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I'm looking for something that comes from the heart
(Daily Post (Liverpool) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) FOR most teenage boys, having one mum asking if they've done their homework and nagging them to tidy their bedroom is quite enough.
The Feeling frontman Dan Gillespie-Sells had double that number, as well as a hippy dad with a vast record collection.
"They weren't nagging types. I don't know if that's a rule, if that's not part of the lesbian way, lesbians don't nag, I don't know," laughs the 28-year-old, who is in Liverpool this week as a judge for Virgin Mobile's Road to V competition.
"I had an idyllic childhood. It was perfect, I can't imagine it being any other way really. They looked after me very well and I felt very loved.
"I really enjoyed being part of the lesbian and gay scene when I was growing up as well.
"My dad was a hippy taking me to Glastonbury and my mum was an activist taking me to Greenham Common and to Pride."
On one Pride march, Dan carried a banner saying "My mum's a lesbian and I love her". A press photographer snapped the family's picture and it appeared in national newspapers.
Years later, Dan was surprised to find it in a sociology textbook in the school library.
"I never got teased. I got teased a little bit later on when I was a slightly effeminate lad at school, but they never teased me because my parents were gay and they knew, I'm sure.
"My mum had dykey hair and drove a manly car and turned up in jeans to the school parents' evenings with another woman," laughs Dan, who is himself gay
"So it was obvious, but I think back then they didn't really know how to deal with it. I think it was more paralysis from the other kids and the other parents more than anything else.
"This was long before lesbian chic and Madonna."
While his mother was taking him to Pride marches, Dan's father was the one to inspire his musical side. He experienced his first Glastonbury Festival at the age of five and spent many happy hours working his way through his dad's vast record collection.
He had always imagined being a professional musician so, although The Feeling's success seemed to have come out of nowhere, he had a while to get used to the idea.
The band met at college and underwent several metamorphoses before settling on a name.
Within a very short time they went from entertainers on the ski circuit to a nationally renowned band achieving Top 10 hits with the singles I Love it When You Call and Sewn, while their debut album Twelve Stops And Home reached the number two spot.
"It's something that we knew could happen. We knew when it happened it was going to happen in that way. So we just carried on what we were doing regardless," says Dan.
"We enjoyed all of those years we were playing to a few hundred people in a pub in the Alps, every part of the process we enjoyed."
His own experience as a jobbing musician followed by international success - The Feeling have just returned from a US tour - makes him an ideal judge for Virgin Mobile's Road to V competition, which will lead to an unsigned band appearing at the V Festival later this summer.
The final 14 bands will play a series of heats, including two at Liverpool's Carling Academy tomorrow and Thursday "It involved commenting on bands and, being a bit of a big mouth myself, I thought it might suit me," says Dan.
"I think that Britain's really good at finding new acts and new talent. I think if you're doing anything half decent you'll get noticed in this country which is a good thing about Britain. Having come back from America you realise that that's a place where artists really do get lost.
"Considering I'm an artist who released an album in 2006, I'm so out of date with what's going on that I thought this would be quite a nice way of catching up and seeing what the kids are getting up to.
"I'll be looking for something which excites me, something which comes from the heart. That's the most important thing I look for in my own music when I'm making it. "
He will not be listening out for any particular style of music, he adds.
"I'm not really into styles. I kind of listen to music from all different genres. My record collection's like one of those really mad eclectic ones where people go 'What've you got an Aqua record for?' but then they go 'Oh, but you've got. . .'
"I don't really think that anything in music is that important. I'm not aware that I'm saving any lives when I'm making records, and it sometimes baffles me the amount of money musicians make compared with nurses and doctors, teachers and people who really do make a difference in people's lives."
Perhaps this is why The Feeling's brand of cheerful pop implies a lack of musical angst?
"Oh, I've got it," Dan disagrees cheerfully. "It's just the way I express it is in a less obvious way than just shouting. There's sorrow and there's joy and there's everything in my records, it's just not obvious.
"I think some of the greatest pop artists have got a lot of different elements to their writing, particularly lyrically. It's just expressed in a less obvious way than angry-therefore-minor - key, happy therefore major key and melodic."
Disappointingly, he gives little away about the cause of that angst: "Broken hearts and you know I was a therapy case for a while, but that's nothing we should go into now."
lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk
Copyright 2007 Liverpool Daily Post & Echo Ltd
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