‘Seventeen Going Under’: Sam Fender’s Celebratory Breakthrough Hit
Though inspired by personal hardship, this classic rock song is defiant and life-affirming.
Sam Fender scored a well-deserved U.K. No. 1 with his 2019 debut Hypersonic Missiles, but he reached a much wider audience with “Seventeen Going Under”: an impassioned anthem from his second album that remains among his biggest hits to date.
Hypersonic Missiles highlights such as “The Borders” and the suicide-related “Dead Boys” proved Fender could write affecting songs about his generation’s struggles, but on “Seventeen Going Under” the English singer-songwriter drew upon his own troubled past. Set a decade earlier, when Fender was 17 himself, the song was at least partially inspired by his mother’s chronic health issues which prevented her from working while Fender was still too young to help support her.
Recalling this turbulent time in a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone UK, Fender said, “That was the age where I started having to grow up. I was old enough to know what was going on and that upset us. It was horrible to see [my mom] like that, to see the way she was being treated, but I wasn’t old enough to be able to financially help her. That’s when my rose-tinted glasses fell off.”
Things worsened before they finally improved, with Britain’s social security services (the DWP) even erroneously suspecting Fender’s mother of benefit fraud for a time. However, while Fender refers directly to this stark period in the song’s most harrowing lines (“I see my mother, the DWP see a number/She cries on the floor encumbered,”) “Seventeen Going Under” also reflects on more typical teenage rites of passage. Indeed, Fender’s sharp lyrical observations about everything from adrenaline-fueled brawling (“the fist fights on the beaches”) to falling in love for the first time (“The first time that it scarred/Embarrass yourself for someone/Crying like a child”) are easily relatable for most young people making the transition into adulthood.
“Seventeen Going Under” also worked beautifully because Fender aligned his cinematic lyric with one of his most stirring tunes. Propelled by an urgent guitar riff, a driving rock backbeat and Johnny ‘Bluehat’ Davis’ Clarence Clemons-esque sax, this life-affirming song bore all the hallmarks of a classic rock anthem – and it won over fans at summer festivals even before it saw official release in July 2021.
Tailor made for radio, “Seventeen Going Under” racked up a significant amount of airplay and it was voted 2021’s ‘Hottest Record’ by BBC Radio 1 listeners before it finally peaked at No. 3 on the U.K. chart in January 2022. Sam Fender has since issued a further series of impressive hit songs, ranging from “Gets You Down” to “People Watching” and his Noah Kahan collaboration “Homesick,” but while quality abounds in his wider catalog, he’s the first to acknowledge that “Seventeen Going Under” will likely remain one of his most talismanic songs.
“I’ve had a lot of ups and downs [in life] and I’m very thankful for both [my parents] because the downs are the things that made me appreciate everything else,” he told Rolling Stone UK. “‘Seventeen Going Under’ is a celebration of life after hardship. It’s a celebration of surviving.”
