Sam Fender

Earth accounts for four of his ten planets and air just one, leaving three in water and two in fire. Earth holds a position and water registers the room; the element that would stand back and analyse is nearly missing. Fender is an English singer whose songs are rooted in the town he comes from, which is a deliberate refusal to write from nowhere in particular.

The Sun sits at five degrees of Taurus, the sign that holds on to what it already has and is slow to be moved off it. For a songwriter whose subject is one place and the people in it, that is the plainest possible reading: Taurus does not go looking for new material, it keeps returning to the same ground. The Moon is at the very end of Libra at noon, or in Scorpio if the hour was later.

A T-square holds the Moon, Mercury and Uranus, with the Moon directly opposite Mercury at under half a degree, so feeling and speech face each other and both meet the planet that breaks arrangements at right angles. Mars makes a quintile to Uranus four hundredths of a degree short of exact, the tightest thing in the chart. Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto were all retrograde. In a songwriter whose material is one town, feeling and speech facing each other across the chart is the argument the songs are made out of.

Saturn worked its way back to its opening Pisces degree on 28 February 2024, at twenty nine. A first circuit of Saturn wants to know what the first thirty years produced, and Pisces is the least tidy sign in which to be asked it. For a writer whose material is where he grew up, the question and the subject are closer together than they would be for most. Four planets in earth is what keeps a writer returning to one place rather than moving on to easier material, and the chart has no air to argue him out of it.