A RAY OF SUNSHINE

Grant Nicholas on the song that gave Feeder a super-hit – a “simple” song that he almost gave away.

This millennium started badly for Grant Nicholas. Aged 32, the Feeder frontman found himself suddenly single, forced to look on as his departed girlfriend took comfort in the arms of a media high-flyer. “We’d broken up after a long time, and she’d started going out with a guy who made adverts. So there was a bit of jealousy,” he admits. “My only way of dealing with it was to keep writing songs. He was making a car advert at the time, so that’s what inspired the first line of Buck Rogers: ‘He’s got a brand-new car…’ It’s a song about starting again.”

In those days Feeder were critically respected, but if the singer had a pound for every rock press accolade that had been heaped on their early albums – 1997’s Polythene and 1999’s Yesterday Went Too Soon – then he probably wouldn’t have been scraping by in a mortgaged flat in north London. “We weren’t the big, rich pop stars,” he confirms. “It was still pretty tough, but we were surviving.”

It wasn’t all bad. Nicholas was close to securing the services of Gil Norton, having offered his songwriting skills to a misfiring US band the producer had under his wing.

“The plan was to help them come up with a single,” he explains. “When I started writing Buck Rogers, I was thinking: ‘I’m quite happy to give this one away.’ I have to admit there are days when I’m embarrassed about writing it.”

Amid the frowns and boiler suits of nu metal, Buck Rogers was a ray of sunshine.

“Buck Rogers is so simple it’s ridiculous,” Nicholas says, of its rudimentary guitar parts, “but it’s the simple songs that connect with people. Sometimes you hit a formula and it just happens. You don’t always have to like it. You end up thinking: ‘Well, I’ve written much better songs, but nobody gives a shit about those.’”