatever, time to listen to his third album, People Watching since some of the singles are interesting.

Album cover courtesy of Polydor Records

‍Sam Fender is the son of a nurse and an electrician from a working-class home in North Shields. He grew up in a council estate and had a very chequered background, saying he grew up in an area where there weren’t opportunities for people like him and drugs were rampant. When he was young, he worked in a call centre and a bar and played gigs in restaurants in the evenings, but he says he considered dealing drugs to help support his family.

Released in 2025, People Watching was his third album, written when he was grieving a woman who was like his surrogate mother growing up and who encouraged him to perform. He says it features  “colourful stories and observations of everyday characters living their everyday, but often extraordinary, lives.” So it’s story-driven songwriting about ordinary working class people’s lives that’s then followed by saxophone solos – that’s Bruce Springsteen, it’s UK Springsteen for the Instagram generation.

That being said, I probably didn’t want to like it as much as I did, but it’s very inoffensive storytelling rock that lets you peek into the life of someone like him, and I think hearing voices like his is important in the UK today. Making music where he talks about his life, with his parent’s homelessness or his friend’s suicide attempts, without glossing over anything and with the pain that people are actually feeling is almost cathartic to hear.

There aren’t too many working class people who get to the top of the music industry in the UK – apparently only 7% of the population have gone to fee-paying schools, but 43% of musicians are privately educated. With the state of the economy right now, it must be even harder to get there than it was in previous years. But you can’t aspire to something you can’t see, and to have a top-level musician singing about his background is only ever a good thing.

I loved “Wild Long Lie” and “Rein Me In” and I at the very least liked the rest. It’s an 8/10. He feels like a pretty necessary voice today and his writing is great, but I hope his sound develops into something a bit more unique.