“Leave Fast or Stay Forever”: Sam Fender’s Forgotten Classic
With three albums, one EP and a litany of excellent B-sides, Sam Fender has built-up a stellar discography. Throughout his music, Fender, above all else, details his life and feelings about the North East of England.
Whether that be the deaths of close friends in Dead Boys, the struggles of his mother and himself in Seventeen Going Under or even the detailing of a collapsing relationship in Rein Me In, as of writing his biggest hit (due in no small part to the duet with megastar Olivia Dean).
Photo by Polydor Records
In the 1950s, a movement began amongst working class playwrights, novelists and eventually film-makers (with the British New Wave). They became termed the ‘angry young men’. Dissatisfied with their working class status and the stagnation of their life, these works of art often saw young men rebelling against their surroundings and the status quo, also often termed as ‘Kitchen Sink Dramas’, due to their location often surrounding the kitchen/houses of working and lower class characters. This artistic movement has influenced a considerable amount of British art for the ensuing decades.
Fender’s work itself can be evaluated as ‘kitchen-sink rock’, due to his explorations of the struggles and wider lives of the working class in modern Britain. As Sam Fender’s sound and lyricism has matured across his three records, some of his strongest and most rebellious work has fallen away from setlists and popular favour. While he still fits the stated mould of an ‘angry-young man’ as an artist, his earliest singles that were imbued with rage at the status quo, have given way to more nuanced and focused lyricism.
His early works see Fender seething at multiple targets, from fake aesthetical lives he takes aim at in Poundshop Kardashians, an incredibly underrated single bemoaning the social media age and the phoniness it has brought on. Or the inner rage he feels and the toxic masculinity of his youth, explored in ‘Friday Fighting’. These forgotten classics would almost seem out of place amongst his newest work, not just because of their heavier sound, but because of the bubbling rage Fender delivers his scathing lines.
But amongst the collection of forgotten classics, one song stands tall: Leave Fast. A more soulful ballad than the aforementioned songs and dedicated to North Tyneside and the wider North East itself, the song is still imbued with a youthful angst. This time with the pen aimed firmly at the government as well as his frustrations of feeling trapped in a declining and decaying northern town.
Originally featuring on the Dead Boys EP and later his debut album Hypersonic Missiles, Leave Fast is one of Fender’s slowest tracks and a departure from his usual storytelling style lyricism, deviating to instead paint a picture of coastal North Tyneside, which in the late 2010’s was very much in a state of decline.
Leave Fast is a beautiful song filled with emotion and heartbreak, standing tall as a forgotten classic due to both its quality as its song but also due to its unspoken resonance across the rest of Fender’s discography. The themes from the song are incredibly resonant across all of Fender’s future musings on his North East life. From the scathing critiques of the government and the effects of growing up in a deprived town that runs through Leave Fast are themes that can be seen across the entirety of Fender’s next album, Seventeen Going Under to the sense of nostalgic longing and complex relationship Fender holds with his hometown is explored throughout his third album People Watching to the overall sense of entrapment and indebtment to the region that is prescient across all of Fender’s work.
The tumultuous relationship Fender shares with North Shields and the wider North Tyneside region has always been prominent in his work, but it is within Leave Fast where his hypercritical lyricism begins its more focused function.
Photo by Beth Dennett
How does the song set the stage thematically for the rest of Fender’s work? The song opens up on a beautiful, if bleak note. “Dark grey vistas of this weathered place” immediately resonates with myself, a born and bred North Tynesider, all too accustomed to the misery of grey rainy skies disrupting what, in a much warmer climate, would be one of the most beautiful coastlines in the entire world (though it’s still not all bad).
Fender continues to conjure up images of nostalgia (“Where kids freeze their lungs/ And run amongst the rolling dunes away from everyone”) and decline (“Boarded up windows on the promenade/The shells of old night clubs”).This lyrical blend in regards to this song paints an austere picture of Fender’s surroundings and catalogues the true-to-life decay of North Tyneside in the late 2010’s.
The two interacting themes that are again present throughout his work but first concurrently explored in Leave Fast, as well as Fender’s constant guilt in regards to his privilege, even as a slightly better of working class citizen, explored in the lyrics “selfish little baby with no responsibility/watching people die in the cold”.
This all builds to a chorus that encompasses the spirit of the song and the sense of entrapment that builds through each of the verse comes to a crescendo with a heart-aching chorus that every creative or aspirational person from the North East, a region so often “forgotten by our government”, will painfully relate to: “An old man told me to leave fast or stay forever” (repeated three times).
The chorus encompasses expertly the entire sentiment of the song, as well as the themes that flow through all of Fender’s work. The feeling of entrapment, that if you don’t get out of the struggling towns while you can, you will be fated to stay forever. The chorus is sung with a pained and anguished tone, far away from Fender’s usual bombastic rock vocals, using his powerful and high voice to convey all the complex emotions of feeling trapped in a suffering town you love and hate. The verses paint a visceral picture of the depraved towns that Fender feels so trapped in. And as the last chorus finishes up, Fenders’ vocals fade away to a humming and a sanguine guitar solo, closing out the song and providing the listener a rumination period to soak in the emotional ballad.
A lot of Fender’s work wears its heart on its sleeve, guiding you through eloquently told, kitchen-sink stories based around Fender’s (and the people around him) life. But Leave Fast, especially its chorus, departs away from this. Instead, the song dives deep into Fender’s subconscious and exhibits his emotional relationship and feelings surrounding his hometown and situation. This introspection, which is always an underlying current throughout Fender’s work (“kids in Gaza are bombed and I’m just out of it” another example of this, from the track Hypersonic Missiles), is laid bare and at its most honest by Leave Fast.
It’s a love letter to a fading town, a cry for help for someone to save the town and as someone excepting their fate, that they are going to stay trapped in a declining town forever. While beautiful, there is almost a hopelessness attached to the songs, both through the lyrics and the painfully beautiful delivery by Fender.
So, what makes Leave Fast a forgotten classic? One huge reason has to be how resonant its themes are across the rest of Fender’s work. Follow-up album Seventeen Going Under would see Fender dive deeper into his feelings surrounding his childhood and upbringing. What Leave Fast scratched the surface of, SGU expands upon, with Fender admitting across many interviews that the album was digging deeper into his person and his experiences as a struggling youth, an ‘angry young man’ you could almost say (okay, this will be the last time that phrase is used).
The anger about the government’s abandonment of his hometown and the effect this has on his youth and masculinity is a recurring theme throughout his second album. This is especially felt with the title track, Seventeen Going Under, which details both Fender’s childhood issues and the struggles his mother went through dealing with the DWP: ‘The debt, the debt, the debt/So I thought about shifting gear…I see my mother, the DWP see a number’. The song is deeply personal and acts almost as a sequel to the lyrical themes established by Leave Fast.
The themes of entrapment in a suffering town, the governments lack of care, the nostalgic remembrance of causing trouble in neighbouring coastal towns and most of all, and also the sense of hopelessness. Seventeen Going Under is a beautifully crafted song, working amongst an album of songs that similarly explore these themes (The Dying Light, Spit of You and Get You Down are three songs that similarly explore these themes).
Seventeen Going Under also sees Fender departing further away from his youthful anger into a more introspective songwriter from the get go and continuing throughout the album. This firmly finds its roots in Leave Fast, with the song (and to a greater extent, the rest of the album) functioning almost as a sequel.
Photo by Amos Menin
Speaking of Leave Fast and music that acts as a sequel, what happens when you make it? When you shoot to superstardom and find yourself gone from your hometown? Away from the working class and the themes that dominated your early work? You find yourself People Watching the very same people you were raised with. Fender’s third album, is diametrically opposed to Leave Fast. The album’s overarching theme focuses upon Fender’s feeling of moving to the other side of the glass. Departing the working class and finding himself firmly into the celebrity class.
Stadium and arena tours, number one songs as well as albums. The Fender of Hypersonic Missiles has grown into one of the UK’s most well established musical artists. Fender is now separated from the working class and the themes that have dominated all through his discography, he is instead ‘People Watching’ those who he used to share life with. The guilt Fender has always demonstrated over his privilege comes to show across several songs on the album, specifically ‘Crumbling Empire’ and ‘Something Heavy’, both songs where Fender ruminates over the state of the country and his hometown.
One line in Crumbling Empire brings home to roost the new People Watching perspective of Fender, ‘I don’t wear the shoes I used to walk in’, clearly demonstrating Fender feels a disconnect with the working-class life he formerly knew. Fender’s talent as an introspective songwriter, who uses his lyricism to both explore the self and the outside contributions to the self, is one of his strongest qualities as an artist. It’s this that allows the drift away from the working-class theme across the People Watching album to not come off as someone out of touch or as champagne socialism, (as he sings in Crumbling Empire, ‘I’m not preaching, I’m just asking’), but rather as a deeply introspective and honest artist, who uses his music to reckon with the path of his life and the changes he is experiencing.
The People Watching album, in essence, sees Fender completing the request of the old man to Leave Fast and refusing to stay forever, with the album dealing with the consequences of departing your working-class life. The themes established by Leave Fast are answered by People Watching, but in a differing perspective. Fender is no longer stuck on the losing end, he’s on the other side of the glass, now stuck to watch his town continue to suffer: he states in People Watching ‘I can’t stop running/ I see the whole town fall/ I people watch on the way back home’.
Fender is watching the town still suffer, despaired more than he usually is, as despite the success he has had he is still unable to save those around him. Instead, he drifts further away from them. The anger at the government as previously mentioned are explored, but so to is nostalgia in the second song ‘Nostalgia’s Lie’. Fender asks ‘What is this place?/ Can you take me back to somewhere darling/ Where I feel safe?’, this can be interpreted as Fender feeling out of character in his new position as an outsider to working class life.
Leave Fast’s legacy as a forgotten classic is represented in how its lyrics and themes are diametrically opposed by Fender’s most recent album and by how the album, as a whole, functions as an answering call. It responds to the old man encouraging Fender to Leave Fast and deals with the aftermath of leaving to superstardom.
The themes established by Leave Fast, that are prescient across the rest of Fender’s work, are why I believe it is not only one of his best and most important songs , but also a forgotten classic. As Hypersonic Missiles turns 7 years old and his earlier works start falling off setlists (Leave Fast itself has only been played once in the last 6 years, an improvised version due to technical issues), Leave Fast is slowly being confined to the early works.
But its importance as a song across the breadth of Fender’s work must be acknowledged. As he continues to grow and mature as an artist, it will be intriguing to see how the influences of his early, youthful anger and disparity will return and if, much like Leave Fast flows through his work, other earlier forgotten classics may begin to have their influence felt on his newer, sleeker output.
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