‘We only released our first single 18 months ago, so I can’t believe we’re here already,” says Sam Fender, referring to both this stuffed-to-the-gills venue and what is shaping up to be a quicksilver career. The 24-year-old singer-guitarist has toured with Michael Kiwanuka, been playlisted by Radio 1 and sold out this headline tour. The latest recipient of the Brits’ critics’ choice award (previously given to Adele, Sam Smith et al) can already excitedly refer to his next gig in Manchester, “over the road” – at the much larger Ritz, where he will appear in May. “A couple of months ago I was sat in me mam’s,” he splurts.
The likably open geordie offers something slightly different in 2019. His huge, quivering holler is delivered over dystopian post-punk tropes, radio-friendly pop rock and homespun, honest storytelling: an unlikely blend of early Simple Minds, Psychedelic Furs, Hothouse Flowers and (his hero) Bruce Springsteen. It’s an arena-sized sound that – being performed for the band’s first time as a five-piece – can get claustrophobic or bombastic in a smaller venue. The more math-rock Play God has a propulsive groove, but Fender should lose the stadium rock guitar solos: his words need space to breathe.
He still proudly lives in North Shields and, like fellow geordie Nadine Shah, a love-hate relationship with the area’s rundown coastal environments fired his songwriting. He can appear judgmental, whether jabbing at the local square’s “plastic action men and Poundshop Kardashians” or That Sound’s “green-eyed beasts”, who envy those who get out. However, at his best, he confronts the north’s beauty and ugliness – from toxic masculinity to overdoses – with searing rawness. Dead Boys – about the north-east’s young male suicides – rings around the room with haunting power. Home truths spawn poetry in Leave Fast’s tales of coastlines where kids “freeze their lungs and run amongst the rolling dunes away from everyone” and “An old man told me to leave fast or stay forever”. Fender hasn’t yet quite navigated the competing forces of his natural intimacy and a quest for big and brash, but he is clearly a special talent.
• At Electric Brixton, London, on 28 February, then touring.
