Jeremy Williams, Deputy Arts Editor
Dan Gillespie-Sells: Still Feeling It
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When that debut record, Twelve Stops and Home, came out, the idea of still playing it two decades later would have been almost impossible to imagine. “When you’re young, trying to imagine like two years ahead is virtually impossible, let alone try and imagine what you’d be doing in 20 years,” Dan says.
And yet here he is — still making music, still touring and, perhaps most importantly, still finding audiences who know every word.
“I’m just very grateful to still be here and to still have an audience,” he says.
There’s something particularly lovely about the crowds The Feeling are seeing on this tour. Some fans are old enough to have bought the album when it first came out; others were barely old enough to remember it. Dan says they’ve even had people turning up who “must have been toddlers” when the record was released, singing along to every word.
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He reckons the explanation is pretty simple. The album was part of family life for a lot of people — played in the car, played at home, and absorbed by children who perhaps didn’t even realise they were listening to something that would stay with them for years.
For the anniversary shows, The Feeling aren’t just dipping into the old favourites, either. The album is being played from start to finish, exactly as it was released.
“It’s going to be the album as was released top to bottom,” Dan explains.
Having already completed one leg of the tour, he’s had the chance to see just how powerful that can be. There’s a familiarity to hearing the tracks in their original order, particularly for anyone who spent years listening to the CD that way.
“I think that the audience almost like knows when the next song’s coming and what the next track is,” he says. “They almost like feel it in their body.”
It’s that shared anticipation that makes the shows feel like more than just a nostalgia trip. There’s a sense of everyone collectively remembering where they were when they first heard the songs — and then getting to experience them all over again, together.
And while The Feeling remains a huge part of Dan’s life, his career has taken him in directions he could never have predicted when the band started. One of the biggest surprises has been musical theatre.
“I never thought I’d write musicals,” he admits. “That was not something that I thought was ever kind of a possibility.”
His background didn’t exactly make it seem like an obvious route, either. He went to a state school, then the BRIT School, before starting a band. Musical theatre composition wasn’t something he had grown up imagining himself doing.
But once he started digging into the art form, he became hooked. He began researching, discovering writers he loved and gradually deciding that he wanted to give it a proper go.
“I really wanted to roll my sleeves up and give it a go,” he says.
That willingness to try something completely different seems to be a recurring theme in Dan’s career. Even now, with two decades of The Feeling behind him, he’s not particularly interested in suggesting that everything has already been done.
The band have travelled the world, but there are still places they haven’t reached. South America is one obvious omission, while Japan is somewhere Dan would love to return to after playing festivals there more than a decade ago.
“We have travelled the world,” he says, “but I think there are some territories that we haven’t been to that we’d love to go to.”
There are practicalities, of course. There are five members of the band, along with children, families and all the other commitments that come with life. But Dan still feels there are plenty of things left to do — particularly when it comes to taking the music to new audiences.
And then there’s the album itself. Ask any fan to name their favourite track and you’ll probably get a different answer every time. For Dan, Sewn is an obvious contender, not least because it was the song that changed everything.
It was the first time he remembers hearing an audience sing back to him louder than he could hear himself.
“That was a real experience,” he says. “That was the song that kind of broke us and suddenly was like, wow, everyone was singing along.”
So it will always have a special place in his heart.
But there’s another song that means something different to him now: Strange. Listening back 20 years later, Dan can hear the person he was then in the writing.
“I think reflected who I was as a young man at the time,” he says. “And now I look back on that song and I go, that song says quite a lot about where I was at.”
He’s proud of it — and still loves it — but there’s also a recognition that he’s changed enormously since those songs were written.
“I’m a very different person now,” he says.
Perhaps that’s what makes a 20th-anniversary tour so interesting. It’s not simply about recreating the past. It’s about hearing old songs through new ears, sharing them with people who have carried them through different stages of their own lives, and seeing what they mean all these years later.
For Dan Gillespie-Sells and The Feeling, 20 years on, the songs are still there. And, judging by the audiences singing every word, so is the feeling.
Tour Dates:
3-Nov-26 Portsmouth The Gaiety
4-Nov-26 Liverpool O2 Academy
5-Nov-26 Cardiff Tramshed
6-Nov-26 Oxford O2 Academy
7-Nov-26 Bournemouth O2 Academy
11-Nov-26 Eastbourne Winter Gardens
12-Nov-26 Margate Drill Shed
14-Nov-26 Frome Cheese & Grain
15-Nov-26 Torquay Arena
18-Nov-26 Lincoln The Drill
19-Nov-26 Shrewsbury Buttermarket
20-Nov-26 Middlesbrough The Empire
25-Nov-26 Carlisle The Old Fire Station
26-Nov-26 Coventry Empire
27-Nov-26 Northampton Roadmender
Tickets available HERE.