Metro, March 2022
For all the soaring rock anthems and TikTok hits that characterise Sam Fender’s two propulsive albums and underpin this striking arena show, it was the quiet moment during Spit Of You which really struck home. Fender turned around and drunk in his childhood snaps, beamed across the back of the stage. “Someone who’s been doing this a lot longer told me to make sure I take all this in,” he said as the final chords drifted away. “You never know how long it’s going to last.”
A while, if such vulnerability continues to be allied to these immense choruses. Spit Of You, for all its breezy jangle, saw Fender trying to navigate the darker feelings about his father. 17 Going Under – with its arena-ready ‘woah-ohs’ drifting long into the night – took on growing up in an atmosphere of violence, toxic masculinity and mental illness.
So it’s incredibly refreshing that Fender can craft this arena show – visually it was superbly staged – without resorting to tired, swaggering rock tropes. When he invited the crowd to mosh to the taut indie rock of Spice, the riff aggressively ramped up live, he reminded them to do it respectfully. Not exactly punk, but that’s missing the point of Sam Fender. The nuance of his lyrics point towards a better way of looking at the world, even though the pain.
He ended with Hypersonic Missiles, its pointed lyrics about imminent war and helplessness in the face of tyrannical regimes unbearably prescient. The final roar from the crowd wasn’t for Fender but the last image on the screen – a Ukrainian flag. Was an arena crowd ever this thoughtful?
