Adele - Promise This (BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge Cheryl Cole cover)

Promoting her new album 21, Adele took to Radio 1's Live Lounge, covering Cheryl Cole's sublime Promise This, transforming it into an epic, bluesy piano ballad. At moments soft and subtle, at others sultry and full of swagger, it's an inspired song choice. And it goes without saying, WOW at Adele's voice. Simply breathtaking.

Adele – Promise This (Cheryl Cole Cover) by CherylOnline

Cheryl Cole - The Flood

Last year, Parachute gave fans a taste of the kind of love-drenched pop Cheryl Cole was capable of producing – but whereas that was a mid-tempo workout with a suitably dance-focused video, The Flood represents the all out epic ballad, the perfect outpouring for all those emotions and feelings. It’s interesting to remember that Girls Aloud themselves hadn’t really brought out a ‘traditional’ ballad since their Chemistry album so the gentle touches of Cheryl’s new single make for a refreshing change. And by God is it good!

What I love so much about The Flood is that in essence it has two choruses, both as equally catchy as each-other. The poetic beauty hits you first, ‘You can’t hold onto water, it fills you up but never stays’, before the song its crescendo, rolling over you like a wave, sweeping you up into its depths. You can lose yourself completely in the layers of this song, each listen bringing something new. Those strings swelling in the background, the lazy tropical sounds of the beat, the sunny strumming of the guitar. This song transports you away to a magical fantasy world where it’s just you, Cheryl and the music – and it’s amazing. Her ad-libs are damn impressive too.

There’s a tenderness to the song, something the beautiful, picturesque – and the brilliant video only serves to further emphasise this. Set on the coast, all arty and windswept, it presents a more candid view of Cheryl than the hyper-stylised likes of the Fight for this Love and Promise This do. It’s all impossibly cute, like the song itself, picking you up on a buoyant swirl of love and emotion. This is Cheryl at her most natural, the acoustic flavours really suiting her voice. There’s a lush organic vibe to the whole thing, a sense of ‘rightness’, and as Cheryl sings ‘sitting on the shore all day, waiting for the tide to come’, we can think of fate and how we’re all waiting for that perfect moment.

The Flood is out to download on iTunes now.

The video can be seen on YouTube here.

Cheryl Cole - Promise This

“Alouette-ouette-ouette...”  Take the hook from a classic French nursery rhyme and transform it into a dance-pop classic.  It could only be Cheryl Cole.  And that little refrain will be stuck in your head all day. Guaranteed.  And despite Cheryl’s claims in Girls Aloud’s 2008 single Can’t Speak French, she manages to do a pretty good job of it here.  “Déployer les ailes” indeed.

Promise This sees nation’s sweetheart Cheryl doing just that, spreading her wings and building on her already considerable knack at coming up with some of the best pop music out there.  Teaming up again with songwriter Wayne Wilkins who she worked with on last year’s mega-hit Fight For This Love, her new single is all processed beats and a buzzing bassline driving away behind synthetic strings that could have come straight out of a lost 80s New Order floor-filler.  As the chorus floats in, riding on a wave of trippy piano that lends the track vibes of Ellie Goulding, Cheryl sings ‘If I die before I wake,” a line that in hindsight bears startling significance when taken into account with Cheryl’s malaria scare earlier this year.

Yet despite this potentially morbid subject matter, Promise This is brilliantly uplifting – a fitting anthem for a woman who through everything has always remained ambitious, focused and utterly driven on pursuing the career she loves.  The first single from her second album - wonderfully titled Messy Little Raindrops - the song presents a stronger, more confident Cheryl.  The energy and passion in Promise This is plain to see and the song has become another well deserved smash hit for Chezza.