“I WATCH people on the way back home,” sings Sam Fender on the soul-bearing title track of his new album.
With its widescreen ambition, driving intensity and visceral lyrics, People Watching can’t fail to draw familiar comparisons to Fender’s “biggest hero”, Bruce Springsteen.
In the song, Fender speaks directly to Annie when he intones, “I stayed all night till you left this life” and later sums up his feelings with “and I hold you in my heart till the day I die”.
On Fender’s radar are the people like him who grew up in terraced houses on the banks of the River Tyne.
People from the old fishing port of North Shields where he was born and people from nearby Newcastle where his beloved Magpies play in the Premier League.
