Music

Their singer and lead guitarist is a tweed-clad dandy from north London whose declared aim is to be ‘Karen Carpenter in Neil Young’s body wearing Freddie Mercury’s trousers’. Their bassist is married to Sophie Ellis-Bextor. Their guitarist and keyboardist are brothers and their drummer is a mate from school in Sussex. They’re all music-college types who learned their craft playing covers of ’80s power-pop faves (Buggles, Bangles, A-ha, etc) to pilled-up punters at an Alpine skiing resort. They’re called The Feeling and, judging by the blanket radio airplay (R1, R2, Xfm, Kerrang! etc) for their first two singles, this album should make them quietly enormous.

‘Twelve Stops And Home’ comprises 12 elegantly crafted, hook-laden AOR classics, invoking the pantheon of ’70s studio rock (Andrew Gold, 10cc, ELO, etc), which makes them the unwitting poster boys for Sean Rowley’s ‘Guilty Pleasures’ club. Where they part company with the likes of Scissor Sisters (with whom they share a pop savvy and a love of Todd Rundgren) and The Darkness (with whom they share impeccable muso credentials and a love of Queen) is that The Feeling refuse to place giant quotation marks around their music. Those sonic hallmarks of the best ’70s AOR – Supertramp-style Wurlitzer piano-pounding, decisive ‘Since You’ve Been Gone’-ish guitar crunching and cocaine-bloated West Coast vocal harmonies – are undercut by a down-at-heel lyrical sensibility – all bittersweet, quietly despairing romanticism set in grotty London flats. It’s underlined by the glottal stops and the Brett Anderson-ish mockneyisms of lead singer Dan Gillespie Sells, which enable The Feeling (unlike much-pilloried revivalists like San Francisco’s Jellyfish) to slip on to indie playlists by stealth. Indeed, you could see this album as a version of Britpop that might have inducted, say, Gilbert O’Sullivan and Gallagher & Lyle into its orthodox Beatles/Bowie/ Kinks/Jam hall of fame. And is all the richer for it.