This June, Liam Fender and his superstar brother Sam fulfilled a long-standing family ambition in a most unexpected way. “The Fender family is all Newcastle United mad, and all really good footballers: my dad, my uncles, my granddad was semi-professional,” explains Liam, speaking over video call from the spare bedroom at home in North Shields. “I came along and I’m fucking useless. I was that shit at football, I got bullied by a PE teacher! It soured the whole thing for us, and Sam’s by no means a footballer. So there was something quite heartening and amusing about the fact that the two shittest footballers in the family are the ones who can say we’ve played at St James’ Park!”
During those two sold-out nights at Newcastle’s Cathedral on the Hill, Liam joined Sam (who’s 9 years his junior) to duet on Bruce Springsteen’s slow-burning 1984 classic ‘I’m On Fire’. Now, Liam is preparing to release debut EP ‘Love Will…’, a rich collection of ballads and bawlers that showcases his knack for melody and sharp turn of phrase, as if Richard Hawley were from a bit further North.
Here, he tells NME about digging into the songwriting vaults he’s built up after 20 years of gigging, starting work on his first album and lending his support to a campaign to help men’s mental health in the North East during the cost of living crisis.
Your song ‘Don’t Follow Me Down’ has become something of a mental health anthem. How did it come about?
“There’s a couple of songs on this EP that have been sat in the vaults for quite some time. I originally wrote that back in 2015. When I’ve just written a song, I invariably don’t know what it’s about. I very much write from a stream of consciousness. It’s not usually until a few years down the line that I can listen back to something and think: ‘Oh, right, now I know what that was about.’ ‘Don’t Follow Me Down’ feels as though it suits the times we’re putting it out in. We’re coming off the back-end of the madness that has ensued over the last few years, and it reflects that. That it’s been picked up as an anthem about mental health was quite accidental, if I’m honest. As soon as people started picking up on it they were going: ‘It’s clearly about mental health issues’. I was like: ‘Oh yeah, of course it is.’ When I wrote it, I just thought it was a drug song. There’s some obvious references in there!”
You’ve recently been supporting a campaign to help men’s mental health in the North East during the cost of living crisis, which includes a walk-and-talk group. That sort of thing can be so valuable, can’t it?
“Definitely. Especially coming from, without wanting to sound too twee, quite a hard, working-class, Northern town. You go to work, you play hard, all of that sort of stuff. I think men’s mental health is something that has been overlooked a lot in the past few years. I don’t want to go all Jordan Peterson on you and start talking about the white, heterosexual male being under threat, but I do think it has been somewhat overlooked. It’s good that it’s getting talked about now.”
It’s particularly important in times of turmoil. You can’t work hard and play hard if you can’t find work in the first place!
“Totally, yeah. It’s a symptom of the times. We’re going through a period of mass global change, and everybody’s got to move with it. I think sometimes that speed of change is very hard for people to adjust to. Especially if you’ve been subject to a certain way of life and then work becomes precarious. It’s the same in music. When I think of how the music industry was when I was starting out 20 years ago, it’s unrecognisable.”
Were the Fenders a musical family when you were growing up?
“Yeah, music was always in the house. Dad’s a musician. A frustrated musician, as we all are really! From the age of 7 it was just like: ‘This is what I want to do.’ It’s probably that thing of: ‘I’m just gonna follow my dad down the pit.’ I’ve always seen it as an opportunity to escape Palookaville. It’s total escapism, for me. I’ve always been fascinated by it. I would get the bus up to Newcastle as a teenager with my pocket money and go into record stores. I’d be on the bus back home reading all the credits on who played what. Even now I’ll go to a gig and stand at the side of the stage looking at what gear they’re using. I’m completely a music fanboy, first and foremost. If I can get by at making music myself, and people like it, then happy days!”
What were you listening to as a kid?
“Steely Dan. That was dad. Mad Steely Dan fan. My mam was a big fan of Sting. I think pretty much anything my mam liked, my dad didn’t, and vice versa. I had a weird taste in music when I was a kid. I had a strange obsession with Genesis when I was 8. It was all sorts. Classic rock. Soul. R&B. From a very young age, I was fascinated by it. It’s caused me many frustrations throughout my life, and there’s been points where I’ve thought: ‘What the fuck am I pursuing this for?’, but I remain fascinated by it.”
‘Time Comes Around’ is accompanied by a gorgeous music video which sees a couple of ballet dancers pirouette through the streets of North Shields. Was that your idea?
“We were pretty proud of that! I’ll take credit for the location. I’ll not take credit for the idea of having the ballet dancers and all the stuff going on. I wish there’d been more documentation of the filming of that one. It was shot on the high street two minutes round the corner from where I live, and just the reaction from bystanders was pretty hilarious. With the song itself, it reflects a theme that runs through the whole EP about things coming good after a period of prolonged sadness. The roots of that one go back about 11 years. We’re starting work on the album now, which is much more up-to-date, but with this EP I knew I had a couple of songs sitting around that I really wanted to get out before a new body of work.”
Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ is such a beloved song that it can be contentious to cover it. Did you feel you could do something new with it?
“Fuckin’ Nigel Gallagher [sic] went and did a cover of it just recently too, the fucker! I’m curious to see what the general response will be to that track. I gigged that for years, when I was playing in bars and things like that. There’s been that many cover versions of that song, but I always thought there was space for that sort of interpretation where it was quite stripped back, and getting to the rawness of it. It’s a fuckin’ heartbreaking song, isn’t it? Hopefully I’ve done it justice and nobody will be offended by it!”
‘Love Will Conquer’ closes the EP in euphoric fashion. How did that song come together?
“I wrote that two or three year ago. I’m not someone who pushes myself to write. If the ideas are there and I feel right, it’ll come. I’m not someone who wakes up and writes a song every day. ‘Love Will Conquer’ was one of the rare occasions when I woke up in the morning and could hear a song in my head. My phone is full of half-baked ideas, but I had this melody in my head, and I knew that if by the end of the day I didn’t write that song it would just become another one of them. I think that’s where the quality comes from. I didn’t have too much time to ruminate or think about it. I just went in and demoed it, and it felt like it had a certain something.”
How’s work on the album going?
“We’re just in pre-production at the minute. All going well we should be looking at a release sometime next year. I’m excited to be getting stuck into it. We’re recording in Newcastle at a place called Blank Studios. There’s a really great vibe to that place, and some great people working in there. Quite a few bands from up here have worked out of there. The Pale White have done most of their work there, and Pigs x7 are based there as well. It’s a really cool, creative hive of a place. It’s great to see the North East has really got a buzz going on now, in a way that it didn’t when I was starting out. It’s really exciting to see! It’s an exciting time to watch it all unfold.”
‘Love Will…’ by Liam Fender is out on July 28