Indie rockers Feeder are 90s and early 00s indie icons. The Welsh band’s 2002 album ‘Comfort In Sound’ is one of the best selling albums in the UK to be released on an independent record label, topping the charts twice, on release and again in 2025. It came in the wake of drummer Jon Lee’s suicide, a moment that came close to being the end of the band. Instead, it ultimately left the remaining two members to pick up the pieces with a work of stunning emotional depth, with ‘Comfort In Sound’ unveiled amid tearful shows across the UK festival circuit.

This writer personally attended the first official show back, at Reading Festival (it followed a small warm up in Portsmouth), and felt the emotional weight of ‘Quick Fade’ being dedicated to “absent friends”. Years later, having barely stopped since, frontman Grant Nicholas is revisiting the moment.

“It didn’t feel right to mess with ‘Comfort In Sound’, so we just remastered it rather than remixing it, and added a couple of tracks back from the Japanese version. It’s one of those special albums for us, so we didn’t do as much,” he says.

“I was a complete mess touring that album,” Nicholas continues. “I was overwhelmed by the support, and in a very weird place. There was that show at Reading Festival with crowds layers deep outside the tent, and it reinforced that we should carry on. We’d been asked the headline the whole show, but it didn’t feel right, so we had that slot instead, and it was powerful. It was so emotional, a heaving tent.”

More than 20 years later, ‘Black/ Red’ is the last of a group of recent records Nicholas describes as a trilogy. “I’m somebody who likes to move forward,” he says. “I know people love the first few albums, but I think a lot of what we’ve put out on the last few records is as good if not better than our earlier work. We don’t want to live off our past glory. ‘Black/ Red’ is almost two albums in one, and both of those albums would be good in their own right.”

“Our old labels have been asking us to do box sets,” he continues. “I didn’t really want to do that, but it did feel like a good time to go back and reflect on something we’ve done. I don’t know why I felt like that, but ‘Comfort In Sound’, after losing Jon, opened up a lot of doors for us and pushed me in a different musical direction; expanded the sound of Feeder. We’ve never done reissues before. A lot of contemporaries have, and I just thought, ‘let’s do it before we’re too old.’”

Not that Feeder have settled into entering a nostalgia period of their existence. Quite the opposite. “I want to mix it with some new music, too. But the fact is, it doesn’t matter how good the new music is, people want to hear those classics. It’s important for me to still be moving forward, and as long as we can do that, we can do just a little bit of nostalgia, too.”

“We had that ‘Renegades’ period where we went back to smaller venues. It was still Feeder, and a very planned thing. I needed to get back to why I was doing Feeder originally, and that time reignited the spark. We’ve always had that heavy side, and we needed to go back to that to move forward. It was very planned. We weren’t trying to be young again, but it was great fun. I still love that record. That heavier but melodic sound, big riffs, that’s a big part of our DNA.”

“We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves musically. If we want to do a pop song, or we want to do something like ‘Godzilla’ or something like ‘Feeling a Moment’, we’re going to do it. It’s a real mixture. My musical education is all over the place, from Sex Pistols, to ELO, to Peter Gabriel, to Pink Floyd, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Pixies. You can hear that in our music. It all comes out of the Feeder blender.”

“With ‘Comfort In Sound’, it’s like revisiting the holy grail, and we might do others before we call it a day. But a lot of bands have already done this reissue thing, and we haven’t, so it just felt like time. We might do one or two more, but we don’t want to milk it either. We want to do things properly, get the original masters and either remix or remaster it. But we won’t just do that.”

Rock has been on the fringes of music’s zeitgeist for some time, but Nicholas is slowly starting to see a swing back towards heavier guitar music.

“Things are getting a bit more positive,” he says. “Stuff like Turnstile, Geese, and so on, kids are getting into 90s-like stuff, which is good for bands like Feeder. We do get a new generation of fans. Smashing Pumpkins are back doing sell-out tours, and Billy Corgan has stopped being difficult and is playing the big hits again.”

"Things are not like the 90s with guitar music all over the radio. Exposure is the problem. But I think, for us, it’s almost like we can be out of vogue for one record or one year, and then it circles back. Some of the records we put out were our best records but not at the right time, and others caught the wave.”

‘Soldiers Of Love’ on newest record Black/ Red contains bagpipes, and Nicholas recalls a strange process that led to that, and the ultimate outcomes. “The song had this Celtic feel, with this kind of slightly military bagpipe thing. I could really hear them on the song. I knew it would either be the best thing we’ve ever done or the worst thing, and I had no idea how to find a bagpipe player. Bagpipes are hard, because you can’t really play them in key,” he explains.

“I went on a run in Finsbury Park near where I live one day and I heard these bagpipes from a tunnel where the buskers go. I’d been talking about looking out for a bagpipe player the day before. It felt meant to be.”

“I walked up to the busker, I didn’t tell him who I was or anything, I just told him I had a song that I wanted to put bagpipes on, and asked if he’d be up for coming back to my little home studio. He gave me his mobile number, and about two weeks later I called him up, and he turned up on his bicycle with his bagpipes. He came into my studio and they were so loud.”

“We realised it was in completely the wrong key, and he couldn’t get it into the right key. We put it on a loop and he did his thing, looping the intro through loads of tapes, and I recorded it. I had to time stretch it into the right key. So it’s real bagpipes, edited a little, and used in the intro.”

“He was looking around in the studio, and that’s where I keep platinum and gold discs and so on, rather than having them in the house. He was looking around, and I could see his brain going. Eventually he asked if I knew the band, and I told him who I am. For a little while he looked like a rabbit in the headlights. But I paid him a bit, put in the credits, and he was over the moon. It felt meant to be.”

The song stands as something of a triumph for Feeder’s ability, even decades later, to reinvent themselves, with lines like “the fear, the thrills, moments when you can’t keep still, you reach across to the other side for alcohol and pills.”

“We’ve never been able to do the bagpipes live really,” Nicholas says “though we once had a bagpipe intro that he played as we walked on early in the tour. We couldn’t fix the out-of-key issue to do more than that. But it still worked. The song would be great for a film soundtrack or something like that.”

“There will be new music before too long, though I’m not sure when, and then we’ll probably revisit a couple more records, too. We’ve got a massive catalogue and we could just go out and play that, but we have no lack of ideas or inspiration. I’d go mad if I stopped writing stuff.”

As for Ireland?

“When we first asked to do the Guinness Jazz Festival I asked if they’d got the right band,” Nicholas laughs. “But I’m told they always have other types of acts. We wanted to do an Irish tour but we haven’t been able to make it work for the ‘Comfort In Sound’ dates. I know some Irish fans have been unhappy about that, and we still plan to do it. But this is a bit different. And we will be back.”

Feeder play the Guinness Jazz Festival in Cork on October 24.