For someone who, according to a Q & A session for the New Musical Express, sees hell as 'doing American radio acoustic sessions at 10 o'clock in the morning', Grant Nicholas should have been his grungiest self.
After all, it was just before noon - the usual wake-up time for the kingpin of British band Feeder, no doubt - but Nicholas had already been grilled several times by inquisitive journalists, with several more to go.
Instead, Nicholas, 32, was bubbly, amicable, if not downright jovial. Far from lamenting yet another photograph session that involved lying on a miniature golf-putting green and standing around empty swimming pools, he offered to workout on an exercise bicycle.
Unlike some of his more holier-than-thou peers, Nicholas was lapping up his press tour with good grace. Indeed, he could not keep himself from saying how coming to Asia would have been an 'unimaginable' feat two years ago. The band's ascension to stardom - hit singles, screaming fans, ever-inflating air miles - reached a zenith in 1999, a year marked by a chart-hugging sophomore album Yesterday Went Too Soon and an appearance before more than 60,000 people on New Year's Eve, supporting the Manic Street Preachers in Cardiff, Wales.
A refusal to conform is probably part of why they succeeded. Feeder's musical blend - riff-laden numbers about depression and woe - has never been a mix that caters to British musical tastes. The affinity their sound has with the dreary grunge movement in the United States - which manifested in their guitar-heavy debut album Polythene in 1997 - has surely affected their fortunes at home.
However, Nicholas saw no shortcomings in this association. 'I think it was very good for music like that to come along, as rock music is a little bit dead before grunge came along,' he said. However, he was confident that Feeder had more than your ordinary American garage band.
'Feeder is an indie-rock band who play power-pop songs, because obviously we have lots of very slow songs and a lot of bands, when put next to Feeder, don't have that side. We toured the US for nine months and played with some very good bands; but I found a lot of the bands were very one-dimensional. They have their sound and that's what they stuck to.
