Leave Fast

Album: Dead Boys EP (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • Sam Fender is a proud Geordie, born and bred in the North East coastal town of North Shields. However, there was a time when he felt scared that he would never get away from his hometown.

    Leave fast or stay forever
    An old man told me to leave fast or stay forever


    Fender explained to the BBC: "I love my hometown but 'Leave Fast' is the way I felt when I was 17, 18 - it's that fear that I'd never be able to do something else."

    "Now that I am doing something else and my job is my music, I feel differently," Fender added. "I just knew that, for what I wanted to do, the industry isn't here, so I had to go."
  • Fender's hometown of North Shields has steadily declined - unemployment and austerity is rampant. "'Leave Fast' is a haunting dispatch from a community ignored for generations," the singer told Q magazine. "'Leave Fast' was just looking at my hometown and the rise of homelessness which is obscene, it's everywhere."

Comments: 1

  • Chris from NewcastleJust to explain a few of the lyrics for people outside the North East.

    The Nautilus is a pub - the blue star is a sign outside the pub, basically Newcastle Breweries sign.

    The Beehive Road is a country lane where boy races go, there is a nice old pub called the behive there too.

    Can't say for sure but I imagine the kids freeze their lungs - is referring to sniffing lighter gas.
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