If there’s a better single released than The Feeling’s ‘Sewn’ this year, it’s going to be taken from Twelve Stops and Home, the soft rock revivalist’s very own debut album. It’s not just that each and every one of the 12 tracks appear to be potential singles, it’s that the CD sounds less like a first effort and more like a greatest hits package. No wonder they had “Slash Music’s finger poised over the ‘best new band in Britain’ alarm” when the Channel 4 music Web site reviewed their March 7^th show at London’s celebrated 100 Club.

The chief architect of this magnum opus is The Feeling’s singer/songwriter/guitarist, the improbably-monikered Dan Gillespie Sells. An artist who urges audiences at the band’s shows to “embrace the cheese”. A man who’d “like to be Karen Carpenter in Neil Young's body. With Freddie Mercury's trousers." Yet who instead resembles, physically at least, a post-Atkins-diet Tony Hadley.

Gillespie Sells, who has, when you come to think of it, the perfect name for University Challenge is backed by Richard Jones on bass, guitarist Kevin Jeremiah, Ciaran Jeremiah on keyboards, and drummer Paul Stewart. The soon-to-be-famous five met at the Brit School of Performing Arts in Croydon, an institution that also gave birth to Athlete and the Kooks. Answering an ad, they worked for a number of seasons as a covers band in the French Alps, playing rockier versions of the likes of A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’ and ‘Jump’ by Van Halen.

Although when they quit their jobs as après-ski entertainers The Feeling swore they’d never play another cover, it’s a promise they only half keep on Twelve Stops And Home. For instance ‘Love It When You Call’, one of a number of examples, sounds like a speeded-up ‘I Want It All’. No surprises then that Gillespie Sells describes himself as a massive Queen fan.