Downstairs at the Academy, new wave iconoclasts Wire are plying their vintage wares to an audience of aging punks. Upstairs Welsh grunge-poppers Feeder are running some sort of crèche for their college-aged children.
Rock ‘n’ roll really does now cross the generations, and the assembled teens don’t mind if what they’re hearing is a reheated version of the musical dinner their older relatives ate two decades earlier. As the crowd chant “Feeder! Feeder! Feeder!”, Grant Nicholas and his team of merry rockers expertly bang out infinite varieties of the same riff, using a template invented by the Pixies and popularised by Nirvana (quiet bit, loud bit, quiet bit), but with a pop star voice cutting through it all instead of the more edgy vocalisations that formerly accompanied such riffery. There are other key differences. Unlike the aforementioned bands, hesitant optimism permeates Feeder’s lyrics instead of troubled angst, and generational solidarity replaces Dadist weirdness (“I think we’re going to make it!” sings Nicholas on ‘Buck Rogers’, sounding like a man unlikely to revel in the knifing of canine eyeballs, Pixies-style).
Such sentiments coupled with rousing riffery creates what psychologists and pick-up-artists call “rapport” and soon most of the audience are waving their arms in the air, quaffing beer and singing along in an animated fashion. By the time the encore rolls around and the quartet are playing ‘Just A Day’, some sections of the audience are recreating the band’s fan-made video for that song with idiosyncratic dance patterns and syncopated tomfoolery. Quite touching really. Then their parents came up from the Wire gig to collect them, as did Feeder’s roadies.