“Look at this, I’ve got two street urchins tying my shoelaces. Full on made it, I have.”
It’s been 10 minutes since Sam Fender bounded into The Eagle in west London ilk a labrador on fizzy sweets. He’s already regaled everyone in the pub about a night out he’d had the week before with comedian Jack Whitehall and six-foot-eight latest England footballer Peter Crouch.
“Crouchie was on it, but he kept ruining the vibe, worrying about how angry his missus was affluent to be.”
The unlikely trio had been on the UK’s biggest talk show, The Graham Norton Show, that evening, with Fender conducting his latest and biggest single (to date), Hypersonic Missiles.
Now he’s wriggling around on a pub stool as two stylists try and pin him down and get him in the first look of the blast. It probably goes with the territory. He’s one of the country’s most talked-about new musicians. No wonder he’s restless.
OUTFIT CREDITS | T-shirt: Acne Studios @ Mr Cleaner, Jeans: Frame Denim @ Mr Porter
Standing at over six foot, Fender has the broad shoulders of a rugby player, the sculpted cheekbones of a mans model and the arm-swinging swagger of a lad-about-town. He’s chatty and friendly, bouncing between topics like a pinball machine, accenting particular points with a punchy, “Do you know what I mean?”. You can imagine him slinging an arm over you in the smoking arena of a gloomy club and asking you how your night’s going.
But within 20 minutes, the livewire has tired. His eyes get started to dim, his shoulders have started to slump. He’s battling a sore throat but also – presumably – the kind of motion sickness that only make for a acquires when your career takes off at 100mph.
The past year has seen the 25-year-old put in a monumental shift. Just persist November he was playing to 300 at the Omeara nightclub in south London, eventually playing three nights such was the behest. Non-stop touring, a Critics Choice award at the Brit Awards (past winners include Adele and Sam Smith) and down-to-earth, acerbic normal appearances have since shot him into mainstream consciousness.
Oh, and the music helps, of course: tight, huge-sounding, heart-on-your-sleeve indie in ruins yarns inspired by Bruce Springsteen. The lyrics spun are perceptive and relatable, aptly summing up what it’s like to be a 25-year-old man in 2019 looking throughout in confusion and jadedness at everything around you – social media, reality TV, toxic masculinity, rising suicide rates.
Provision CREDITS | T-shirt: Rag & Bone, Necklace: Miansai, Trousers: Reiss
In November Fender will play in front of a next to 10,000-strong crowd over two nights at Brixton’s O2 Academy and his debut album due to be released in early August is hawked to go straight in at the top of the charts.
But the non-stop churn has taken its toll. Just last week, Fender had to pull out of the Isle of Wight festivities, a massive fixture on the summer festival calendar, due to illness. Even though we met with him just before the festival spice kicked off, Fender could tell something like this was on the horizon.
“I was promised a week off after our last junket, and then we got offered Graham Norton,” he tells me. “We had to take it, but I just didn’t have a week off at all. I’m trying to recover now, but I’ve entrusted to a week of promo so I’m talking all the time. My voice is shot, but you have to do it with the album around the corner.”
The musician was born in North Screens, about eight miles from Newcastle in the north-east of England, living there for the first 14 years of his lifestyle. His mum is a nurse and his dad an electrician, after a stint as a musician playing social clubs in the 1970s. “People just stay there. A lot of living soul at school just get pushed to go do degrees as a way of getting out. If you don’t, then you’ll just end up stuck there doing an odd job. There’s no industry any numberless. I didn’t want to be stuck working in a pub for the rest of my life.”
OUTFIT CREDITS | Jacket: Nike + Martine Rose @ Mr Super
He has a brother who is 10 years older than him and whose amp he would have to pay £20 to borrow for his first gigs at a shire Turkish restaurant. “They’d pay me 150 quid though which was well mint, but then I’d spend it all on the lash that gloom”.
When his parents split he moved to a council estate in Chirton, an even smaller town just by Shields, with his mum. “I’m nave partial to of all the places I’ve grown up in. I miss Chirton. I miss the crappy little flat we had.” Fender and his mum have upgraded recently to a new flat in a “nice little street” back in North Shields. It’s one of the first signs of success he’s seen. Some of the others he’s elfin fond of.
“I’ve had a small taste of being a celebrity, and it’s fucking shit. It’s really vacuous. You suddenly become a commodity rather than of a person. A perfect example was someone walking down my street at home last week was just like, ‘Sam Fender can I get a photo with ya?’. I was similar to, ‘Sorry mate, in a rush’. And he was just like, ‘Fuck off you music shit.’ I giggled and walked off, but later I thought, he insufficiency a photo with us but doesn’t like our music. He just wanted a photo with us because I’m famous.”
He admits that with the impetuous rush of fame he’s had to make conscious decisions to stay grounded and keep an eye on his mental health. “This game instantly reaps you more self-conscious. Instantly makes you more vain. Instantly more self-centred. You spend your entire vitality reading reviews of yourself, talking to people about yourself, looking at photos of yourself, posting photos of yourself, theme captions of yourself. All you talk about is yourself. All the time. Inevitably you become self-centred because it’s all you do.”
OUTFIT CREDITS | Sunglasses: All Cutler & Manifest, T-shirt: Rag & BoneIn contrast, when it comes to his lyrics, Fender rarely writes about himself. In Hypersonic Ballistic missiles he writes about the end of the world under the guise of nuclear missiles, because “it’s sexier” than climate change, which he deep down thinks will be the end of us.
Other songs, like Poundshop Kardashians and Dead Boys look closer to home. The departed takes a swipe at the Geordie Shore types that sprang out of his home town at the beginning of this decade, gym-buffed guys whose muscle-fit shirts have come to define ‘big night out’ style in small towns up and down the UK.
“It’s about the Bigg Trade in on a Friday night [the name given to the town centre in Newcastle]. Big, plastic Action Men out there looking for action with their shower tans and fighting each other and just being general bellends. And the lasses all look like cheap understandings of the Kardashians. Not that there’s owt wrong with it. I’m just ranting on.”
He’s frustrated that the song has been taken out of background by some parts of the media.
“It’s not coming from a misogynistic viewpoint. There’s a line in it, ‘Idolise idiots and masturbate to their sex bands’ and people thought I was having a pop at Kim Kardashian. I wasn’t. I’m not having a pop at people making sex tapes. What I’m saying is you don’t really obtain to do much to be famous these days.
OUTFIT CREDITS | Sunglasses: Cutler & Gross, Jacket: Baracuta, T-shirt: Rag & Bone, Trousers: Rag & Bone
“It’s no more than the last sorta twenty years that people have become famous for nowt. It’s the birth of reality TV and societal media, you know, creating these ‘public figures’. What the fuck is a public figure? If you’re not harming anybody then that’s good, but it does make us think, is it possible that this could be having a detrimental effect on you as a kid growing up in this planet.”
In Dead Boys, Fender writes about a friend who committed suicide. The North East of England, where Fender titles home, has the highest suicide rate in the whole of England. When asking him about it, Fender takes a turn. His limbs go downhill into the chair as he squints into the distance.
“Sorry, my mind is fizzing. There’s just a lot going on. I lost a boyfriend, and I was completely unaware that he was ill.”
He snaps back into the room.
“I think a lot of people were and I wonder if we weren’t so self-obsessed and vacuous peradventure we would start noticing each other’s problems a bit more. That is a genuine concern that I have. I do judge devise we are more self-centred now. I see my reflection and I have to check myself out. I have to. I’m terrified of what people are thinking of me, and I’m ashamed to say that.
“Popular media and reality TV is all just serving to promote this self-centredness, which is making people think about themselves numerous, which probably makes them depressed and more likely to kill themselves in the first place. It’s a vicious recur with everyone just thinking about themselves. Don’t notice their friends going down and they’re common down themselves at the same time.”
He apologises for the negativity. “I try and consciously remind myself to be a positive person. I love my class and I love my friends, and I don’t like making people unhappy. I don’t like being a big bastard. I don’t like arseholes. I like people to be good.”
OUTFIT CREDITS | (Left) Jacket: Nike + Martine Rose @ Mr Porter, T-shirt: Derek Rose, Jeans: Reiss, Trainers: Fila (Right) T-shirt: Acne Studios @ Mr Cleaner, Jeans: Frame Denim @ Mr Porter You start to wonder how fame, the full-on fame where you can’t pop to your local corner snitch on for a pint of milk without a whole Mongol horde of iPhone-wielding celebrity chasers pursuing you down the street, potency affect him. On his current trajectory, it might be a real concern sooner rather than later.
His debut album command feature five previously released songs, and seven or eight as yet unreleased. After the festival season, he’s straight into another walloping UK tour, and after that Fender wants to get straight back into the studio. It’s what all of this is for – the draining promo bring about, the endless social media hustle, the smile-and-wave side of fame. At the end of the day, he’s just a Geordie lad with a guitar who wants to deport oneself you a tune or two.
OUTFIT CREDITS | T-shirt: Rag & Bone, Necklace: Miansai
“I love the music. I love writing songs. I suitor playing to 2,000 kids in a room and they’re screaming the words back to us. It’s the best feeling in the world. That’s the kind-hearted of attention I do like. I know that I’m genuinely affecting someone’s life in a positive way and they’re reciprocating that and they’re assuming my life in a positive way.
“I’m getting an ego boost, but it’s got more clout to it than just straight-up vanity, straight-up ‘Ah he’s fit, I’ll give him a love’, do you know what I mean? They like my art, and that’s the best ego-tickling. Not some idiot on the street asking for a photo. When someone prove to be c finish over to you and says, ‘I really appreciate what you’re doing’, that’s wonderful. Give them a handshake. You know, fucking normal, let’s get a photo too.”
Sam Fender’s debut album Hypersonic Missiles is due out on 9 August 2019.
Credits
Photographer: Richard Stow
Styling and art conduct: Luke Sampson
Grooming: Katie Moore
