Tim: A good five months earlier than typical, here’s last year’s X Factor winner with her first proper song.
Tim: Why so early, you may be wondering
Tom: When someone wins the popular vote every single week, the record company’s wanting to make their money so quickly?
Tim: Well, there’s that, but there’s another biggie: she’s never going to appeal to teenagers, however much of a makeover she gets. The next best thing, therefore, is female, mid-30s plus. Of utmost importance, then, is to get something out there for the single most important day of the year: Mother’s Day.
Tom: Oh. Oh, that makes sense.
Tim: Yes – first track out now, you’ll have your album of covers well on the way to being wrapped up at the end of March.
Tom: And promptly there’s a number 1 album on the charts.
Tim: This, a cover of a song originally by Norway’s Didrik Solli-Tangen, of 20th-at-Eurovision-2010 notability, sits perfectly on it.
Tom: I still say he was robbed.
Tim: Absolutely – for a start, at thirty-six seconds I think he’s set the Eurovision record for a steadicam shot.
This, in remarkable contrast, is dull, and tedious, and sung with far more emotion that it could possibly warrant, but it’ll get countless dads looking at it in Asda and thinking “yeah, she’d love it if our son gave that to her”. And that, after all, is what counts.
Tom: That’s entirely cynical and entirely right. To be fair, I don’t think I can call it “dull and tedious”: it’s a by-the-numbers love song and it’ll sit in the background, but with that much big-voice it’s probably going to be the first-dance song at a couple of weddings in a couple of years’ time.