Feeder have been around for years, but suddenly find themselves one of the bands of the moment. Singer Grant Nicholas tells Brian Boyd how these undedicated followers of fashion find being flavour of the month leaves them with a weird taste in their mouths'IT'S BEEN A VERY SLOW BUILD'

'It used to be Smashing Pumpkins and now it's Snow Patrol," says Feeder's Grant Nicholas, as near to exasperated as the laid-back singer/guitarist will ever come. He's talking about who his band are supposed to sound like and busy puzzling out how Feeder have travelled the musical distance from the former to the latter. "People like to forget that we formed in 1992 - we've seen it all - we were originally the 'British Pumpkins', then we got ignored by that Britpop scene and now we're supposed to sound like bands who weren't even formed when we were releasing albums and touring around everywhere. I think people have got this the wrong way around," he says.

Standing on the platform of Paddington train station in London, ready to board the train to Cardiff for a Millennium Stadium Tsunami benefit, Nicholas is picking holes in the advance reviews of Feeder's fifth, and best, album.

"The reviews have been great across the board, but I wonder how many of the previous four albums these people have listened to. It's not like we've suddenly arrived with these songs, it's been a very slow build. These days, if nothing happens immediately, you're just dropped - but we're the other side of that coin."

It's been a funny old rock 'n' roll world for Feeder. Originally a metal band, Nicholas, bass player Taka Hirose and drummer Jon Lee were a Welsh-Japanese trio who sold steadily over the years. With the last few albums going top 10, and singles doing similarly, they have managed to hold on to their original fanbase while adding new swathes with each new recorded work. In some quarters they are still best known for the massive hit Buck Rogers, a song of which Nicholas now admits: "I didn't even write that for Feeder, I wrote it for an American band. It was supposed to be a funny song, but people didn't take it that way - now it's like Blur's Song 2 or something." Nevertheless, the song went top five, as did the album, Echo Park, and Feeder looked like taking the next step up until the death of their drummer, Jon Lee, in January 2002.

"We had so much guilt about carrying on without him. It took a lot of time. I remember writing a whole bunch of songs with no intention of bringing them out, but then we released the Comfort In Sound album and it was during the tour of the record that things came together again. I'm not sure if we rushed back or not, but I am sure that this new album is us as Feeder again. We got in a drummer called Mark Richardson, who used to play with Skunk Anansie, and he did the tour with us. He's a great rock drummer, I'd put him up there with David Grohl and he's now a full-time member, mainly because I wanted Feeder to be a band again and feel like a band again."

Recorded at Dave Stewart's studio and produced by the man who twiddled for the Pixies - Gill Norton - Pushing The Senses has an epic rock sound and is as heartfelt and lush as they come. The first single, the slow and intense Tumble And Fall, is a fair indication of where the band have moved to sonically. "It was the most enjoyable album to make since our very first one," says Nicholas. "There was positive pressure on us in that the last album did really well, so we knew we had to make this one better. Everyone is saying it's the most melodic thing we've ever done and that's probably because it was written on either acoustic guitar or piano. The composition of the songs is totally different in that you're building them up from a different starting point. The other big change is the vocals on the album.

"I never really wanted to be a singer, just never really felt that comfortable with it. In the early days, with the louder sound we had, it was easy because I could bury my voice under all the guitars. But these songs called for a different type of vocal and I just thought 'fuck it, this is what I sound like', so I took it from there. It's all part of the changing process - if the songs sound different, then the vocals have to change also."

Oddly, or maybe not, the album should have been produced by Brian Eno. It looked like Gill Norton wouldn't have the time to do it, and Eno was lined up to replace him, but at the last moment, Norton became available. Feeder are now the only band Norton has made three albums with - apart from The Pixies.

"Despite what people are saying about the album, we're still a rock band," he says. "There're still big guitars on this, it's just that it's a smoother journey than before. The songs flow better, it's more stripped down. It's not as heavy as before, but that's because we've already done the 'turn it up to 11' thing. I couldn't write the songs that were on the first album again, that would be fake. And it's strange for us, after all this time, to be described as 'a songs band', but I suppose that's the way it is."

As much, though, as people are pushing Feeder into the same camp as Coldplay, Snow Patrol and Keane, Nicholas keeps demurring: "First, we've been doing it much longer than any of these bands. Anyway, we've never been a scene band. People told us that our timing was wrong during the Britpop years, but we carried on anyway. I mean, that would have meant us making our last album to sound just like The Strokes or somebody. The problem with being part of a scene is that you can get left behind very quickly - you will see that with this Art-Rock thing going on. I've heard a lot of it before with bands such as Talking Heads and Gang Of Four. Many of these new bands will find it hard to transfer their sound on to the live stage, but the good ones will survive. Being perceived as a 'scene' band never helps a band."

Nevertheless, the new Feeder sound - epic, heartfelt and widescreen with elegantly constructed songs - is a right time, right place affair, building on the sound first patented by The Verve, refined by Coldplay and put to considerable commercial use by Snow Patrol. There's more of that sound to come courtesy of Athlete and Thirteen Senses.

"It's a move to return to the song over the image," says Nicholas. "Which is why Keane and Snow Patrol did so well last year. I remember seeing Keane play years ago and they couldn't get signed - and they were playing the songs that are now huge hits, so a lot of this is just how the industry works in terms of who gets signed and pushed and who doesn't. The only real problem I can see, speaking as someone who has been in a band a long time and seen many movements come and go, is that having a huge album early on can make things difficult. It took us a long time to get anywhere, and at times the only reason we kept going on was the belief that each album was better than the last. It sounds bizarre, but it does make you a better band. We never had the massive breakthrough album, it's all been step by step."

Pushing The Senses is a total anomaly in that it comes in at under 40 minutes and only contains 10 tracks. This, though, was a deliberate "get back to the ethos of vinyl" tactic on the band's part. "Albums are far too long these days," Nicholas says. "You've got stuff out there which has 16, 17 tracks. You can't do it on a CD, but we really wanted this album to have the feel of five songs on one side and five songs on the other. We only did record 15 songs for this album, and the ones that aren't on the album we'll use for B-sides, or, as is more the case these days, we'll make them available for downloads."

Although never hugely successful in the US, the band have just switched labels over there and there is already talk of this album being the one to make an impression for them. For Nicholas, though, it may be too late: "We're already committed to a UK/Ireland tour, then an European one and then we're in Japan and then in Australia. It comes to the stage when you have to decide if you want to put in the long tours for the US, and we're still not sure."

He doesn't expect any fall-out from early fans who preferred the rougher, more hard rock inclined Feeder sound as opposed to the songs on this album, which are already picking up high rotation play on MTV. "This is us developing and that's what bands are supposed to do. This is how we sound now, but we will still always play stuff from the early albums and I think most people will be able to appreciate both phases. But I really don't think it's the case that we sound totally different - I think it's more to do with the fact that the rest of the musical world is finally catching up with us."

Pushing The Senses is on the Echo label. Feeder play the Ulster Hall, Belfast on March 22nd and The Olympia, Dublin, on March 23rd.