Lewis since moved to Island Records, where the promotion of her new album has been infused with negativity. Watch Leona Lewis’s One More Sleep – videoĬhristmas, With Love, which came out in 2013, was her last album for Syco, and the whole situation reeked of gritted-teeth contract fulfilment. Even attempts at injecting some personality into her performances mostly backfired, with this version of the excellent One More Sleep on The X Factor coming across like a breakdown at an office Christmas party. In a pop world of Mileys and Rihannas, Leona Lewis feels like that strait-laced older cousin who’d dob you in to your parents if she caught you smoking. “I’m a whole lot of trouble,” trills the chorus, which is quite a stretch for a singer whose public persona is so safe and restrained. Trouble also epitomised Leona’s other problem: her flawless personality. Leona’s name was trotted out every time anyone dared suggest The X Factor doesn’t produce global stars, which must have made One Direction’s globe-straddling dominance something of a relief. While her lead single Trouble was a top 10 hit in the UK, the album was never released in the US, and the campaign stalled following Lovebird’s inability to make the top 40. Echo sent her on a UK arena tour, but it felt like it was happening off the back of that one single.īy the time Glassheart came out in 2012, the gap between the “global superstar” tag The X Factor rolled out every year and Lewis’s actual position in the pop galaxy was so vast you could have fitted Simon Cowell’s ego in it. Leona’s Happy, however, was just a poor man’s Bleeding Love, a message to the casual, one-album-a-year brigade that they needn’t bother with the new record because it’s more or less the same as the one they’ve already got. With Spears, however, the pop mimicry was obvious but the new song was just as great as Baby One More Time. Britney Spears attempted to follow the career-defining Baby One More Time with the lead single from her second album by essentially remaking it in the form of Oops! … I Did It Again. It didn’t help when she tried to replicate its success with Happy, the lead single from her second album, Echo. While subsequent singles from Spirit performed well in the UK, it remains her only US top 10 hit, and its ubiquity has haunted her ever since. In fact, Lewis should have retired the day it came out. But how do you follow such a blockbuster hit? Well, you don’t. From its church organ intro to that booming, relatable chorus, Bleeding Love’s perfection is undiminished. So what went wrong? Let’s start with Bleeding Love, one of the greatest, most immaculate songs of the past 20 years. Watch Leona Lewis’s Fire Under My Feet – video Since Bleeding Love, it’s been a case of ever-diminishing returns for Lewis, with her new single, Fire Under My Feet – the first to be taken from her forthcoming fifth album, I Am, and the first released outside of her contract with Syco – limping into the charts at No 51. The X Factor was suddenly responsible for a legitimate global phenomenon, cementing its reason for being – and saddling Lewis with a curse she’s never quite shaken off. Her subsequent album, Spirit, became the fastest-selling debut album of all time in the UK going on to sell more than 3m copies in Britain and 8m worldwide. Then something amazing happened: her potential was transformed into actual stardom.īy the end of 2007, Lewis was, as her press releases still maintain, a global superstar: her debut single Bleeding Love topped the charts in 35 countries, including the US, where it sold 4m copies, and it was the biggest-selling single of 2007 in the UK. So when Lewis, an office assistant from east London, was crowned the winner in 2006, it looked as if she and her impeccable voice would become nothing more than the Argos alternative to Mariah Carey. While they both achieved moderate success in Britain, their chances of cracking the US seemed about as likely as Sharon Osbourne having a nice word to say about Dannii Minogue.
#Leona lewis album series
Launched in the UK by Simon Cowell in 2004, the first two series produced barely serviceable winners in the shape of Steve Brookstein, a sort of Michael Bublé for the Pizza Express touring circuit, and a low-cost Justin Timberlake in the form of Shayne Ward. Leona Lewis has, in many ways, single-handedly turned The X Factor into a global concern.