2022 winning submission – “Sam Fender: The Canary in the Coal Mine?” by Meg Byrom

Sam Fender: The Canary in the Coal Mine?

By Meg Byrom

In the current UK pop landscape, another floppy-haired boy with a guitar shouldn’t surprise us but Sam Fender continues to. When you search his name, there are a few recurring images, clips and headlines that will buffer and load before you. Amongst them, are viral videos of the Tyneside singer drowsily admitting he was “really hungover” on BBC breakfast,  pictures of him standing amongst crowds of striped Geordies as they celebrated their football club’s take over, and headlines of his patronage of local homeless charities and food banks. Sam Fender has obtained a seat amongst the North East’s most treasured local heroes, with his sophomore album ‘Seventeen Going Under’ only cementing his place further.

Nepotistic record labels have mass-produced a winning formula, creating the inoffensive yet numbingly dull characters of their contemporary pop successes (Sheeran, Odell, Ezra, to name but a few). But with his second record, Fender takes this formula and subverts it. Wrapped in upbeat tempos and saxophone riffs, Fender has placed a Trojan horse at the gates of British chart music, hiding his account of the realities of modern Britain in plain sight. Fender continues to examine the core ideas that emerged in his debut, ‘Hypersonic Missiles’ with a sophistication, nuance and honesty that is rare in his field.

From playwrights such as Sheila Delaney (A Taste of Honey) and John Osborne (Look Back In Anger), to Coronation Street and the Smiths, Fender joins a historic tradition seeking to represent groups in contrast to the stereotypical working-class imaginary. Neoliberal myths such as “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”, have laid moral blame at the feet of those facing structural inequality, especially in an age of austerity. When Vicky Pollard and Catherine Tate’s school girl Lauren Cooper  (famously spouting “Am a bovvered?”) permeate the British consciousness, Fender’s revival of kitchen sink realism offers a dynamic and authentic portrayal of working-class life in contemporary Britain.

But is Fender truly representative of representing the concerns of the current working class? His music, like much in this tradition, has a left-wing edge as he delves, heart first, into the post-material. Discussing gender, xenophobia, mental health, as well as recognising his own ‘White Privilege’ (in a song of the same name). Fender is explicit in his support of topics that are disregarded as cosmopolitan or ‘woke’, and not of interest to the regional working class.

Crowning the ‘red wall’, the North East has been theorised as a key region reflecting the shifting cleavages of British politics, as traditional voters increasingly reject the left and socially liberal parties and lean towards social conservatism, protectionism and patriotism. In 2019, it was the ‘red wall’ in which labour lost 20% of its 2017 support, in a region where a majority of constituencies voted to leave the EU.

Despite increasing conservative voting patterns, the North East’s ‘local boy done good’ is as politically liberal as the urban dwellers and cosmopolitan ‘elite’, who many journalists have poised regional voters to oppose. How then, does Fender supposedly represent and find support from people that should, in theory, oppose him and his ‘left-wing’  values?

Fender may have left inclinations, but his music transcends the left/right paradigm. His depictions of Britain arise more from political disenchantment than any kind of dogmatism. With stories of poverty, such as his chronically ill mother struggling beneath an austere welfare state (”I see my mother, the DWP see a number”), to political corruption (“I don’t have time for the very few, they never had time for me and you”) and disillusionment with the cultural mainstream (“the woke kids are just dickheads”), Fender warns that a sense of powerlessness underpins the region’s political thought and perhaps explains their current electoral volatility.

In a political landscape that divides issues as post-material or ‘woke’ and material or ‘real’: Fender refuses this binary and culture war, uniting these issues in tales of apathy and hopelessness against an unrepresentative system of politics.

Whilst party political broadcasts depict the victims of austerity, regional inequality, and corruption; such messaging falls not upon deaf ears, but on those actively turned away. If British politics is to be defined by the impossibility of change, apathy and a sense of enduring powerlessness, then perhaps the critics are correct: Fender is indeed the voice of his region and in this album, we must listen to his warnings.

Meg Byrom 2022

Reflection on how the piece is informed by Orwell’s influence

When asked about his favourite musician, conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson replied that it was in fact the punk rock and riotously left-wing band, The Clash.  From Johnson’s peculiar taste in left-wing music to Fender’s success in an increasingly conservative region, what explains the disconnect between the art we admire and the politics we support?

Orwell had already begun to examine such a point. In his critical reflection on Dickens, the novelist’s ability to simultaneously criticise English institutions without offending the Victorian middle class was illuminated as one of his strongest suits. It is this aspect of Orwell’s writings and the extent to which we can use prose, poetry and lyricism as a political vehicle, that made me think about current trends.

Some have remarked that this contrast hails the omission of class consciousness or is simply a sign of stupidity, but the answer, according to Orwell, was neither.

Unlike his intellectual peers who steered towards Oxbridge, Orwell’s experience in Burma established his political thought in the realities before him. In his disdain for the left-wing intelligentsia of his era (The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius), Orwell had already identified the destructive power of dogmatism in politics, and issues of post-material ignorance and distance from the working class (The Road to Wigan Pier) that continues to plague politics today. Moreover, Orwell had begun to understand the cultural components of the British working class and the ways in which the Europeanised intellectuals failed to understand this, particularly in regard to patriotism (“My Country Left or Right”).

The culture that Orwell outlines as a foil to democratic socialism aids explanations of Fender’s success. Whilst exhibiting left-wing views, Fender’s lyrical realism and experience separate him from the current intellectual left elite, in a similar and relatable vein to Orwell.