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Wow, I haven’t been so moved by something so mainstream in quite some time, and this guy — northern-English working-class heir to Springsteen with chiming guitars, meat-and-potato rhythms and occasional soaring sax solo for backing — is soulful in a way I don’t think I’ve heard before. It’s the way he just throws words at the music, I think: sometimes they rhyme, more often they don’t, and if the rhythms are constant then I haven’t fathomed them, yet meanwhile the melodies are accessible as can be. They say Fender grew up musical and it makes sense: I don’t know how you write or sing like this if it isn’t in the blood. I’m caught between envy and deepest gratitude that anyone is singing for kids like the ones he’s singing about. I can’t say I was ever one of them — his is more a man’s world than mine was — but when he sings about his alcoholic father, like he does here, I feel it to my bones. I’ve heard this three times today, cried like a baby each time. Watch the film-clip, starring the incomparable Stephen Graham as the father; I know that man, that situation. Oh, and yeah, I’ve heard the album too. I liked it, even sat reading the lyrics while it played (to combat Fender’s Geordie accent), but I wouldn’t know how to rate it yet. But this song, this is gold. What a guitar sound! And that voice! A small but significant event.