He’s got pop star hair and a red zip-up pop star jacket, so it’s no surprise to find that Richard Jones’s West London home turns out to be the house of a pop star. Retro vending machines sit alongside state-of-the-art studio equipment, while a snooping Loyd Grossman would surely be alerted to the amusing ornaments that musicians buy when they’re passing through Tokyo.
Today, with Jones’s wife Sophie Ellis-Bextor in the studio working on her new album, the house is free for the Feeling — with whom he plays bass — to hold court. It must be a house built on pop, I suggest. Jones, who met Ellis-Bextor during a stint in her touring band, nods. “Well, clay, actually, although pop certainly helped pay for the rewiring.” As the radio ubiquity of the Feeling attests, it’s likely that pop will continue to maintain the House That Groovejet Built for the time being.
In a post-Scissor Sisters, post-Guilty Pleasures age, the Feeling couldn’t have timed their arrival better. The quintet’s adhesively catchy melodies and defiant referencing of 1970s MOR must cause further consternation for the Bobby Gillespies of this world — that deluded subsect of fans who deem 1978 memorable primarily for the fact that Funkadelic put out One Nation Under a Groove rather than, say, Andrew Gold’s release of Never Let Her Slip Away. The Feeling’s frontman may share his name with Primal Scream’s musically correct mouthpiece, but in every other respect Dan Gillespie-Sells, a polite, posh-voiced Londoner, is a very different creature. One cites the Black Panthers as a key influence, the other will hold forth about the tight compositional values of the Pink Panther theme song. Not the film theme, you understand — but its “rinky-dink” cartoon counterpart.
The Feeling’s new single, Sewn, offers conclusive evidence of Gillespie-Sells’s ability to create something like a pop truth drug from his cheap-rack record collection. If the happy-sad melody line hints at one Guilty Pleasure in particular, it’s the plinky-plonky minor chords of romantic longing that clinch it. Hands up who likes Supertramp? Three hands shoot up in the air. That’s three-fifths of the Feeling — and the other two (keyboard and guitar siblings Ciaran and Kevin Jeremiah) aren’t even here.
Despite a friendship that goes back a decade to when they all attended a music college in the capital, the Feeling say their big moment of Supertramp re-evaluation came five years ago, when they started playing together as a five-piece. They answered an advert in NME asking for a group to play covers to holidaying skiers, and moved to the French Alps for two seasons. “We were listening to French radio and it was non-stop Supertramp,” Gillespie-Sells says. “Of course, you know the songs, but hearing them when your are a bit older makes you appreciate them.”
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“We blagged our way over there,” Jones says. “We had been in bands, playing our own songs. We called the guy (who placed the ad) and told him we knew how to play about 50 songs – when actually we only knew about six. We just played him those six songs and luckily he didn’t ask for any more. All we needed to do was set about learning the other 44.”
It’s not quite as glamorous as two years tripping over drugs and prostitutes in Hamburg. Nevertheless the Feeling believe there are parallels between the Beatles’ German apprenticeship and their own baptism of, um, snow. “We all lived in one room,” recalls the drummer, Paul Stewart, “with two bunk beds next to each other and one bed on the floor in between. And we had to do two gigs a day, in two different venues. We had to go to one venue and set up, then play from five until seven. Then put it all in the van, then drive to another venue and set it all up again. Then play from eleven until one and we take it all apart again, before getting drunk and going to bed at three or four in the morning. Then get up at ten and go snowboarding. Actually, the fresh air was a good hangover cure.”
Gillespie-Sells isn’t the first songwriter to find his own voice through playing other people’s hits. Songs by the Kinks, A-ha, the Zombies, the Proclaimers and the Bangles escorted his song-writing development. Like Sting and Paddy McAloon before him, he says he learnt “the anatomy of a good pop song” while playing in France — and it shows. But none of his sound grasp of pop theory would matter if there wasn’t a deeper vein of inspiration at work.
If Gillespie-Sells is too shy to draw attention explicity to that inspiration, that’s hardly surprising. It’s precisely that shyness that lends much of the music its character. The recent single Fill My Little World is more moving for the sense that its singer may never summon the courage to declare his affections to the song’s subject. He’s single at the moment — as indeed he was when he wrote Never Be Lonely, a sweet sigh of yearning directed at a world that seems to love only lovers. “It’s about looking at people who are in a relationship when you’re not,” the singer confirms. “Sometimes you say to yourself, ‘Oh God, I don’t want to be in a relationship’. Then sometimes, you switch back and you go to yourself, ‘Oh my God — how can I not be in one?’ Depending on my situation, I can always sing half of that song with meaning. And, of course, there’ll always be someone in the audience who gets it.”
Perhaps so, although that hasn’t always been apparent. When you’re a non-indie band touring the indie toilets of Albion it can send out a confused signal to the world. “People see five musicians with guitars and drums and expect to hear indie music,” Jones reasons. “No one ever turned up to the Camden Barfly expecting to hear a band who aren’t scared to half-inch their harmonies from ELO.”
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As a self-invented mainstream act in a world of painstakingly marketed indie bands, the Feeling are aware of their own paradox. In apparent acknowledgement of their outsiderdom, Gillespie-Sells has written Strange — a sweet, karmic shrug of a song that goes: “People gonna shove you/People gonna love you/ People gonna do whatever makes them feel they own you.” It’s the quintet’s very own Que Sera Sera.
“These were the songs that came out once I’d stopped trying — the fun project. If you had told me all this was going to happen I’d have laughed and laughed.” As some other pop alchemist once put it, he’s started a joke that might get the whole world laughing.
The Feeling’s single Sewn is out on Feb 27 on Island; the band is on tour from Feb 10
Podcasting: what is it and how do you do it?
A couple of years ago podcasting was something that only geeks did. Today, however, it’s taking centre stage in internet broadcasting and you can now hear everything from a weekly show by Ricky Gervais to SwineCast — regular updates on and the pork industry.
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So what is it exactly? Well, very simply, podcasting is the delivery of audio content from a website to your computer and portable music player. Podcasts can be played on your computer or moved to a music player.
From today, Sounds and Times Online are introducing an exclusive series of free music podcasts. We kick off with music and conversation from this week’s cover band, the Feeling.
Visit www.timesonline.co.uk/podcasts to hear the band talk about their highly anticipated debut album, Twelve Stops and Home, due out later this year, and hear exclusive previews of tracks. There are also links to websites from which you can download the software you need to receive audio files.