The 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.”
It shouldn’t happen to a rock star. But then in those days Nicholas barely fitted that description. Feeder were critically respected, but if the singer had a pound for every rock press accolade that had been heaped on his 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.”
