Cheryl Cole: You can't hold on to water man pet

There's an recurring phenomenon in pop culture, where a bunch of creative people working independently of each other somehow cluster around the same idea.

For example, two meteoroid disaster movies, Deep Impact and Armageddon, premiered within months of each other in 1998. Last year, Guy Ritchie and Steven Moffat both had versions of Sherlock Holmes in production at the same time.

It happens in music, too. Right now, everyone seems to have decided that The Flood is a good name for a single (it is). Katie Melua started it off, Take That picked up the baton and now they've passed it on to Cheryl Cole.

Take That's song is largely nonsense. They're "standing on the edge of forever" and "holding back the flood", whatever that means. The lyrics aim for spiritual mystery, but Robbie & Gary just sound like two mad men with no trousers ranting at traffic.

Melua is more robust. She's talking about a sea-change in her relationship, which turns into a flood, washing away the foundations of her life. She doesn't seem to be that bothered, though. "No-one is to blame," she croons repeatedly.

Plucky little Cheryl is the most proactive of the bunch. In fact, she seems to be deliberately throwing her man to the mercy of a raging storm. "Turn the lights off in the lighthouse," she hisses, "I saw you coming". There follows a shipwreck and a gloomy chorus about love slipping through her fingers like water. Yikes!

There's an obvious way to interpret these lyrics, which I needn't go in to here. The important thing is that this is Cheryl's first BIG BALLAD, and it's surprisingly effective. Emotive, catchy, radio friendly and very, very well sung.

If she doesn't have rain pouring over her in the video, it will be a big mistake.


Cheryl's second solo album, Messy Little Raindrops, is out on 1st November.

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Listen to this: Sparks vs Katie Melua

Pop overlords Sparks have taken their electrical toolkit to Katie Melua's new single, A Happy Place, and created something really quite astonishing.

I have listened to this remix 10 times in a row, and I'm still not sure (a) what I'm hearing, or (b) how to describe what I'm hearing.

It's a beautiful cacophony. A Bontempi organ cycling through it's demo modes. A four-minute wow machine. Alice In Wonderland's tension headache. A swarm of crickets flying through a field of cymbals. The history of pop on a psychedelic roundabout.

A disaster. A triumph. A disastrumph.

Oh, I give up. Listen to the song and draw your own conclusions.

A Happy Place - Sparks Vs. Melua by Katie Melua

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Shockingly good Katie Melua thing

Seriously, this William Orbit-produced single is a triumph from beginning to end.

Katie Melua - The Flood


That rather came out of the blue, didn't it?

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