A WORKING CLASS HERO IS SOMETHING TO BE
Culture wars, class, white male privilege, working-class anger, party politics. Most pop stars will do just about anything to avoid getting into the weeds with these hot-button topics. But not Sam Fender.
With his latest No 1 album, Seventeen Going Under , Sam has bagged three Brit Award nominations and is perilously close to becoming the voice of his generation. As music becomes ever more socially rarefied, and working-class perspectives ever more sidelined, he resonates with hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who don’t often hear their lives reflected at the top of the charts.
“To be honest, with this record, it wasn’t actually a real aim to tackle social issues,” he says. “It was just I’d done therapy for two years once I started getting famous. That, basically, opened up a whole can of worms with my upbringing.
“I just ended up writing about home a lot more, and writing about my life, and writing about my mother. Them stories just have a social conscience in them, because it’s talking about very, very normal things that happen to very normal people.”
As we talk, we are sitting in
