The Feeling are five twentysomethings from Sussex and London who love pop music; great big no-nonsense, hook-filled, giant-chorused pop music. Music for the masses, only intelligent, with sunshine hooks and killer choruses that everyone can hum, from plumbers to professors.

Singer Dan Gillespie Sells, who admits to having had an indie phase once, says: "There are no guilty pleasures anymore. You're allowed to like Andrew Gold, ELO, Supertramp or 10cc. It's really liberating."

The Feeling are pop and proud. They're reclaiming the term.

Like The Raspberries or, more recently, Jellyfish or The New Radicals, The Feeling are premier exponents of prog pop meets nouveau soft-rock.

If there's a Lennon & McCartney - or rather, Becker-Fagen, Gouldman-Stewart, or Godley & Crème - in The Feeling, it's the hydra-headed Dan Gillespie Sells, who handles the music and the words. The band, they say, have to "wrestle the songs out of him."

As a Queen fan, Dan admits he doesn't just like "concise pop songs" - he's also a bit partial to "prog epics with ludicrous outros."

The Feeling, who are all between 25 and 27, are overnight sensations with a bit of a past, cutting their teeth as session musicians on a variety of mainstream and marginal recordings. They're all from Sussex, except Dan, who's from London. Paul, Kevin and Ciaran even went to the same school: Paul and Ciaran were in the same year. The Sussex axis of the band have been friends for 13 years. They met Dan and Richard at music college in Croydon 10 years ago, and they've been working together in various forms ever since.

Five years ago they went through their "Hamburg era" when they appeared for several seasons in the Alps as a covers band who specialised in versions of Rolling Stones, Kinks, Stevie Wonder and Beatles songs as well as rocked-up versions of '80s hits like "Take On Me" by A-ha, "Walk Like An Egyptian" by The Bangles and "Jump" by Van Halen: "Whatever got the crowd going."