If he’s any compassion at all, any empathy for the common man tuning into breakfast time FM radio stations across the land, then Mr Gillespie-Sells (or whatever), father of The Feeling singer Dan, must now be wishing he’d elected to masturbate_ that_ night. Had he known then that the product of his life-bringing man soup would turn into the mouthpiece of the most intolerable purveyors of beyond-bland contemporary AOR since 10cc, then surely he’d have immediately reconsidered his position, shuffled away from his wife and leapt into a cold shower. Anything, anything, to prevent this.

Since he experienced no premonitions of what was to come, received no visitations by the appropriate harbingers, then we all must tolerate this, the latest (mercifully) short-play slice of dangerously inoffensive soft-rock from The Feeling. The band are “pop and proud” according to their slickly underwhelming website, yet their label categorises them as rock/alternative at their homepage (The Ordinary Boys must be peeved by comparison, seeing as they’re firmly in the pop camp at Universal HQ). Yet even the most broad-minded of music critic would struggle to qualify this dross as either, while the average man on the street, unless he’s taken absolute leave of both his senses and taste, would do well not to utter an obscenity under his breath upon being exposed to this tribute to all the Seventies acts even your parents refuse to acknowledge existed.

Universal should consider adding another category to their drop-down box of genre pigeonholes: ‘unnecessary shit’. Really, why anybody would wish to spend a few minutes of their life in the company of ‘Never Be Lonely’ is so beyond my sphere of comprehension that it’s a wonder I’ve penned so many words at this point; that I’ve more to add isn’t a reflection of any hidden qualities within this single, this soul-sapping excuse for a creation of affecting artistry that should in any fair and just world be fired from Earth and into the clouds of Jupiter. These are words of warning, the essential heads-up that the previously uninitiated will thank me for later.

You’re at home, around the breakfast table, waiting for your toast to pop up; a cup of tea’s already steaming in your left hand as your right reaches for the radio. STOP.

You’re in the car, reclining at the first red light of your to-work journey. You wonder if there’s any news on the traffic a little further down the line, so you focus your attention on the dash-housed receiver, looking to tune it into the local FM radio station. STOP.

You’re on your lunch break, taking a stroll in the pitiful excuse for a park that sits just west of the business estate you call home for the best part of five days a week. You’ve had a morning of frustrating phone calls, headache-inducing meetings with middle-management retards dropping stupid lines like ‘think outside the box’, and all you want to do is escape this reality for five minutes. You go to switch on the tiny pocket radio that you took from your drawer a few moments earlier. STOP.

You… oh, you get the idea. Basically, keep your radios tuned to the sound of silence for, say, a month or so and you just might escape this; those already exposed, I’m sorry but these warnings can’t save you. That little piece of hope you’d stored for the resurgence of popular music as a force for good has died, and there’s no bringing it back while acts like The Feeling sell enough albums to break the top 40. There’s no salvation in sight so long as these manufacturers of the utmost banality, of what’s deemed pop only in the very bowels of Hell, are still at large. Bashing at a keyboard like a child after a Chupa Chup too many does not make you ELO, let alone ELP. Squealing, like some whiney pre-teen whose daddy won’t get her another pony, lyrics about people in love, and how great they are, does not afford you the privilege of connecting with the hearts of the public. Claiming that you’re_ "proud"_ of this fucking terrifyingly awful assimilation of the miserable work of a dozen perpetrators of God-awful slush-rock is like stating you’re entirely confident of Saddam Hussain’s ability to run a cafeteria at a Kurdish refugee centre, circa 1987-88.

The Feeling’s existence is a lesson to boring wankers everywhere: keep it in the tissue, please, or else we’ll be battling an army of these fucking bollock-less fairies in twenty years. Dan’s dad, a written apology, please. Dan, your heart and soul FedEx-ed to the office by Monday, if you don’t mind.

What do you mean you can’t find them…?