Messed!Up
The 1990s were a great decade for guitar-driven music, particularly in the indie rock and alternative rock spaces, and there were many bands that earned their time under the spotlight. In 1995 I was down to Bristol to look for a new music studio space and usually, it also involved a night out at the Fleece and Firkin, my favorite venue back in the days of my youth. The Fleece was a guarantee for a fun night out with friends and some great live music on stage, often showcasing new bands.
This particular night a new band was about to play and my friend sold it to me like ‘The Smashing Pumpkins of the UK’, and with Siamese Dreams in mind and some new singles out that would end up on Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness later that year, it was easy to talk me into buying a ticket (well, he had me at ‘the Fleece’). That was my first Feeder gig. A few weeks later they released their debut single ‘Two Colours’.
After a few more Feeder gigs at the Fleece and their first gig at Reading Festival in 1996, I ended up on their debut album tour in 1997, again at the Fleece, and then they played the Main Stage at the Reading Festival and everything changed forever. Polythene, the debut album, was well received and Feeder’s songwriter captain Grant Nicholas continued to write songs over the next years that captured the interest of a continuously growing fanbase across the world.
Twelve albums and 29 years almost on the day after my first Feeder gig at the Fleece, we sat down with Grant ahead of Feeder’s gig at Uebel und Gefährlich in Hamburg and talked about finding inspiration to continue writing music after 30 years of Feeder, navigating a changed music industrial landscape, and releasing a double album in this day and age when bands release EPs.
The long journey from the 1990s to the 2020s
It’s a little embarrassing but I have to admit that I haven’t been to a Feeder concert since the Reading Festival in ’97. We haven’t really crossed paths for a very long time.
“Oh my God! When we were still a three-piece? And I had this yellow t-shirt? (laugh). I remember it well and actually posted a video of that on our story just a couple of days ago, it came up on my phone. I think it was the first time we did the Main Stage at Reading. That was big for us back then and gave us a bit of a push”.
But I also was at many of your shows in the 90s and remember seeing you at the Fleece and Firkin in Bristol already in ’95, and a few more times after that when I lived down there. I think it was a few weeks before you released your debut single. A friend sold it to me as ‘The Smashing Pumpkins of the UK’.
“Yeah, we also got that label. It was kind of weird because I come from a small town in Wales far from that kind of music. But I was reading something on Billy Corgan, that he grew up with quite similar music, so maybe we have similar influences”.
“But yeah, the Fleece; I have some really great memories. It was quite an important place for us, it’s where we kind of started out and got a bit of following because I grew up not far from Bristol and was there a lot. I was born in Newport, but I grew up just over the border in a place called Chepstow, or just outside Chepstow. So, when I was younger I was going to Bristol quite a lot to buy stuff in these cool vintage shops because where I lived there was nothing. I remember a shop called Uncle Sam’s, a vintage shop I used to go to. I should visit it again – if it’s still there”.
It’s sort of a 30 year anniversary for you this year although you started as a band a few years earlier, in ’92 already. What has been driving you to continue writing and releasing music for most of your adult life?
I mean, you have released twelve albums and most bands are happy just to get their debut album out. Then they’re out when their sophomore album doesn’t meet the expectations.
“I actually don’t know. I mean, I’m just very lucky that I tend to write a lot of songs and I’ve always got some sort of inspiration. But it’s not that I go home every day and say ‘Hey, I’m gonna write a song’, but when they come I kind of get into a very intense period of writing and write a lot. I have to stop myself sometimes, otherwise I’d have too much work to do trying to finish them all. Which is why we’ve done a double album, I had too many songs”.
“But it’s hard to explain. I’m just inspired, really, and I kind of still enjoy the process of writing music. I also find it good for my headspace to be creative and all that. I’m not an academic, I’m more of a creative person, and I like what music does and how it makes me feel, especially when I was growing up. I don’t mean to be pretentious or anything, but I think music is quite a powerful thing. You can go and see a film and if you take the music out of it, it doesn’t have the same impact, and that’s what I love about it. And there’s no rules, you don’t really have to follow any rules unless you want to play the pop game”.
And did that also kind of save you a little during the pandemic? I know kind of many people who suffered from mental health issues because they didn’t know what to do. But some people finally got time to do what they really loved and could put full focus on being creative.
“Yeah, I mean I did write a lot, but the first bit of lockdown didn’t really made me feel inspired, but I had already written some stuff. I felt it was a weird time and wondered ‘What’s going on?’ and didn’t really put my guitar out there for a while. But when I did, I started writing loads of stuff but it took me a good six weeks to sort of write anything which is quite rare for me”.
“Even some of the songs on Black/Red were actually written during lockdown but they didn’t end up on Torpedo, I kept some back. So there’s a few songs that kind of make me remember what I was doing during that period of time. But I suppose I’m lucky in some way because being a writer helped me a bit, it was a hard time for a lot of people”.
Quite much has changed in the music industry over the last 30 years, from physical records to digital files and streaming; from poster and ads promotion in physical magazines to online promotion and social media; from selling albums to earn a living to playing more live and not being able to live off the music anyway – and a lot more.
How has it been to navigate through these, sometimes tough, changes and still keep focus on being creative and writing new music?
“It’s very difficult, I do miss the physical thing and I’m still flying that flag. To make a double album in this current climate is a bit crazy but we’re that kind of band because I grew up with buying records and CDs. Everyone goes, ‘Well, the CD market’s over’, but everyone still makes them so there’s obviously some people who do buy the physical. Actually, physical sales and CDs have picked up a bit the last six months to a year, it’s not completely dead, and even vinyl has become more popular.”
“You know, we’ve done so many records now, and there’s always that thing in the back of my mind if we should kind of revisit a lot of our records because half of the time we don’t play a lot of the songs. Every time we play, we do the current album and then the best of stuff, and it’s already an hour and a half set. But maybe we should just enjoy it a bit and revisit songs that we haven’t played for a long time that the people want to hear and just put out EPs and new singles here and there and not bother doing an album. I do think about that sometimes because we’re at a point now where we don’t necessarily need to release an album”.
“But the thing is I still like that whole process of it. The only thing that frustrates me about an album is that they come and go so quickly. I know we got Spotify and things like that and it does help and people will hear the songs there, and it’s expensive making a record. But it’s not the same as a physical record.”
You mean it drowns in the flood of new music being put out every week?
“Yeah, and that’s really hard. I mean, in the old days when we put out an album it was sitting around for months and months, even a year sometimes. But now it’s like, even if you’re a big band unless you’re very lucky, the album comes, it’s a big hype and then it’s kind of gone in a few weeks. You don’t seem to get that big sort of hit like you used to. Even a band like the Foo Fighters – even that huge band – don’t get that sort of classic song that runs on the air for a long time anymore. I don’t know if it’s down to maybe whether it’s the songs or whether it’s just the way things are now. But songs don’t have enough time to develop unless you’re very lucky”.
I get that and you can see how people’s attention span got a lot shorter with streaming.
Another thing about the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s is that guitar-driven music was huge. If you look back and compare it with music today, there’s fierce competition for listeners out there and there’s lots of new genres, especially new electronic music which catch the interest of young people. Has that been a tough competition to face, especially when trying to get new and younger fans to listen to you?
“Yeah, but we still get to play (laugh). I know that every artist says it but I think some of the last few records I’ve written have been some of the better Feeder records. I do believe that if some of those songs came out when we were doing well and the music climate was different, they would have been big tunes. But it doesn’t piss me off. It’s just like the way it is. That’s why we sometimes try to hit that box of keeping some of the old people happy while trying to educate some people that don’t know Feeder’s history with some other stuff, you know, those that only know five or six big radio songs. Normally, we win them over”.
“We’ve always been kind of a heavy metal pop band because I love heavy guitars, but I also love melodies and songs. I’m an old school songwriter, so even though it’s heavy stuff, it’s still melodic and shouldn’t terrify people that much”.
I’ve always seen that as one of Feeder’s strengths, to write heavy guitar songs with a pop feel, and I also remember how I thought it was unfair when you released Echo Park back in the day and people thought it was too commercial and they were shouting ‘sell-outs’. But it was just a heavy guitar-driven album with pop melodies.
“Yeah, I know, and now it’s a really popular record. But I kind of resented it myself and it was one of my least favorite Feeder albums. It’s not my favorite record today, but it has grown on me a bit. The only thing that worries me about that record is that I don’t want to be remembered just for ‘Buck Rogers. As a songwriter, I’ve written some way different and more personal stuff that I think is better”.
“But ‘Buck Rogers’ is a bizarre song. It was written for another band. It was just a demo and was written when I was very drunk one night (laugh). I was meant to be paid so this artist can take it, like ‘Here’s the melody, here’s a song. Do your own lyrics’, and then we ended up keeping it because our record company thought it was a hit. Gil Norton, the producer that was doing the other band that I wrote it for, heard all the songs I had including ‘Buck Rogers’ and said ‘You should keep this for yourself, I want to work with you’, so it was our way in to work with a great producer. But if we hadn’t had that song, maybe we would have been dropped by our label”.
“Every band needs a pop song and that was the one that kind of put us into being slightly more commercial. It’s just that it doesn’t represent what we are as a band. But I’m not complaining about it because it gave us a bigger audience”.
Realising a dream: Releasing a double album
When Feeder released Polythene back in 1997, they quickly built a following and fans came to love the band for their mix of pop and metal – heavy guitar riffs in poppy melodies – which made them stand out of the crowd of bands in the 90s guitar-driven music scene. After 30 years in the scene, three platinum-selling albums, two gold albums in the UK, and several chart-topping albums and singles, Grant was finally at a point when he wanted to realize a dream: to release a double album.
At the beginning of April this year, Feeder released their 18-song album Black/Red, a powerful and intense record that combines the heavier sound on Torpedo while introducing a poppier side with anthemic songs for arena shows.
What I like a lot on Black/Red is that you get kind of a pop feel at times, like on “Unconditional” which very much reminds me of Coldplay with its string arrangements.
“Yeah, that’s very much like the Pushing the Senses era. That song could have been on Pushing the Senses or maybe even Comfort In Sound because it got this string element, and we’ve always had that, like on ‘Feeling a Moment’ [Pushing The Senses] which is a very similar sort of style”.
“We’re obviously a much heavier band than Coldplay, they’re a band with songs that can fill stadiums, but I think some of our songs have that kind of quality as well but in a different way to what they do”.
Is that a new poppier Feeder meaning you’re about to go in a pop direction? I guess you still have some songs left after the pandemic, and maybe they’re intended for a new pop sounding record.
“There is and they’re quite poppy actually, and I left them off the albums for that reason. But I would say they’re more indie band kind of poppy. Feeder have a heavy side and we got the indie pop side and the anthemic side and the acoustic stuff. But I think Black/Red got some pretty heavy songs on it as well. ‘Playing With Fire’ is pretty ballsy just like ‘Vultures’ and stuff like that; CD1 is a bit more rockier. It also got ‘Hey You’ which is inspired by the 80s because I love a lot of 80s music as well. And then CD2 is probably a bit more like you said. It’s probably not the right word but maybe a slightly more commercial approach in some way because you got songs like ‘Unconditional’ and ‘Soldiers of Love’ there. But then you got quirky songs like ‘Submarine’ as well which is still very Feeder”.
But you’ve always had a Feeder sound no matter what direction you go in.
“Yeah, but we do experiment quite a lot. It’s kind of hard being a band, it doesn’t matter whether you are Coldplay or Foo Fighters or The Smashing Pumpkins. People kind of love your band for the sound, and when a band change it too much it’s hard. Sometimes it works, but in general, it’s a bit like ‘I like it but I kind of want to hear what I loved about that band when I discovered them’. And it’s frustrating because if you go too far away from that you can lose people. So I just try to do what I think sounds good because otherwise you’re compromising and you end up not really liking it yourself”.
“I use very similar guitar sounds because I think that’s my sound and that’s a big part of Feeder. I’m not a music guitar player, I’m a songwriter who plays guitars and just love guitar sounds. But there’s also a lot of keyboards and all sorts of stuff on Feeder’s tracks. Since the second or third album onwards we started to experiment a lot more. I mean, I use lots of synths, there’s loads of sub bass and stuff on there. You’d be amazed if you saw what goes into a Feeder track. It’s not just bass, guitar, and drums, there’s a lot of textures in there. But what I try to do is to ask myself ‘If you took all that off, would it still be a good song?’. That’s why I write most of it on acoustic guitar. I would say that 90 or 95% of the stuff is written on acoustic; even in the early days I used to write on acoustic guitar because it’s just there, you just pick it up”.
It’s also a bold statement to release an 18-song album only two years after Torpedo. Even if you have that much material to use many bands save some for the future and another album, or at least their label will insist on it. Why was it important for you to release a double album? You just said that maybe it’s better to release EPs and singles.
“It’s kind of a brave thing to do, right? But I think this was like a bit of a full stop on that. I’ve always wanted to do it and I’ve done it now. Torpedo was very much part of this, so it’s almost like a trilogy”.
“All these records are connected because some were written at the same time. If you put ‘Playing With Fire’, ‘ELF’, and ‘Vultures’ next to Torpedo and maybe a song like ‘Magpie’, you’d hear they can be on the same record. I kind of wanted that, I wanted this to be connected but then you can’t have songs like ‘Unconditional’ on Torpedo. If I would have taken the rock stuff off [Red/Black] and made a single album it probably would have been very similar to Torpedo, but I felt like I needed it to be more interesting”.
“It’s quite a lot of songs for someone to get their head around. 18 songs, it’s almost like two standalone albums, and that’s why I didn’t have one long CD. I wanted to have a break, otherwise it’s just a lot of information. With most double albums people always go, ‘Oh, it’s great, but if it had been a single album, it would have been better’, and I really tried to avoid that”.
“So, we’ve ticked that box. When being in a band for so long, there are certain things you always dreamt of doing. I’ve thought about it before and I’ve always got cold feet, thinking ‘No, I’m not gonna do it, it’s just too much. It’s too old school prog rock’. But this time I thought ‘Fuck it, I’ve got the songs, let’s do it’. As long as the songs are good you have nothing to lose”.
“But I don’t think I’ll ever do a double album again, maybe a live double album, but who knows”.
Still got some boxes left to tick
Yesterday Went Too Soon turned 25 about a month ago, and it made me think about you being a band celebrating your 30th anniversary this year. You’ve probably done most of what you wanted and ticked all the boxes, but what is left to do? I mean, when I saw you in Bristol back in 1995 we were all kids and I’m quite sure that the young you never would’ve thought that you still were going to do this 30 years later.
“No, probably not”. (laugh)
“But it’s a lot left, like playing different territories. That is one of the biggest goals for us because I always felt like we should be bigger in Europe. Maybe we didn’t have the right labels and haven’t come back enough to build on it because you have to build. That’s what we did in the UK and that’s why it works. We kept building, building, and building. You have to do that. The problem is that it’s very expensive to tour Europe unless we go back to being a three-piece touring in a transit van. I’ve done that but want to deliver a quality show even if it’s in a club. We know we can do our thing to the best of our ability and I don’t want to go back”.
“So to answer your question, playing different countries, definitely doing more in Europe. That’s a big priority for us. I don’t care if it’s only certain parts of Europe that we do well, if we can come back and play in Germany and France I would be happy with that. You know, we’ve got good fan bases all over Europe but it’s been hard, especially for UK bands. It’s so expensive after Brexit, and that has made it even more difficult unless you’re not at a very big level. Even if you sell out clubs the fees are so small that they don’t cover two crew in the band”.
“We’re kind of investing our time and money to try and spread the Feeder word in Europe a bit more, especially in Germany because it’s a great market here, it’s a big place. I don’t think there’s any danger of us over-touring in Germany if we come back again and do a few more shows. We are planning on coming back again next year, try not to leave it too long and do some different cities, maybe Berlin and Cologne again because they were always good cities for us. So that’s the plan”.
“We might even do a co-headline. We’re friendly with quite a few big Japanese bands and they want to come and play here and we want to go and play there with them, so we might do a ‘we help you, you help us’ kind of thing. That is really big now, even massive bands are doing it. I went to see Smashing Pumpkins play and they had Weezer as support, and they pulled a lot of people. It was almost like it was a co-headline.”
“But in the end, it’s just to continue doing what we do, obviously make more music and just spreading the word live. That’s the real priority to us”.
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Photographer: Sophie Dobschall
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Feeder pages
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