"It's taken 12 years for us to stand on this stage," Grant Nicholas declares from the front of this enormodome. "We wanted to see if we could do it." Well, in terms of filling Wembley with sound and visuals, they manage admirably. On the other hand, the empty red seats dotted around the venue show that, in terms of packing them in, Feeder still aren't quite in the major league yet.
After muted support sets from Aqualung and The Cooper Temple Clause, neither of which suggest they will ever headline these kind of places, Feeder kick into 'Come Back Around' from behind a thin black curtain. The tone of the evening is set in this one song: Nicholas in his black suit, T-shirt and baseball boots personifies the chart-friendly face of indie; fellow long-server Taka Hirose bounces around like 'Zebedee' on speed; drummer Mark Richardson pounds his drums so hard he's in danger of falling through the floor; and an auxiliary guitarist keeps his head down, save for the occasional bounce. And the crowd sing back every word.
The curtain descends at the end of the opening track and the band continues through a set that mixes recent album 'Comfort In Sound' with choice excerpts from their back pages. The audience is predominately made up of teenagers who were drawn in by the hooks of the 'Echo Park' era, judging by the less vociferous reception given to tracks like 'Yesterday Went Too Soon' and even the late 90s radio staple 'High'.
Their adulation is reserved for the likes of 'Just The Way I'm Feeling' and the ludicrously poppy (and ludicrous lyrics of) 'Buck Rogers'. Nicholas takes advantage of his moment in the sun fully, continually gesturing for more applause or giving the thumbs up like the Macca-in-waiting he evidently wants to be. They even manage to pull off the darker recent songs like 'Forget About Tomorrow' and the slightly hackneyed but still affecting 'Moonshine'. But it's the splenetic likes of 'Seven Days In The Sun' and 'Just A Day' that most of the crowd have come to bounce around to, and a closing double whammy of both sends them home happy.
So, despite Nicholas' irritating mateyness and the schism between the almost adolescent feel of the 'Echo Park' era and the melancholy reflections of their current album, Feeder pretty much pull off their ascent from the small pond to the streams where the bigger fish swim. Whether they can pull off another album as affecting yet populist enough to consolidate their position is the challenge that awaits them now.
