Tom A. Smith

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Tom A. Smith

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Tom A Smith knows exactly what his beloved Bruce Springsteen meant when he sang, “We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.” The 21-year-old songwriter – Sunderland born, bred and proud – has, by his own admission, never been the academic type. Instead, his greatest lessons have all arrived with a guitar in his hand. “It’s how I’ve made sense of the world and everything that’s happened in my life,” Tom says. “It’s just always been such a constant part of who I am.”

He’s not wrong. Tom first picked up the instrument at four years old. By eight, he was onstage for the very first time; at 10, he was stepping out at Glastonbury. Going on to secondary school, while his classmates would come in on a Monday morning with their homework in hand, Tom would instead return with pictures and videos of his weekends spent opening for Catfish And The Bottlemen or The Lathums in front of thousands of people.

“Whether it was playing pubs or festivals or these massive shows, all I wanted since I got that first taste was to be onstage,” Tom says. “Maybe it’s being the middle child – it’s a bit of the attention-seeker in me coming out…”

Attention is something that Tom has not been in short supply of. Sam Fender is a noted close friend and vocal supporter. Miles Kane was so impressed by seeing Tom open for him that he immediately suggested the two collaborate in the studio. Elton John has lauded him on his Apple Music radio show, and handpicked him for his 2022 Farewell Yellow Brick Road show in London’s Hyde Park. He’s found champions in BBC Radio 1 (Jack Saunders, Greg James), Absolute Radio and Radio X; NME, Clash, Dork and The Times. He’s already shared stages and bills with Courteeners, James, Billy Bragg and Gang Of Youths, and appeared at Radio 1’s Big Weekend and Leeds Festival.

It’s all a world away from the quiet cul-de-sac in Houghton-le-Spring, a picturesque town a half- dozen miles outside Sunderland, where Smith grew up, his love of music passed down from his dad, who today serves as a de facto tour manager come driver and merch operator.

It’s there that the likes of Detroit Social Club’s Chris McCourtie and Dale Knight and The Futureheads’ Barry Hyde would come over to deliver guitar tutoring, have a kick-about around the living room, or indulge in Tom’s second love of video games (Tom’s proficiency at the FIFA football games, for which he once ranked amongst the top 0.5% of online players in the world, comes a close second to matching his musical prodigiousness). It’s there that he fell in love with artists as diverse as Jake Bugg, Leonard Cohen, Led Zeppelin and Radiohead, and the “lost art” of the album. And it’s there that, during the Covid lockdown, Tom hand-built a home studio in which he would be free to pen hundreds and hundreds of demos, exploring his evolving sound and songwriting craft – slick guitar licks and big-hearted hooks, but considered introspection, too. When he’s not on the road, Tom can be found here most days, working on new material from morning to night, or utilising a keen interest in music production to help write and record other up-and-coming artists – all much to the neighbours’ delight.

“Great songwriting for me is about storytelling,” Tom says. “The greatest songs are written about the biggest, most important thing in people’s lives. Speaking about something that is deeply personal to you, but doing so in a universal way that anyone can connect with, is a special thing. I take great inspiration from writing that’s working class and speaks to people’s real lives.”

Family, community and a roll-your-sleeves up work ethic are engrained in the fabric of who Tom is, values that he attributes to growing up in this former shipbuilding powerhouse corner of England’s North East. His love for his city is deeply rooted. Tom is a familiar and popular face in community spaces such as Pop Recs, The Bunker – for whom he played a pair of fundraising headline shows last year – and The Fire Station. He is an ardent supporter of the city’s underdog football team, a one-time mascot and season-ticket holder whose earliest adventures in songwriting were based on childhood day-dreams of goalscoring glory. He will soon begin work on his debut film role, portraying a young Dave Stewart in a musical memoir of the Eurythmics’ man’s early years – a coming-of-age story intrinsically linked to his native Sunderland.

Yet Tom knows all too well of the challenges of growing up in a city so removed from the opportunity and thinking of the London elite and the powerhouse south of the country, too. He was devastated and left feeling “disconnected” from his home following the destruction wrought on the city by the “shameful” 2024 riots, a photograph of a burned out car outside one of his favourite community hubs The Peacock etched into his mind to this day. Tom sighs when he speaks of how many of his school peer group have begun echoing dangerous, divisive rhetoric maligning marginalised groups. “We live in a very terrifying and selfish world right now,” he says. “But I have hope, because that’s not the Sunderland I see every day, or the Sunderland I want to celebrate. This city and the world are full of good people whose voices need to be heard louder.”

Tom’s own voice comes ever more into focus on forthcoming EP Say What You Want, his first release since signing with legendary label Fiction Records (The Cure, St Vincent, Tame Impala). Written at a time of reflection and change in Tom’s life, capturing a moment in which his awareness of moving “from being a kid into being an adult” is at the forefront of his mind, the release finds its author exploring themes of identity, self, and the face we choose to show the world – and that we choose to keep behind closed doors. Lead single Fashion pokes fun at “the stupidity of how hiding behind materialistic items gives you a level of confidence”, while What serves as an anthem “for the people who don’t feel they are the coolest or most outgoing, but have something they want to show or say about themselves”. I Don’t Blame You and Beautiful Way find Smith exploring deconstructed, synth driven sounds, the latter a tender rumination of “how the image that people have of you is not all that it seems”. An atmospheric cover of California alt.rockers The God Machine’s It’s All Over doesn’t so much bring down the curtain on this collection, this moment in time, as leave the door wide open: to new sounds, new styles, new revelations.

The release constitutes a “journey”, Tom says. It’s one that begins to not just uncover hitherto hidden aspects to Tom’s musical craft, but his own story, too – bridging the person and artist Tom has been, is today, and is becoming. It’s right there in the title – a freedom to embrace who you are, and what you want to tell the world. As Tom attests: “Authenticity in my writing is the most important thing to me; knowing that I’m not holding anything back. This EP is the first step in living up to that.”