Sam Fender gives a tender and punchy performance at London’s O2 Arena

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You can gauge the popularity of a song at a Sam Fender gig by the quantity of forefingers pointed towards the stage. For the most popular at the O2 Arena there was a bristling mass of digits, many thousands of them, all directed at Fender in his Bob Dylan T-shirt as he sang and played guitar. It resembled a crude electoral tally. Hands up if you like this one.

Some acts get befuddled by mass support: they lose sight of what they want to do amid the clamour. But Fender feeds off it. The singer-songwriter from North Shields, near Newcastle, represents a working-class constituency that has found itself edged out of British cultural life in recent decades. His songs tend to start at a decent clip and then gather momentum until they seem unstoppable. That’s when the pointing fingers are at their most profuse. Forwards to the sunny uplands — or its symbolic stand-in, the big stage illuminated with bright lights.

His show at London’s O2 Arena, the first of two, came near the end of a UK and Ireland tour that sold out within hours. Opening track “Dead Boys”, from his 2019 debut Hypersonic Missiles, tackled a difficult subject matter, the suicide of young men in Fender’s economically depressed hometown. “Let’s see you, London,” he cried in his strong Geordie accent, as the song shifted gear with pummelling drums and guitars, and the audience surged around amid strafing spotlights. Their beams picked people out at random: anyone can be a star. Hopefulness is Fender’s currency, not accusation or despondency.

He stood at the microphone stand with his seven-strong band arranged around him. His right-hand man was lead guitarist Dean Thompson, a childhood friend. Drew Michael gave the songs their acceleration at the drum kit. A female newcomer to the otherwise all-male band, Brooke Bentham, sang backing vocals. Johnny Davis on saxophone underscored the songs’ affinity to Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar anthems. 

The debt is acknowledged: Springsteen’s “Born to Run” rang out before the show began. But Fender does not fling himself around the stage like his all-action American forebear. He invited a young fan from the audience to join him on acoustic guitar for “The Borders”, a tribune-of-the-people act, although done without the showman’s pizzazz that Springsteen would have brought to bear. Fender is a different performer. His appeal resides in not seeming to be superhuman.

He sang with both tenderness and muscularity, rising to a big vibrato during the most impassioned passages. Mosh pits opened up on the floor of the venue for a hectic pair of tracks, “Howdon Aldi Death Queue” and “Spice”, which were followed by a punchy version of The Clash’s “London Calling”, sung by Thompson and guitarist-keyboardist Joe Atkinson. At the other end of the musical spectrum, Fender opened “The Dying Light” alone at a piano, cursing and laughing as he flubbed the chords. 

The biggest response came for the last song before the encore, the heart-swelling, air-punching title track from 2021’s Seventeen Going Under. Its successor People Watching is due out in February. A lumpily jangling number from it, “Nostalgia’s Lie”, failed to get fingers pointing. But Fender inspired a singalong with “Arm’s Length”, which had a twiddly Fleetwood Mac-inspired guitar riff. And the album’s pounding lead single “People Watching” was greeted almost as fervently as “Seventeen Going Under”. The next test awaits for Fender, but its result appears preordained. This felt like a victory lap.

★★★★☆

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