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Feeder's Frenzy
03/05/1998 3:00 AM, LAUNCH
Janiss Garza
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At his first school gig, fledgling singer/ guitarist Grant Nicholas performed "Roxanne" by the Police and "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath. A decade and a half later, Nicholas's love of both the light and heavy side of music is still apparent in his band Feeder. The trio's first American release, Polythene, starts off with "Polythene Girl," a simple, whimsical tune that shocks you awake with a screaming, tortured bridge. Lush, dreamy tunes like "High" and "Change" cross paths with the tensely rocking "Tangerine" and the peppy, '60s-styled bounce of "Crash." Then there's the hooky punch and lyrical obsession of the single, "Cement."
"I love sonics and guitars with pop music," Nicholas enthuses. "It's just great!" As a songwriter, Nicholas is constantly pulled in two opposing directions, but it certainly makes for wonderful noise.
In South Wales, it's surprisingly easy to acquire a taste for aspiring rock stardom. Nicholas went to school in Monmouth, not far from the world-renowned Rockfield Studios. "I used to see Robert Plant in town when I was 14 years old," he recalls. "We used to run up and ask him for his autograph." A few years later, Nicholas felt the need to escape his small- town origins. "I stayed there too long," he says. So he took his love for John Lennon and Judas Priest, and his brilliantly twisted songwriting talent, to London. It wasn't long before he invited his friend and former bandmate, drummer Jon Lee, to come up and join him. Thus the nucleus for Feeder was born. Eventually, they found Japanese bassist Taka Hirose through Loot, a paper that contains ads for cars, secondhand equipment and musicians looking for gigs. That was over five-and-a-half years ago.
With Feeder's unusual take on pop and rock music, the going was tough in Britain's world of here-today-gone-tomorrow trends. Too harsh for Britpop, too melodic for the hard rock scene, at first the trio was viewed with suspicion by those swayed more by fashion than by quality. But after a while, the group caught on. "After six months or a year," Nicholas darkly recalls, "all these same people who didn't want to look at us or even come to our shows started to come up to me saying, 'I'm really into Feeder's stuff,' and it just seemed so shallow to me. It was just because it was starting to happen." Read between the lines of "My Perfect Day" or "Tangerine," and Nicholas's pain and cynicism is apparent.
Because of their tenacity, Feeder had the last laugh over the trendoids. They were signed to Echo in the U.K. and several singles were released ("High" reached No. 24), plus an EP, Swim. By the time they were ready for a full-length album, the U.S. label Elektra had become involved. Now Polythene is quite literally opening up a whole new world to the group--finally they get to tour the U.S. for the first time.
Although he doesn't say so outright, it's clear that Nicholas's real wish is to have people open up their ears a bit and realize that pop doesn't always have to be sweet and rock doesn't always have to be brazenly loud. He recalls a recent interview with a guitar magazine. "They asked me my favorite guitarists," he grins, "and I mentioned George Harrison and Andy Summers from the Police. They were, like, 'But you're in a rock band!' And I was, like, 'Yeah, so?'"
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