By Aline Mahrud
WORTH A LOOK?: ***1/2
WHEN?: Friday 28 October, tour ended 31 October 2022
SETLIST: High Like You; There Is No Music; Fill My Little World; Never Be Lonely; Love People; Kettle’s On; Never Gave Up; Rosé; Helicopter; Video Killed The Radio Star; Everybody’s Talking About Jamie; This Was Me; Sewn; Join With Us; Love It When You Call; I Thought It Was Over; Leave Me Out Of It; Murder On The Dancefloor (both with Sophie Ellis Bextor); Fat Bottomed Girls
We’re here because we love lead singer Dan Gillespie Sells’ detour into musical theatre with Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and this show proves just how different we feel to most of this band’s fans.
- Read on for reasons including details about the songs Ellis Bextor duetted on with The Feeling during this gig
The 2006 debut album Twelve Stops and Home dominates their history and more than half of it appears in this set 16 years later and it is this nostalgia for it that seems to be the driving force behind much of the almost sold-out crowd here.
For us songs like the hits from it like Fill My Little World, Never Be Lonely and Love It When You Call are pleasant earworms but it’s a song like This Was Me, used to such devastating effect when sung by Holly Johnson in the Jamie film, that speaks to us most keenly about looking back on our youth with both fondness but also marvelling at how tough it was.
Buggles’ cover Video Killed The Radio Star is a fun choice and reminds of the band’s previous incarnation playing other people’s songs in a ski resort before they were famous.
1 of our favourite gigs of this year was Sophie Ellis Bextor’s Palladium jaunt back in March and it is with some delight that we note it is going to be released as a live album on 11 November 2022 and include Ellis Bextor’s covers of ABBA‘s Dancing Queen, Madonna’s Like A Prayer and Our House by Madness.
She’s married to The Feeling’s bassist Richard Jones and appears for 2 songs here towards the end of the show which prove the icing on a pleasingly baked cake.
For us the choice of Queen’s questionable Fat Bottomed Girls is a misstep and some of the music tonight has had the whiff of 70s prog rock that we don’t much enjoy but singer Sells holds it all together with an undeniable presence and charm and it is the pop nous of his most recent work for the theatre stage that we are most looking forward to hearing from him and his band again soon.
monstagigz 
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