Songwriter Sam Fender caught between stardom, his hometown
NORTH SHIELDS, England — Sam Fender, a singer-songwriter often labeled Britain’s answer to Bruce Springsteen, realized his life had changed for good on Halloween.
This year he bought “eight massive boxes” of chocolate for any children who might knock on his door in North Shields, a working-class town on the banks of the River Tyne in northeast England.
Fender expected the stash to last all night, but it went almost instantly.
“Everyone in the neighborhood was, like, ‘That’s Sam Fender’s house, let’s go knock!’ ” the musician recalled. The trickor-treaters’ parents were more keen on getting selfies with the star than candy, whether they knew his music or not.
Over the past year, Fender, 27, has become one of Britain’s biggest music stars, but said he still doesn’t want to be “that guy” who is too famous to answer his door on Halloween — a position that touches on a tension running through his newfound success: how to be a star while remaining part of the community that defines his songwriting.
His second album of anthemic pop-rock, “Seventeen Going Under,” released in October, quickly hit the top of the British charts, just like his debut did, and since then he has sold out arenas and announced a 45,000-capacity outdoor show in London.
For a few weeks in fall, the album’s title track sparked a Tiktok trend because of lyrics — “I was far too scared to hit him, but I would hit him in a heartbeat now” — that speak to suffering at the hands of bullies and domestic abusers.
All that success had been built on the back of North Shields, a depressed town of 30,000 people in a region where 34% of children live in poverty, but is also home, Fender said, to some of “the funniest, most loving, caring people you’ve ever met.”
Fender sets most of his songs in the town, often referencing local pubs or fistfights on the nearby chilly beaches, and sings about his and his friends’ experiences, including troubled childhoods, male suicides and widespread political alienation.
This local focus has won him fans far from Britain. Steven Van Zandt, a veteran member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band who regularly plays Fender’s music on his U.S. radio show, said that Fender “could have taken the easy route” thanks to his voice and looks. Instead, Fender chose to sing “these intensely personal songs of working-class life that had no guarantee of success,” Van Zandt said, calling that decision “courageous.”
Fender seemed overjoyed that some of his heroes, who include Springsteen, loved his music, but in an interview, he returned to talking about his hometown again and again.
At one point, he mentioned a campaign he led last year to stop the local council from charging people money for calling its emergency help lines for the homeless. After Fender took to social media to complain about the problem, the council promised to make the lines free. “I sometimes feel like, ‘Am I really doing anything that good?’ ” Fender said. That was a rare moment when he felt he was, he said.
Fender insisted he would never leave North Shields behind and became visibly anxious when talking about the possibility. But Halloween night and other similar experiences had shown him it might be time to try living somewhere else for at least a few months. Somewhere that doesn’t feel like a “goldfish bowl,” he said, maybe New York, maybe London, somewhere that is “the opposite of where I’m from.” The only thing for certain was his songs wouldn’t change.
“You can take a lad out of Shields,” he said, “but you can’t take Shields out of the lad.”