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The Feelers: Feeling Their Way To Success

© Anne-Marie de Bruin

The Feelers are a band who are currently riding high in the New Zealand music charts. The band, originally from Christchurch, did well with the singles "Pressure Man", and "Supersystem" and have continued their success with a No. 1 album also entitled "Supersystem."

The Feelers are James Reid (vocals/guitar), Matt Thomas (bass) and Hamish Gee (drums.) Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Hamish about the band's success, their upcoming overseas trip with Matchbox 20 and just why they'll never be Australian. Oh yeah... and I also asked Hamish about something known as a Feelers backlash...

You've got some gigs coming up with Matchbox 20 in Australia are you looking forward to it?

"Really looking forward to it, because they get lots of kids to their gigs. We're doing a couple of shows in Sydney and they get 15,000 people to each gig- it's crazy."

Did you play to that amount of people last time you were over there?

"I think there were about 4000 people at most of the gigs last time. But they've gone off over there- they're heaps bigger there then they are here- there's 18,000 people going to their shows in Melbourne I think so those will be the biggest crowds we've ever played."

I heard you guys playing the acoustic set you did for National Radio, so to use a cliched phrase, do you like being plugged or unplugged better?

"As a band we like playing with all our instruments but I kind of like playing unplugged because I get to play the guitar, and I love that because normally I'm playing the drums. We're doing an acoustic thing where me and James play guitars and I kind of like it because I get to do something different, but it's fun both ways. I guess the most exciting thing is doing a gig with full instrumentation, with lots of people dancing and jumping around and stuff."

That sounds exciting and you must be equally excited about your album being No. 1?

"It's pretty exciting, we didn't know it would do that well. We were really happy with it because we thought it sounded good and all our friends thought so but we didn't know that everyone else would think was."

But along with the excitement, there seems to have been a bit in the press about there being a Feelers backlash. However, I'd never heard anything about that until I read an interview with James in the Sunday Star-Times. So is it sort of an exaggeration about how much of a backlash there actually is?

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