Leona Lewis has, in many ways, single-handedly turned The X Factor into a global concern. 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. 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. 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. Then something amazing happened: her potential was transformed into actual stardom.
By 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. 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. 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. 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.
So what went wrong? Let’s start with Bleeding Love, one of the greatest, most immaculate songs of the past 20 years. From its church organ intro to that booming, relatable chorus, Bleeding Love’s perfection is undiminished. But how do you follow such a blockbuster hit? Well, you don’t. In fact, Lewis should have retired the day it came out. 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.
It didn’t help when she tried to replicate its success with Happy, the lead single from her second album, Echo. 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. With Spears, however, the pop mimicry was obvious but the new song was just as great as Baby One More Time. 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. Echo sent her on a UK arena tour, but it felt like it was happening off the back of that one single.
By 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. 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.
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. Trouble also epitomised Leona’s other problem: her flawless personality. “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. 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. 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.
Christmas, With Love, which came out in 2013, was her last album for Syco, and the whole situation reeked of gritted-teeth contract fulfilment. Lewis since moved to Island Records, where the promotion of her new album has been infused with negativity. Early leaks to the tabloids from well-placed sources talked about how the title track is allegedly a stinging attack on Cowell and how free she is from the shackles of Syco (“I am breathing without you / I am somebody without you / I am free without you / I am stronger without you”). While the emotions are likely to be about another relationship altogether, the message it sends out to those who still connect Leona to The X Factor, and who don’t follow the ins and outs of a career, is one of “singer turns on the man who made her famous”. That alone is a huge hurdle to overcome when you’ve slipped from pop’s A-list.
Haunting the whole scenario, however, is the simple fact that Fire Under My Feet isn’t strong enough to make its mark in today’s overcrowded pop market. According to the website Compare My Radio, BBC Radio 1 have only played it twice in the past month, while YouTube views for the video are under 2m. It’s also hard to shake the fact that it sounded better when Adele did it as Rolling in the Deep a few years ago. Still, at least we’ll always have Bleeding Love.
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