Sam Fender is playing two headline shows at The O2 in London this week as part of his People Watching tour.
The 30-year-old Geordie singer-songwriter, who is tipped to play the main stage at Glastonbury this year, hasn’t played live to a London crowd since he headlined at Finsbury Park in 2022.
Fender already had to add another date to his London stop to meet popular demand. All the arena show dates are sold out, following a mad scramble from fans to secure their pre-sale tickets last month.
He will be playing shows on Tuesday 10 December and Thursday 12 December at The O2 in Greenwich. Fender will be supported by opening act Wunderhorse, an English rock band fronted by Jacob Slater.
Doors will open at 6.30pm and concertgoers will need to have their phones charged, as tickets have to be displayed at the doors via The O2 app.
Fender is currently previewing his upcoming 2025 album, also called People Watching, on this tour, as well as playing hits from his previous two studio albums: Hypersonic Missiles (2017) and Seventeen Going Under (2021).
He’s been switching up his setlist so far, having played shows in Dublin, Leeds and Manchester already. In Leeds he opened with The Kitchen from Seventeen Going Under, while in Manchester his first track was Dead Boys, his anthem about male suicide from his first album.
Two of Fender’s biggest singles, Hypersonic Missiles and Seventeen Going Under (the title tracks of their respective albums) have been saved for the final song and the encore.
Seventeen Going Under, Fender’s breakout song, explores his mother being hounded by the government’s Department for Work and Pensions while she was too sick to work. Fender has been open about his difficult upbringing on the poverty line and his songs often fly the flag for left-wing politics and social justice.
In-between playing the hits, Fender is debuting his new material to fans. The 11-track album People Watching is due to be released on February 21 . “Me and the band have picked away at these songs for the last couple of years,” Fender said about the release. “We recorded so much material in that time and deliberated long and hard over what came next. We settled on this collection for our next outing.”
His band now includes Brooke Bentham, a guitarist and vocalist that used to busk alongside Fender in their hometown of North Shields. Joe Atkinson, a schoolfriend of Fender’s, plays keyboard and synth, Dean Thompson plays guitar, Tom Ungerer plays bass, Drew Michael is on drums, Johnny Davis plays saxophone and Mark Webb is on the trumpet.
Their lead single, People Watching, was released last month. Fender has described the song’s themes as highly personal ones. “People Watching is about somebody that was like a surrogate mother to me and passed away last November. I was by her side at the end, slept on a chair next to her,” the singer-song-writer said.
If you’ve missed him this time around, Fender will be back in the capital next year to play the London Stadium on June 6 supported by The War on Drugs and Cmat.