(Credits: Jay Davison)
Sat 14 March 2026 8:00, UK
Few novels have shaped language and culture quite like George Orwell‘s 1984, where his vision of a totalitarian UK gave the world a vocabulary for control, surveillance, and propaganda, with words like Big Brother and Room 101 to thoughtcrime, unperson, memory hole, doublethink, and Newspeak, becoming common parlance.
Its unflinching exploration of state overreach, political indoctrination, and the human drive for autonomy has resonated across generations, sparking everything from the global reality TV juggernaut Big Brother to Frank Skinner’s Room 101, and even giving birth to the adjective Orwellian itself and even musicians have long mined Orwell for inspiration.
The Jam’s 1977 track ‘Standards’ concludes with the chilling line, “And ignorance is strength, we have God on our side, look, you know what happened to Winston”. Radiohead’s ‘2 + 2 = 5’ wrestles with manipulated reality, David Bowie’s ‘Big Brother’ evokes the idea of authoritarian surveillance, and Marilyn Manson, in his autobiography The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, recalls being “thoroughly terrified by the idea of the end of the world and the Antichrist. So I became obsessed with it…reading prophetic books like…1984”.
Fast forward to around 2016, and Orwell’s work found a new interpreter in a fresh-faced Geordie going by the name of Sam Fender. He picked up the novel amid the seismic political upheaval of Brexit, Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House, and global unrest.
In Britain, a generational unease simmered, particularly among young people alienated by the Brexit vote, so much so that music journalist Matthew Perpetua coined the term ‘Post Brexit New Wave’ to describe the flurry of frustrated, disillusioned post-punk bands that emerged around 2016.
Tackling these feelings on behalf of the indie camp, Fender picked up a pen to process his own anxieties and wrote his debut single Play God, which described the world sliding towards the dystopia Orwell had once imagined. “I had just entered my 20s, I was anxious about the future of the world and its leaders, and it didn’t help that I’d just read George Orwell’s 1984 at the time,” he recalled, “As you can imagine, I was pretty paranoid!”
Orwell’s omnipresent Party translated seamlessly into Fender’s lyrics, as he sang “am I mistaken, or are we breakin’ / Under weight from the long time that he played God?”, with who the “he” in the lyrics refers to being deliberately ambiguous: perhaps Trump, David Cameron, or a broader manifestation of male leaders across the world, wielding unchecked power.
“No matter who you are or where you’ve been / He is watchin’ from a screen / Keeps a keen eye on the in-between / From the people to the Queen,” he continued, a direct nod to Orwell’s Big Brother in an era where digital screens, social media, and mass data collection had all become real.
Fender may have evolved, but the thread of social consciousness that weaves through his lyricism has remained intact, just as Orwell’s dystopia has continued to cast its long shadow beyond 2017.
As Trump sits in the white House once again, 1984 has remained a potent source of inspiration for musicians, with Bastille singing “If doublethink’s no longer fiction / We’ll dream of Huxley’s Island shores” on their 2022 track Back to the Future, while English Teacher sing of “Doctor Who and doublethink” on their 2024 track Mastermind Specialism.