Feeder The World

By rights, Grant Nichols should be feeling pretty chipper right now. His band Feeder have been a regular top ten feature since their second album in 1999 and their latest offering Pushing The Senses has been garnering excellent reviews across the board. Yet when we finally catch him on a Saturday morning trip to the CD:UK studios, he sounds a little weary. Perhaps it stems from the pressures of promoting what all concerned seem to think will be a massive record, and pondering whether it represents a radical shift in the band’s sound.

“I’d never really analysed it that much until people started asking me about it,” he explains. “I think it’s still very Feeder. It’s very song based, there’s some rocky moments and there’s some mellow moments which you’ve had on pretty much all our records. It’s what we’ve always done really.”
So if someone heard the record blind and had no idea it was them he wouldn’t consider that encouraging?
“Not really, I’m not trying to hide who we are. I’m very proud of Feeder and what we do. It’s a bit odd when you get comparisons with bands who’ve been around for a couple of years when you’ve been going for twelve years but that’s just the way it is."
Ah yes. Having spent the early part of their career fending off accusations that they were grunge copyists, Feeder now find themselves bracketed alongside a new wave of sensitive British rock bands, with the one that seems to irk Nichols most being the continuing mention of Keane.
“We have evolved as a band and I’ve tried to move on as a writer but it is a bit weird for us to be compared to them, as it must be for them. I remember when they started people compared them to Coldplay all the time and now they’ve sold a lot of records people accept them as being themselves. If you put a piano on a track people label it as being like either them or Coldplay. It is a bit frustrating because we’ve been going a long time and we had strings and pianos on our second album, just not as upfront as on this one. I’m not worried about it because there’s no point. At the end of the day I was writing songs for Feeder and it wasn’t about trying to be somebody else.”
He’s right of course. Pushing The Senses sounds nothing like Keane, Coldplay or Snow Patrol. Yet neither does it merely duplicate Feeder’s hitherto most well known, pop rock side. In truth it sits somewhere in the middle, an impressive case of a band acting their age and letting their music grow with their own personal experiences. And it’s arrived at just the right moment, as Grant recognises.
“A lot of our success is down to timing. It helps to release an album when some of the bigger bands are away and have left a gap. You could say that about Keane, not to take anything away from them but sometimes a band needs that space to have a break. Possibly on our first few albums we never had a massive gap so we just did it by touring and building a huge fan base. It may have been a bit slower but it hasn’t been bad for us. The bands that get there faster don’t always last. As we’ve got older so have our audience. It’s not a bad place to be actually.”
So he is more content than perhaps he’s letting on. Another reason is the band’s policy of taking care of business on their own terms, something that has seen them stay on the same small label (Echo) and remain one of the few bands of their status not linked in some way with a huge multi-national.
“Being on the same independent label for ten years has enabled us to grow slowly. It’s more of a family thing and I prefer it that way. You don’t always have the power of a big corporate but at the same time you have a bit more freedom which suits us as a band.”
The promotional hoops still have to be jumped through though, hence his current journey to the TV studio. Does he ever worry that the more introspective side of the music will get lost in the flashy surroundings of the pop world?
“That’s really down to us. I don’t have a problem doing stuff like CD:UK. I want people to know about the band and I’m proud that more and more people seem to know the name Feeder – it’s not always been the case. I don’t think that we’re diluting the music or the songs, it’s just a way of presenting them to a wider audience.”
At the other extreme sit the ‘serious’ press, all of whom are queuing up to try and delve into Nichols’ most personal thoughts, in particular his continuing reaction to the suicide three years ago of drummer and childhood friend Jon Lee.
“I put a lot of personal stuff into the songs but I want to make them as universal as possible. Some come out better than others. A lot of people know what we’ve been through as a band and that has affected me hugely as a writer but looking back at some of the earlier albums I was picking up on that kind of stuff as well.”
Was not dealing with Jon’s death in such a public fashion as his music ever an option?
"I started writing songs very soon after he died and I was still in shock to be honest. The whole thing is a bit of a blur. I went straight into the studio and drove the engineer mad by just working every hour. If I hadn't done that I don't know whether the band would have been able to carry on, we may have left it too long.”
He pauses for a moment and you detect the hint of a smile down the phone line.
“I’m pleased we did it because otherwise I wouldn’t be here talking to you now.”b

Pushing The Senses is out now on Echo.