Feeder // Birmingham, 2018 – Ben Hobson
As a thin 5’3” man, crowds aren’t generally my friend. But at the O2 Academy in Birmingham in 2018 for Feeder’s ‘Best Of’ tour, some very nice tall people had let me stand in front of them so I could see. However, that was about to change because ‘Buck Rogers’ had just begun. You know the one: “Brand new car, looks like a jaguar, leather seats, CD player player player…”. Yeah. That one.
It’s an oldie but a goodie and the next three minutes were electric—something about ‘Buck Rogers’ activates the inner madman in people. I couldn’t see a thing as utter chaos reigned supreme and people moshed like it was their last night on Earth. No feet remained on the ground as the earth itself quaked and the venue became a haven of sweat, noise and stray elbows. A song that was nigh-on 20 years old had turned this crowd—mostly in their mid-30s—into teens again. Only the special songs do that.
I ended up three rows back and blinded to the stage by those more vertically-gifted again, but I didn’t care. I had moshed to ‘Buck Rogers’ and survived. And minutes later, ‘Just a Day’ began, the only other song to provoke such a reaction. “Well”, I thought, “Here we go again.”