Feeder to Join The Darkness on Seven UK Arena Dates This December

The Darkness have confirmed Feeder as special guests on their UK arena run this December, with A also on the bill. Seven dates are planned, all at arena scale, which is not a setting Feeder have regularly occupied as a support act.

The more interesting detail is what they intend to play. Feeder’s set will focus on Polythene, the 1997 debut that arrived before the band’s commercial peak, when their guitars were heavier and their outlook gloomier. It has aged into a useful document of late nineties British guitar music, and playing it in arenas reframes it as a body of work rather than a cue for nostalgia.

The pairing is legible. The Darkness deal in theatrical hard rock, Feeder in a quieter, more melodic strain of the same national tradition, and both have spent two decades working in a landscape that stopped rewarding guitar bands the way it once did. Arena bills now carry a certain weight of accumulated history, whoever is on them.

The run comes behind a new Darkness album, and the tour is being presented as a return to something more exposed after years of playing the hits with a wink. Feeder, for their part, get the rarer proposition: a debut album performed at a scale the band only reached afterwards.