Leona Lewis 'A Moment Like This'

Chart Peak: 1 (4 weeks)
YouTube

22 year old X-Factor winner Leona Lewis broke all records when her single 'A Moment Like This' was released in December 2006 - It was downloaded 50 thousand times within 30 minutes of being made available online... She has been described as the "Lovechild of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey" due to her amazing soul-diva vocal range!!!

No, I don't remember when we decided that "soul diva" was a concept defined by vocal range either. But there's no denying that Leona Lewis does have one, and was an unsurprising winner of a contest judged by people who consider a lovechild of Whitney and Mariah was an appealing prospect (it was of course also a highly unlikely one). It's easy to forget now that Lewis was only the second X-Factor winner to score a Christmas Number One (and one of only five to do so to date, though all eight of them have topped the chart at some point), and as it turned out this single sold less than Shayne Ward's hit the previous year - its massive out of the gate sales first thing on Sunday morning owe more to the growth in the download market generally than any increased popularity.

Ultimately, that doesn't matter much because this isn't the song she's remembered for anyway - in fact it was already shop-worn, having been recorded by Kelly Clarkson when she won American Idol a couple of years earlier. That version was never a single in Britain, but Simon Cowell could hardly have failed to spot that it was almost tailor-made for a contest winner, with all its talk of "journeys", as shown by the old audition footage in the video too, of course. It's a narrative that doesn't totally fit with Lewis, who was clearly always going to have a career one way or another, but the bigger problem is that it's just a dull song. Perhaps surprisingly, it was co-written by John Reid of Nightcrawlers fame, but it's probably too late to do a "not fit for purpose" joke now. Either way, the track was always destined to sell well in the short term, but even though she's one of the few long-running stars to emerge from the show, and her album Spirit is by far the biggest seller connected with X-Factor, this was never likely to be more than an apologetic bonus track at the end.

Also appearing on: Now 68, 70, 72, 80 (with Avicii)
Available on: Spirit