The Feeling

The Feeling, a British quintet, draws substantial inspiration from the lush harmonies and melodic contours of 1970s soft rock. Its members are vocalist/guitarist Dan Gillespie-Sells, formerly of the Scottish pop/rock band Speedway, bassist Richard Jones, guitarist Kevin Jeremiah, keyboardist Ciaran Jeremiah, and drummer Paul Stewart.

All five musicians had studied at the Brit School of Performing Arts in Croydon, where they first crossed paths in 1995. They subsequently worked together as Super Fly, the resident cover band at La Tania Ski Resort in the French Alps. Upon deciding to pursue original material in the vein of classic rock, the group returned to Britain in 2004, adopted the name the Feeling, and secured a recording contract within a month.

Island Records backed their meticulously crafted debut Twelve Stops and Home, issued in the U.K. in June 2006. The album spawned three Top Ten U.K. singles—“Sewn,” “Fill My Little World,” and “Never Be Lonely”—and received a Brit Award nomination. Cherry Tree/Interscope reissued it the next year in America with new artwork and a revised track order. Domestic success continued unabated, and the follow-up Join with Us debuted at number one on the U.K. charts in February 2008.

Together We Were Made, the third album, reached number 22 in the U.K. upon its 2011 release and included guest appearances by Róisín Murphy and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, wife of Richard Jones. Later that year the band collected all eleven singles from their first three studio albums on Singles: 2006-2011. Two years afterward came Boy Cried Wolf, their fourth studio set, which explored the end of Dan Gillespie-Sells’ five-year relationship. Though chart success was modest, the record earned favorable reviews.

Partially financed through crowdfunding, the 2016 self-titled album was recorded live in the studio across ten days to convey the immediacy of the band’s concerts. “Wicked Heart” appeared as its single, and the project was released on the group’s own Little World label. Following a supporting tour, the Feeling entered a brief hiatus and performed only sporadically thereafter. In the interim, Dan Gillespie-Sells teamed with dramatist Tom McRae to compose the score for Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, which opened in Sheffield in 2017. The stage musical earned an Olivier nomination and was adapted into a 2021 film for which the pair supplied additional songs, including “This Was Me,” issued as a single by the Feeling in September 2021.

Loss. Hope. Love., the sixth studio album, arrived in May 2022 and marked the band’s final release for Island. October 2023 brought Live in London on Little World, capturing a late-2022 performance at Shepherd’s Bush Empire whose encore featured Sophie Ellis-Bextor reprising her role on “Leave Me Out of It.” Sessions for the seventh studio album took place in San Vito Dei Normanni, a town in Puglia, southern Italy. The resulting San Vito appeared in April 2024 and included the pedal steel-drenched, Americana-tinged single “I Won’t Sleep Tonight” with guest vocals from Lucie Silvas.