Gig review: Sam Fender at First Direct Arena, Leeds

From his entrance with his seven-piece band to the strains of Roy Orbison’s Crying to his utilitarian garb of denim overshirt, baggy black T-shirt and jeans, there’s something humble and even slightly old-fashioned about singer-songwriter Sam Fender.

Like his stage demeanour, his choice of guitars – mostly favouring a sturdy Jazzmaster or Stratocaster – seems solid and dependable, and as he enquires about how his beloved Newcastle United are getting on in their game against Liverpool (“3-3? I’ll take that!”), it feels as though he could be performing to much smaller numbers in far more intimate surroundings than a sold-out 13,000-capacity First Direct Arena.

Yet in an age of the spectacle and expectations of technical whizz bang at venues like this, such an unshowy approach is endearing, even if it takes a little while for his 90-minute set tonight to really cut through.

Fender’s fondness for Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty is evident in the heartlands rock of the opening numbers The Kitchen, Getting Started and The Borders – the last of which features not only a saxophone break à la The E Street Band’s Clarence Clemons but also a guitar solo – but the momentum is dissipated somewhat by slower new tracks such as Wild Long Lie, Nostalgia’s Lie and Arm’s Length as well as the less familiar All Is On My Side.

It takes the indie clatter of Will We Talk? to quicken the pace and get the crowd on its feet again. The anthemic recent single People Watching even gets them singing along and pyrotechnics finally appear during the raucous Spice. The fiery punky thrash Howdon Aldi Death Queue is accompanied by dizzying psychedelic visuals and Fender’s tenor soars impressively during Get You Down.

The set’s emotional core, however, is Spit of You, where the singer digs deep into his difficult teenage relationship with his father and is set to a backdrop of polaroid images of parents with young children, and The Dying Light, where Fender plays a melancholy piano part before reverting to electric guitar.

He and the band round off the night in rousing style with Seventeen Going Under – which Fender introduces in fake American accent as “one you might have heard on TikTok” – and an encore of Hypersonic Missiles, which is accompanied by billowing fog machines, tickertape cannons and fireworks. They’re greeted by mass singalongs from a delighted crowd, proving once again, that North Shields’s answer to Springsteen has struck a powerful chord with little need to resort to loads of contemporary frills.