Andrew Scott goes searching for flickers of the past at the bottom of a bottle and the end of a cigarette in the music video for “People Watching,” the title track on Sam Fender‘s forthcoming third studio album.
In the Stuart A. McIntyre-directed clip, the Irish actor wakes up in the middle of the sidewalk and begins a lonely journey towards nowhere. He hitches a ride in the back of a pickup truck, drinks bad coffee at desolate diners, and smokes at the bar in between crying sessions. He’s lonely, but not always alone. There are the odd bunch of characters he downs drugs and alcohol with in a cheap motel, the women he dances and shares cigarettes with, and the group of guys who jump him late at night.
All the while, flashes of his childhood appear. It’s what he’s both running towards and running from, the maternal warmth that enveloped him back then. He sketches a photo throughout the video in between bouts of debauchery and ends up with an ink portrait of his mother.
“I came back home after seven years/Wide awake, tracing tracks of her tears/Cornered the nurse to get the gist of it/I promised her I’d get her out of the care home/The place was falling to bits/Understaffed and overruled by callous hands,” Fender sings. “The poor nurse was around the clock/And the beauty of youth had left my breaking heart/But it wasn’t hard when you love someone/Oh, I stayed all night till you left this life ’cause that’s just love.”
People Watching marks the British singer-songwriter’s first studio album in three years. Fender first shared “People Watching” in November as his first single in more than two years. “Wild Long Lie” followed in December and “Arm’s Length” arrived last week as the third preview from the record.
In contrast to Seventeen Going Under — which bolstered standing comparisons to Bruce Springsteen while shaking off previous parallels drawn to Shawn Mendes — the new album has been described as a thematic shift away from coming of age stories. Instead, a description of the album reads, People Watching will explore “colorful stories and observations of everyday characters living their everyday, but often extraordinary, lives.”
While Fender is in album mode, Scott is gearing up for the release of nearly a handful of films in 2025. His first appearance, in the action-comedy Back in Action, premiered on Netflix earlier this month. Later this year, Scott will appear as Oscar Hammerstein II in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon and in an unspecified role in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.