A Real Winner

Just as everyone started wondering what happened to the girl who won X-Factor last year – Leona Lewis started belting out her hits.

They knew they were onto something with this one which is why after her obligatory Christmas number one they snatched her away to the States without releasing record after record of cover singles which may well have seen her go from no.1 to no.5 to no.47 to disappearing without a trace like many of her reality TV predecessors.

No, with Leona, Mr Cowell knew she deserved a bit more work and now here she is following up her cracking number one single with a record-breaking album almost a year after the hype. Will Mr Cowell and Miss Lewis please take a bow – that is a feat to be proud of. So, the album. Does it bring back memories of Mariah Carey’s early days? Does it come close to any of Christina Aguilera’s albums? On first listen, after much hype the album was disappointing.

It’s much more accomplished than any other quickly produced reality TV hit makers. They took their time and rightfully so. Incredibly and wisely there are only two covers on the whole album and neither of them Mariah or Whitney; her original debut cover of Kelly Clarkson’s A moment like this and a beautifully sung, unobvious choice for a second cover - The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. So, well done on that front.

But alas here’s the rub. The first song, the dubiously titled no.1 Bleeding Love - was a great song for Leona to hit our radios with and its woeful ‘You left me, I’m sad, I’ll be ok(ish)’ theme resonated with all the heartbroken loners out there.

The problem comes, however, when song 2 is about the same thing and then song 3.By the time song 4 starts thoughts of ‘OK, I get it –he’s a bastard’ start raging through your mind. Leona sings each and every one superbly – there really is no doubting her phenomenal voice. But, it seems the songwriters in LA went on strike as well as the scriptwriters. Horrendous cliché lines of ‘shelter from the storm’ and then ‘make it through the (wait we’ve done storm what’s the other one oh I know) rain,’ make you wonder if it was really worth jetting off to LA to work on that album.Our shamefully poor British pop song writers who wrote Shane Ward’s horrendous follow ups could have done a better job.