“This song is about going to Aldi,” smiles Sam Fender as he introduces raucous lockdown banger ‘Howdon Aldi Death Queue’. If you were a gambler, you’d hazard a bet that this was the first time those words were ever uttered during a Reading headline set, although you’d imagine Kurt Cobain would have loved cruising the middle aisle at Lidl. While he is a guy with a guitar, we’ve never had an R+L headliner quite like this.
- READ MORE: Reading Festival 2023 liveblog: all of the weekend’s action as it happens
When he made his main stage debut at the festival back in 2021, he was a few months shy of dropping his world-beating second album ‘Seventeen Going Under’. It felt like something was brewing, and tonight he tastes the results. “This is a big fucking milestone for me and the lads,” beams a humbled Fender after the intoxicating opening of thrashy b-side ‘The Kitchen’ and star-reaching single ‘Will We Talk’, talking about he and guitarist and close pal Dean Thompson used to attend the sister site Leeds festival as teens. There are enough Sam Fender haircuts here tonight that he could just as easily blend in again, but the audience see themselves in more than his curly mullet.
Following the fist-pumping ‘Getting Started’, the 29-year-old introduces “a song about my hometown… a fishing town, drinking town”, flowing into a gracefully cathartic rendition of ‘Dead Boys’, dealing in the criminal levels of young male suicide and all the pain that comes with it. The ‘Geordie Springsteen’ tag isn’t just about his love of denim, a sax solo and full-lunged chorus. It’s got nowt to do with knee skids, and everything to do with his masterful translation of the profound in the everyday into music that matters. That’s never been more apparent than when there are more people on their mates’ shoulders than not for ‘The Borders’ and when the headliner-scale pits erupt for ‘Spice’.
A “nice little sing-along” is putting it lightly for how he describes ‘Get You Down’, and the biggest crowd of the weekend so far more than oblige in hollering back every syllable to ‘Alright’, ‘The Dying Light’ and the stonking firework finale of ‘Saturday’, ‘Seventeen Going Under’, and ‘Hypersonic Missiles’. The lad from North Shields and his mates left everything on this hallowed stage tonight.
Moments before his set, co-headliners Foals used their glorious party-starting set to tell the crowd that a future headliner was among them. Fender, an artist dealing solely in reality and singing straight to the heart to the young crowd with the world at their feet, makes that seem all the more possible. He’s a mirror to this audience, and that’s why belongs on this stage more than anyone. Taking a moment to thank his stellar band, Fender tells the crowd that he’s merely just “the cunt at the front” and that he “would happily be the underdog”. Sorry Sam, never again.
Sam Fender played:
‘The Kitchen’
‘Will We Talk?’
‘Getting Started’
‘Dead Boys’
‘Mantra’
‘The Borders’
‘Spice’
‘Howdon Aldi Death Queue’
‘Get You Down’
‘Spit of You’
‘Alright’
‘That Sound’
‘The Dying Light’
‘Saturday’
‘Seventeen Going Under’
‘Hypersonic Missiles’