Things have going remarkably well for the Feeling, as keyboadist/vocalist Ciaran Jeremiah slowly adjusts to trampsing around the world from country after country. Right now he’s high up in the hills of Los Angeles, with America currently undergoing a heatwave of epic proportions.

The Feeling have been generating enough heat all on their lonesome – they’ve divided opinion as to their relative worth, generating both love and hate, but nothing in between. Ciaran admits that he himself are unsure as to what they’re doing right, or wrong. “We’re doing something that’s maybe quite different from what the majority of bands are doing in the UK at present,” he guesses. “We’re just making music that we naturally like to make because it makes us happy to hear it. I think we’re not being false in terms of the music that we’re playing, and if you set out to make a certain style of music that isn’t necessarily what you enjoy or what you naturally make then that’s going to be fake and we wouldn’t want to be fake and that’s just how it works.”

The main influences of the band are relatively diverse, as tends to happen when you have five members in the band, with Ciaran explaining that it’s tricky to define it as one particular sound or group. “We were influenced by a lot of different things, from people like David Bowie to 10CC to Supertramp to Paul Simon,” he explains. “Basically we’re big fans of classic radio pop material, and that might date back to the Beatles and the Beach Boys to more recent stuff like Pulp or Radiohead. The more traditional stuff and not the manufactured stuff that’s classified as ‘pop’ these days.”

Part of the reason, perhaps, that the Feeling have been slated by certain British press is that the rhythm section of Richard Jones and Paul Stewart have worked previously with Sophie-Ellis Bextor – Richard is now married to her. “He was actually working with her first before they got married,” he says, “and that was a few years ago now.”

So perhaps that’s part of the reason why people have a certain opinion regarding the Feeling; as they’re not prepared to take the band on face value but judge them by past associations. “I think basically the thing that comes up in lots of interviews is that it seems that maybe the fact that we have worked as session musicians some people frown upon that,” Ciaran explains, “and think that we’re not a real band and we don’t believe in our own music, which is certainly not the case. They forget that people like Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix were session musicians, and people seem to think that having a session musician past is something to be frowned upon, but obviously I don’t believe that is the case.”

The songwriting process works for the band in a number of different ways. Many of the songs on the band’s debut album Twelve Stops and Home were written by Sells, demoed, then brought in to the band to work on from there. From there, the band had cart blanch to change them in various ways by adding new parts or adjusting the arrangements, and develop them between all five. “More recently we’ve jammed ideas that have become songs further down the line,” he says of recent songwriting efforts. “There’s numerous different ways, but who knows if in the future it could work another way entirely as it’s something we’re very open to.”

The Feeling have a fabulous quote in their bio – ‘soft rock is the new punk rock and the Feeling are the Sex Pistols’. “That was quite funny; it was quite an original quote and I can’t remember who came out with it,” he says. “Obviously punk was a reaction to all the music that was around at the time, and it was very, very different, and then it became a massive scene in itself. I’m not trying to liken us to that and we’re going to start a massive scene where there’ll be loads of bands doing a similar sort of thing, but I suppose it is quite, quite different to a lot of stuff going on at the moment, and a lot of the material out there at the moment is very influenced by punk and because we’re almost the opposite to that that’s why that statement was made. I see what they meant by it.”

It does position the band as being the zeitgeist of a new movement. “Who’s to know if that’s going to be the case?” Ciaran shrugs. “I don’t know if it would be, but I suppose it is suggesting that in a way, which is quite flattering to be honest.”

He explains that he doesn’t believe that there has yet to be a traditional pop songwriting movement developing in the UK, despite the fact that some would argue that Coldplay spawned exactly that, with groups like Keane, Snow Patrol and, indeed, the Feeling emerging in their wake. “There’s other bands that haven’t necessarily been signed who are doing a similar thing in terms of their influences and the sort of song structures and that, but I don’t know if it’s a big scene, and certainly not one that I’m aware of.”

He explains that the sort of music they play ties back to their influences, and the music that they grew up listening to and the music their parents played. “Once you get into bands…it leads you to other bands and so on and so forth, and we’re big fans of bands that had their own interesting melodic pop songs and arrangements – harmonies going on, and quite complex harmonies, and that’s maybe something to aspire to in a way because it’s interesting to listen to. It’s not that we do it consciously but the music that you find interesting to listen to is bound to influence your own songwriting because you’re going to want to achieve in creating something that you find interesting.”

The Feeling’s Twelve Stops and Home is out now, with the band currently touring the east coast. Dates:
Monday 7 August – Gaelic Theatre, Sydney
Tuesday 8 August – Prince of Wales, Melbourne