Feeder
By Tyler Ody
FEEDER announced as headline act for TRENTHAM LIVE 2023 along with Jake Bugg and The Feeling.
The Trentham Estate are delighted to announce the headline act for Thursday 17th August at this year’s Trentham Live 2023 is the incredible FEEDER performing at the stunning grounds in Staffordshire. Performing alongside Feeder on the Thursday night will include singer-songwriter Jake Bugg and pop-rock band The Feeling.
That’s not the only big reveal as the organisers have also confirmed that the historic gardens and lakeside location will host not 4 nights of live music, but 5! As this latest announcement also sees Trentham Live add a new date, Wednesday 16th August to the festival with one last big act to be announced later this month!
Tickets for the Feeder, Jake Bugg and The Feeling – Trentham Live 2023 show taking place on Thursday 17th August are available from – https://www.ticketmaster.co.
FEEDER
Feeder were on a magnificent roll, then came COVID. Since launching out of South Wales in 1992, they’ve maintained an enviable forward motion, all but uninterrupted, releasing 10 studio albums and over 40 EP’s or singles accumulating 26 Top 40 chart singles, spending 185 weeks in the UK charts and shifting well over two million albums in the UK alone.
One of the few flat-out rock bands still firing in the face of a predominantly synth-pop world, they secured new heights of popularity around the world with 2017’s ‘Best Of’. After following up two years later with their tenth album, ‘Tallullah’, which garnered another British Top 5, the sky was the limit for these indestructible sensations, until the pandemic scoobied everything.
Typically, however, main man Grant Nicholas and bassist Taka Hirose have finessed a victory-defeat-victory combination from the jaws of lockdown, emerging with one of the strongest and heaviest records of their career. Called ‘Torpedo’, it unleashes some of the filthiest noises they’ve summoned to date, with tunes like the monster-riffing ‘Magpie’, the awesome title track and the Nirvana-ish ‘Decompress’ reflecting the universal experience of darkness, frustration and worry that we’ve all come to accept as reality in the early-’20s.
“Before COVID,” says Grant, “we’d got maybe nine or ten songs in pretty good shape, all recorded and almost mix ready, but then everything came to this grinding halt. For the first time ever, I didn’t feel like writing anymore because there was no real plan, no gigs – nobody knew what was happening. Then after a few months I suddenly picked up my guitar and started writing, and songs poured out of me.”
Where the first batch of songs was Feeder at their most commercial and anthemic, the second was them at their rockiest, and also their most diverse, capturing the edgy moods of the time. Feeling that this stuff was the more immediately relevant, Grant prioritized finishing this material, “chipping away” at his Treehouse home studio in North London, pinging tracks up to Taka at his home in Yorkshire to add the final bass parts, and between lockdowns grabbing the odd day in a big studio for touring sticksman Geoff Holroyde and Karl Brazil to apply live drums. “For me it was great,” says Grant, ever positive, “because it really gave me something to focus on, and I didn’t feel the pressure of any timeline.”
Thus was ‘Torpedo’ conceived, an empowering and highly cathartic triumph amid the challenging conditions that we all faced in 2020-21.
Come early ’21, with as many as thirty finished songs to choose from across those two batches of material from pre- and mid-pandemic, Grant Nicholas had half a mind to go the whole hog and release the majority of them on one glorious splurge of a double-album. Then his better instincts took over, and the best ten from the second batch were honed and sequenced into the often torrid, but ultimately uplifting narrative of ‘Torpedo’. “We’ve always had that kind of freedom,” states Grant, “to say, ‘Hey, we can do an acoustic song, a really heavy, riffy song, a song with strings on, and then one with keyboards and electronic stuff on it.’ It’s quite hard to get that freedom – there aren’t that many bands who can pull it off.”
That sense of rollercoaster unpredictability arrives just in the album’s opening number, ‘The Healing’, where initial acoustic strumming gradually builds into a stadium-pleasing anthem, before left-turning into a burst of apocalyptic metal, only to resolve into a feelgood coda radiating warmth and security, fully justifying the track title. “There’s a lot of Feeder in that one song,” Nicholas laughs. “I wanted to write something with classic chords, not too many, really simple, almost like you’ve heard this before but you haven’t. But then I had West End musicals in my head, almost like ‘Les Misérables’, or ‘Tommy’ by The Who. That’s why it goes off on this tangent in the middle, like a different scene. “The message,” he goes on, “is a come-together hippy thing. It’s a recovery song – a recovery from anything. Everyone has issues with mental health at the moment. I’ve got a lot of friends who’ve been through that stuff lately, so the song is extremely universal.”
Such is Grant Nicholas’ skill as a writer, he manages to articulate the fear and isolation we’ve all experienced under COVID, but leaves his words sufficiently open that the song will never be tied to its time of creation. Instead of obsolete, the moment the pandemic is over (fingers crossed!), ‘The Healing’ will apply for anyone experiencing their own private dark night of the soul, maybe in a relationship or a family situation. Similarly, the themes of division and misunderstanding in stormy-riffed ‘Magpie’ were inspired by “how social media can affect people’s belief, dreams and general well-being”, but thanks to Grant’s skilfully unspecific lyricism the song won’t be forever mired in Twitter’s toxic cesspool.
The album’s opening four tracks deliver a masterclass in heavy-rock action: midway through the third, ‘When It All Breaks Down’, a mammoth riff crunches in, fit for any of the rock giants of the 1970’s. Grant is forever influenced by how Led Zeppelin, and his heroes as a kid in the early ’90s, Smashing Pumpkins, would take their listeners on an epic long-playing journey through storm-tossed seas and calm rustic landscapes. ‘Torpedo’ is just such an odyssey, as track five, ‘Hide And Seek’, suddenly “takes you off somewhere else”, a dreamy ballad with images of yearning for domestic stability.
While ‘Decompress’ opens Side Two with echoes of primetime grunge (think ‘Bleach’-era Nirvana verses, and a mighty Soundgarden chorus), Grant says ‘Wall Of Silence’ was originally constructed around a drum machine and a keyboard part, later fuzzed up with those ‘hovercraft guitars’, but essentially instigated by a love for Peter Gabriel’s massive solo records in the ’80s. “I know some people think the ’80s were an awful time, but there was some really amazing songwriting going on in there, and some great production.” That song typifies Grant’s outlook: channelling the negative energies – the frustration at lockdown’s unwanted stasis – into positive music, as desperate lines about “living in our heads…the weeks just slip away…day after day, we hide away”, ultimately lead to a happier conclusion – “today it feels like everything will be alright… somehow we’ve connected, unified”.
In its final section, ‘Torpedo’ moves through further diverse moods, as ‘Slow Strings’ hints towards ‘Songs Of Faith And Devotion’-era Depeche Mode, ‘Born To Love You’ borders on “croony anthem” territory, and ‘Submission’ closes with images of loss, amid acoustic strums and synth strings à la Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’, on what Grant calls “a broody moody groove, a grand ending like ‘The Healing started with, which tops and tails the LP”.
Mr Nicholas says the umbrella purpose of ‘Torpedo’ was “an uplifting record – I didn’t want it to be a total downer which it could easily have been under the circumstances. I wouldn’t be human if what’s gone on didn’t have a huge effect on what I was writing. Hopefully it will touch people, and they’ll find a connection in those lyrics, and it’ll help them to deal with anything they’re going through. That’s the beauty of song writing”.
The beauty of Feeder’s position right now is that their momentum is rolling on, and they’re sitting prettier than they were even before the world was gripped by the dread virus. Having turned off-road isolation to the positive with another burst of writing, they’ve blasted out ‘Torpedo’ while those difficult feelings were fresh, but also have the pre-pandemic songs still up their sleeve, which Grant remains confident are yet more commercial and anthemic.
When Grant, Taka and their team hit the road in April ’22, they really will be firing on all cylinders, from a position of unrivalled rude health and confidence. Optimism, anyone?
For more information on Feeder, see links below:
Website - https://feederweb.com/
Facebook Page – https://www.facebook.com/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/feederhq
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/
You Tube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/
JAKE BUGG
It may be his fifth album, but Saturday Night, Sunday Morning marks the start of chapter two for Jake Bugg.
Arguably his most complete and coherent record to date, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning manages to combine a love of ABBA, the Beach Boys, Supertramp and the Bee Gees, with a contemporary pop sound: one that’s already spawned his most ubiquitous song in years via euphoric lead single, All I Need.
“I knew what I was looking for this time around,” the 27-year-old says, firmly. “And I feel like I accomplished it.”
It’s almost 10 years since a two-fingered Bugg burst onto the scene with his eponymous debut, one that topped the UK album charts and saw the then 18-year-old from Nottingham fêted as the next Bob Dylan.
A Rick Rubin-produced follow up, Shangri La, quickly followed. But progress stalled with Bugg’s third, largely self-produced, record, On My One, in 2016.
“I was having a hard time on that third record,” Bugg admits, five years removed. “The support from the industry wasn’t what it was. All those people telling you how great you are weren’t there anymore. It does feel like the rug’s been swept from under your feet.”
What that record provided, however – along with its comparatively stripped-back follow up, Hearts That Strain (2017) – was a much-needed course corrector: one that set Bugg on the upward trajectory he finds himself on today.
“When I came to terms with that was when I left the ego at the door,” he says. “It didn’t work out. But it led here. And this is probably my strongest record.” It’s testament to Bugg’s rediscovered confidence that Saturday Night, Sunday Morning – a nod to the debut novel by Nottingham author Alan Sillitoe – sees him working with some of his highest profile collaborators to date, most notably American songwriters Andrew Watt and Ali Tamposi, best known for their work with pop heavyweights Post Malone, Dua Lipa, Miley Cyrus, Camila Cabello.
“I was looking for how I can incorporate my sound for a more modern era. And I kind of struck gold working with Andrew Watt and Ali Tamposi,” Bugg says.
Convening in LA, the first track the trio wrote together is the jealousy-inflected About Last Night, a song about the “insecurities you go through as a young person in a relationship with someone.”
“It’s got such dark undertones, which I love,” Bugg says, of a song that showcases a newly discovered, Beach Boys-esque falsetto. “But it’s also very, very pop. That’s what I’ve always loved. With ABBA, with Supertramp. I love pop music. But when you can get it to be dark, I love it even more.”
It’s a trick the trio repeated again on Scene, Bugg’s personal favourite from the album and a song that best encapsulates the combination of old and new: Watt’s George Harrison-esquire guitar brushing up against contemporary melodic choices by Tamposi.
“I love writing with her,” Bugg says of the Havana hitmaker. “She brought that women’s perspective. And I knew that I’d got that balance of what I wanted. That old school chorus with contemporary verses. That to me was my favourite song when I wrote it, and it still is.”
Perhaps the biggest example of Bugg’s newfound ego-less approach to writing, however, came in the shape of Downtown, a song that grew from an idea by Jamie Hartman (Celeste, Lewis Capaldi, Rag’n'Bone Man), and sees Bugg deploy the higher range of his voice to ethereal, ’60s Bee Gees effect.
“Usually, the initial spark of an idea comes from me. And when it doesn’t, it sometimes loses my attention,” Bugg admits. On Downtown, however, he relished his role as
arranger: “Because there were a lot of moving parts and chords, it was almost like a puzzle,” he says. “I’d never approached a song like that before.
“What I’ve been enjoying on this record is the collaborative process,” he continues. Working with people, writing with people. Because I’ve realised all I really want to achieve is to be the best writer I can possibly be. And I think by working with other people, it allows you to learn a lot as well.”
It’s a theory Bugg has put to the test during lockdown, when he was approached by his manager about writing the soundtrack to an upcoming documentary, The Happiest Man In The World, about Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho.
“It’s kind of a completely different experimental outlet,” Bugg explains of his first ever score. “I approach my own work quite professionally. But with this I can just switch off and go into a different world. And it’s been brilliant – I’ve had to learn different styles of guitar: bossa nova, samba. It’s a bit Vangelis, who’s probably my favourite artist – which may surprise people.”
Possibly. But you get the impression that surprising is what Bugg likes to do. “I don’t like to be stuck doing the same thing,” he admits. “And that’s what this record [Saturday Night, Sunday Morning] was. I wanted to push myself. I’m always learning new influences. I’m careful not to get stuck on the same thing.
“It’s not going to be right every time. It’s not going to be good every time,” he continues. “But if that’s the process it takes to get to this record, where people are loving the songs again, then that’s the journey we have to take.” For Jake Bugg, chapter two starts now.
Jake’s new album ‘Saturday Night, Sunday Morning’ is out now on RCA Records.
For more information on JAKE BUGG, see links below:
Website - https://www.jakebugg.com/
Facebook Page – https://www.facebook.com/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/JakeBugg
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/
You Tube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/
THE FEELING
Pop-rock quintet adored for their infectious, life-affirming music.
Formed in 1995, The Feeling adopted their moniker from a small bar in Paris that they liked, and thought was better suited for a band name.
Except for frontman and principal songwriter Dan Gillespie Sells, who comes from London, the five-piece’s members – bassist Richard Jones, drummer Paul Stewart, guitarist Kevin Jeremiah and his brother keyboardist Ciaran Jeremiah – all hail from Horsham in Sussex.
Their guitar-based soft rock sound has been compared to a range of acts including Supertramp, 10cc, El
In 2006, The Feeling released their critically acclaimed debut album Twelve Stops And Home. Inspired by Gillespie Sells’ journey on the Piccadilly Line from Leicester Square to his home stop of Bounds Green, it was mostly self-recorded in the garden shed at the Jeremiah brothers’ parental home in Sussex. Five of songs quickly became hits – Fill My Little World, Never Be Lonely, Sewn, Love It When You Call and Rose – plus helped them win the Ivor Novello Award for Songwriters of the Year.
The Feeling’s second album, 2008’s Join With Us, continued their successful streak by reaching the No.1 spot on the UK albums chart. That summer the band made their first appearance at Glastonbury Festival playing the Pyramid Stage.
During the ’10s, they released three more top 50-charting albums: 2011’s Together We Were Made, 2013’s Boy Cried Wolf and 2016’s The Feeling.
In addition to his work with The Feeling, over the years Gillespie Sells has also written with other artists like Sophie Ellis-Bextor as well as composed music for television, ballet and theatre including the TV series Beautiful People and the popular West End show Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.
To celebrate the 12-year anniversary of their million-selling debut album, The Feeling reissued a deluxe version in 2018 and embarked on their Twelve Stops And Home Tour to play it in full.
For the UK’s first ever National Thank You Day on 4 July 2021, The Feeling got together with Ellis-Bextor and Jamie Cullum to re-record the Fleetwood Mac hit song Don’t Stop. In August, they unveiled the single While You’re Still Young, also recorded with Ellis-Bextor for the film adaptation of Everbody’s Talking About Jamie.
October 2022 saw The Feeling complete a nine-city UK tour. Their new album ‘Loss. Hope. Love’ is out now on Island Records.
For more information on The Feeling, see links below:
Website - https://www.thefeeling.com/
Facebook Page – https://www.facebook.com/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/thefeeling
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/
Jake Bugg
The Feeling