Sam Fender is fighting the good fight on behalf of the lost art of the music video. In January, the Brit- and Mercury-nominated English songwriter and 2025 Glastonbury headliner recruited the actor Andrew Scott to play a man floored by the death of his mother in the promo for People Watching, the wrenching title track of his excellent third album. It doesn’t yank at the heartstrings so much as take a blowtorch to them.
“He sent this beautiful song about grief in his life. And me and my family went through grief this year – we lost our mum very suddenly,” Scott said recently. “We were able to fuse our two stories.”
Stories are the essence of Fender’s songcraft, as he demonstrated a second time when casting the veteran comedian and actor Dave Johns, star of Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, as an older man caring for his ailing wife in the short film accompanying the track Remember My Name, a heartfelt chugger inspired by Fender’s memories of his late grandparents.
Far from a departure, these devastating observations about the trials of everyday life are part of what the Tyneside singer-songwriter has been about going back to his 2019 debut, Hypersonic Missiles. But that sense of time streaming through your fingers like so much sand is especially powerful on the wonderful People Watching, an intense bearhug of a record informed by the death, in 2023, of Fender’s friend Annie Orwin, an actor who starred in the Newcastle teen soap Byker Grove.
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People Watching is a beautifully made LP that does not reinvent Fender’s sound so much as refine it to a glistening needlepoint, the better to puncture the listener’s defences and reduce them to weepy tatters. It is produced by Adam Granduciel of the American band The War on Drugs, a musician who, like Fender, is steeped in Bruce Springsteen. (Music aside, they don’t necessarily have a lot in common: Fender grew up in hard-knock North Shields while Granduciel attended an exclusive prep school in Massachusetts.)
Springsteenisms have long been a feature of Fender’s writing. They are again conspicuous on People Watching, from the aching riff fuelling the title track to the melody that freewheels like a truck down a highway on Chin Up and Wild Long Lie. But rather than ape Springsteen’s sound, Fender goes beyond mere pastiche and re-creates the American’s talent for putting everyday life front and centre of his songcraft.
On Wild Long Lie he rails (politely) about the dangers of nostalgia, though the tune never descends into a rant and is ultimately borne aloft by Fender’s innate optimism (“Before I’m pushing up daisies, give me a long heady summer”). The closest he comes to despairing is on Crumbling Empire, where he draws a line between postindustrial decline in Detroit and Newcastle, two cities left behind by the elites of their countries.
Fender is to be credited for resisting the cliche of the overnight star whinging about fame. That his success has a downside was underscored before Christmas when he called short an arena tour of Ireland and Britain to avoid “lasting damage” to his vocal cords. He had begun the run in Dublin, and it was a rollicking evening, albeit a less-than-epic one, given that the show clocked in at just 90 minutes. Such a short gig is fine when you’re a scrappy up-and-comer, but perhaps an issue when tickets costs upwards of €50.
That he is working hard at staying humble was clear when I interviewed him at the start of his career. “I’m like a sh*t version of Springsteen,” he said in 2019. “How can you compare me to a man who has done 20 records? I’ve not even released one yet. I think we should slow down. It’s a bit of a big comparison. I mean, I get it. Hypersonic Missiles is a nod to Born to Run. Well, I say ‘nod’. It’s more a headbutt. I’ve completely rearranged Born to Run and put my own lyrics over it.”
People Watching bows out not with another crescendo of guitar, but quietly and wistfully, with Remember My Name. The string-fuelled ballad finds Fender looking upon all he has achieved and experiencing not triumph but pain for those left behind.
It’s a moving conclusion to an album that conjures the stadium grandiosity that Fender will need at Glastonbury while wearing its vulnerability like a coat of armour.
