Sam Fender Has the Working-Class Rock Star Blues

To quote the Smiths, fame fame fatale fame, it can play hideous tricks on the brain. That’s what’s happening in the album-opening title track from People Watching, the third LP by U.K. pop-rock star Sam Fender. “I people watch on the way back home/Envious of the glimmer of hope/Gives me a break from feeling alone,” he sings over the kind of hungry-hearted neo-Springsteen rock that is his sonic safety zone, before clarifying further, “I used to feel so invincible/I used to feel there was a world worth dreaming of.”

Fender hails from tough, working-class North Shields, near Newcastle. He was blessed with the good looks of a model, but he’s also an outspoken lefty with a gift for channeling his mixed feelings about where he’s from and where he’s headed into anthemic singer-songwriter rock that resonates in the pop world of today. His 2019 debut Hypersonic Missiles topped the charts in the U.K., as did it’s 2021 follow-up, Seventeen Going Under.

Fender has taken a few years to deliver album three, which is co-produced by fellow Springsteen superfan Adam Granduciel of The War on Drugs. Both artists love refurbishing Classic Bruce gestures into sleek new products, but where The War on Drugs’ lyrics can be frustratingly opaque, Fender strives to place us in the downtrodden reality he’s left behind but can’t escape. It’s a world he evokes with real empathy and honest ambivalence. On the upbeat, hard-strumming “Chin Up” he contrasts his own entitled life with a young couple who “can’t heat the place for fucking love nor money.” On “Crumbling Empire” he connects post-industrial blight he noticed on the road in Detroit with similar conditions back home: “My old man worked on the rail yard/Getting his trade on the electrical board/It got privatized, the work degraded,” he sings, before pausing to note he’s just talking, not preaching, in case you’re the type with thinks such point-making can get in the way of a good song. On “Something Heavy” he movingly tries to balance his love for North Shields with his frustration at the kind of zombie-lives it produces, people drinking and drugging themselves to dull the pain of their situation.

Fender isn’t the first songwriter who ever addressed this subject matter and his songs are sometimes overstuffed with poetic imagery instead of storytelling specificity — “Before I’m pushing up daisies/Give me a long heady summer/With arms open wide,” he entreats on “Nostalgia’s Lie.” And while his rock-star self-abnegation can hit a chord when he’s trying to get outside himself and grasp the pain of others, it can also devolve into famous-guy self-pity, as on the moodily spelunking “TV Dinner,” where a flood of Dylanesque wordplay leads into a verse where he uses the tragic example of Amy Winehouse to illustrate his glowering experience of celebrity. “They reared me as a class clown/Grass fed little cash cow,” he crows.

But at his best best Fender understands Springsteen’s main lesson: No matter how big you get, you’re never above the people in your songs, even if the main emotions they inspire in you are an uncomfortable mix of guilt, panic, and dread. Fender hasn’t written his version of The River yet. But he’s sweating his way in that direction.