Jazz is actually cool now. Our art game remains strong. Adele lurks in the wings. Stormzy’s headlining Glastonbury. Overall, the petri dish that is British music remains funky. Yet we are living through the age of the solo male performer – the oldest, most played-out game in the western musical lexicon.
Homegrown men – you know, Ed Sheeran, George Ezra – currently mesmerise the mainstream UK music fan, a fetish second only to musical film soundtracks. These boys-next-door have the most listened to UK albums, the sold-out stadium tours. The pat wisdom runs that, in turbulent times, there is comfort and uplift in their songs of romantic love and singalong unity. The myth of the lone male troubadour is a stubborn one, however many hands there are shaping the music.
So it comes as no shock that one of the success stories of the past year is Sam Fender, a name that trips easily off the tongue, one syllable eliding into two more, just like the big boys. Having been shortlisted for the BBC Sound of 2018 award, the 24-year-old recently won the 2019 Brits critics’ choice award, beating Mahalia (too similar, perhaps, to Jorja Smith, 2018’s winner) and Lewis Capaldi (vanilla, even in an anodyne market).
Fender has all the up’n’coming artist credentials: an Annie Mac Hottest Record, sold-out tours, and a home-town headline slot at the Mouth of the Tyne festival in July that shifts 4,000 tickets within an hour. Elton John FaceTimed him for a Beats 1 Radio chat.
Like the many other singer-songwriters vying for a chunk of the everyman pound, Fender is inherently tuneful, even if he is channelling indie rock (sometimes trudgingly so tonight) rather than breezy guitar pop.
Unlike them, however, he doesn’t write love songs. He recently told GQ that “pretty much every prime minister since I can remember has made me mad. The negative effects of greedy politicians have haunted the north-east for years, it’s very apparent. I’m not an expert on politics, but there’s a bunch of bad people at the top who care about lining their own pockets before creating a society that looks after the vulnerable.”
Not writing love songs may fall away when Fender’s debut album arrives later this year. Tonight’s gig seems to offer a tune or two about romantic yearning. But in the tracks that have officially been out thus far – especially last year’s Dead Boys EP – he has shied away from romance to hymn his home town and its discontents in a compelling vibrato that distantly suggests Jeff Buckley.
One of the high points of this sold-out gig (he’s also sold out the bigger venue across the road, the Ritz, where he’s playing in May), Dead Boys finds Fender mourning the suicides of young men without any of the gurning at the piano that such themes usually prompt in most mainstream over-doers. In a white T-shirt and black jeans, all affable geordie manners between songs, and piercing stare while singing, Fender just plays it straight and pacy. The musical forebear here is Bruce Springsteen, who Fender admits is his idol.
The desperate need to escape one’s home town – that Springsteen theme – plays out in Leave Fast, here played solo while guitarist Dean Thompson fixes his own effects rig. “My old man told me, ‘leave fast or stay for ever’,” Fender projects. Intriguingly, the desire to leave rubs up against home-town pride with wry affection. Fender is from North Shields, where he still lives with his mum, a nurse. His elder brother and father are also musicians, the kind who play pubs. Part of Fender’s compelling origin story is how he was pulling pints in 2013, trying to get out of Whitley Bay, when Ben Howard’s manager, Owain Davies, walked in. Recognising him, the landlord persuaded Fender to play Davies his tunes.
So Fender got out. But he went back, taking Polydor’s money and building a studio in a warehouse on the banks of the Tyne, where he, his band – five-strong tonight – and producer Bramwell Bronte have just recorded the album. Fender tells an on-side crowd how he gave himself tonsillitis trying to finish it.
Sometimes there is evidence of trying a little too hard on songs such as Poundshop Kardashians, which surveys the antics of orange-tinted people out on the lash; there’s a slightly regretful edge of indie-rock judgment here, tempered by plain-speaking and despair. “We idolise idiots,” the song goes, “masturbate to their sex tapes.”
What really sticks with you in a lot of Fender’s songs is the bewilderment that he doesn’t have the answers. “How am I supposed to change it if I can’t see the wood for the trees?” he sings.
On Start Again, Fender imagines everything breaking down irrevocably. But we’d just be in the same predicament, “Cause everybody’s looking for efficient ways to kill each other.”
The more cynical might survey Fender’s output – songs called Millennial, or the current single, an over-ponderous track called Play God that featured on the Fifa 19 soundtrack – and conclude that he is ticking off issues. But there is a persuasive sense here that he really wants to be a different kind of singer-songwriter, while remaining the kind of bloke who celebrates his Brits win with Radio 1 DJ Greg James.
In interviews, Fender has alluded to a health scare he had at 20 that profoundly refocused him. He writes about abusive relationships from a female point of view on Greasy Spoon. It’s a right-on tendency that reaches something of a peak on the encore, with an unreleased song actually called White Privilege.
But compassionate storytelling about marred lives is where Fender’s strengths lie. On a promising-sounding song called Borders, you just catch snatches of a drama that he’s played out. “You still hate me cos my dad stuck around,” intones Fender. “You can’t stand me, I can’t stand me too.”
