Ahhh, the good old Alan Titchmarsh show - that last bastion of the pop TV performance. In all seriousness though, without it, we'd never be treated to performances of singles as good as this: Nicola Roberts' latest track Yo-Yo is if anything, the most representative of her album as a whole.
Whereas Beat of my Drum and Lucky Day were fun, feisty, fluffy - Yo-Yo falls far more in the camp of 80s-tinged synth-pop melancholia that characterises the absolute pop gem that is Cinderella's Eyes.
One of the lasting impressions the album gave me was just how much you believed and cared for every word Nicola sings, and never is that more true than here.
A song of ups and downs, of trials and tribulations - if the rest of pop music was always as brave and emotionally bared as this, the world would be a much more exciting place.
I'm really sorry Madonna, but Nicola Roberts has beaten you to it. For all its bubbly pop charm, her first single since Celebration and Revolver is a rather by-the-numbers cousin of Nicola's Beat of my Drum. You can't get away from it - there's only a bloody L-U-V within the first five seconds of the track and everything.
That said, there are a lot of things working in Madge's favour on Give Me All Your Love - for starters, it's easily her most instant track in ages and it's nice to see her completely casting away her cod-RnB overalls and going for a far more carefree, fun flavour.
It's still far from the excellence she reached on Confessions, but its interesting tangent for the Queen of Pop to go down when right now, she stands at a crucial moment where she must prove if she can continue to be relevant to all audiences. Enter producer Martin Solveig, dance-wizard who is basically a bit amazing.
No, Give Me All Your Love shares far more of its DNA with proper old-school Madonna, I'm talking the likes of Holiday and Everybody here. It's relatively fluffy, lightweight - but now that Madge has stopped trying to be one of Timbaland's crew, it feels like a logical move for her. She still isn't back to her true innovative best, but Give Me All Your Love is a step - albeit a very tentative one - in the right direction.
One of my favourite things about music is that sometimes, out of the blue, a track is just given a completely new lease of life - this is one of those occasions.
I've had Nicola's Beat of My Drum on my iPod pretty much all summer now, but hearing this rock version of it makes me want to knock it out on repeat all over again. In short, it's the song you already know and love, but with a load of noisy guitars shoved on top.
If you thought the original was just that little bit too short, listen up - this version is four minutes long! The mid-song break-down is extended, and considering that was one of the best bits of the original, this is obviously all kinds of amazing.
For me, Beat of My Drum kind of always had it in it for this kind of take on it - it's powerful, it's out-there, it's the kind of track you yell out at the top of your voice; whether that be at a festival, a club, or just in your bed-room. It's an outpouring of emotion, a catharsis, a purging of every angst and bad feeling that's playing on your mind that day.
Basically, Nicola + guitars = one hell of a rocking track. We like this a lot.
The gorgeous Girls Aloud red-head goes solo with this stunning Major Lazer-sampling track. Feisty rapped verses and a chorus we guarantee you'll fall in L.O.V.E. with. The track is already surging up the iTunes chart and with Nicola launching the single with a DJ set in Hoxton over the weekend, it looks set to do big things this week. The video also features an absolutely inspired dance routine.
I'm a massive fan of this new girl group, who deliver a country/rock flavoured brand of pop on this, their self titled debut album. Not your traditional girl band fare, but Wonderland make the sound their own - especially on highlights like Starlight and their covers of Lady Antebellum and Adele.
To date, there have been many New Order compilations, but never one that included both Joy Division and New Order tracks together on one CD. With a band who's career spans as many years as theirs, there's the tendency that certain key tracks (or your personal favourites) may be missed off, but as a single-disc compilation of the two band's greatest moments, this presents the perfect introduction for a new listener to one of the greatest musical back catalogues of all time. It also includes the incredibly good 'new' New Order track Hellbent.
It's a bit of the old and a bit of the new with this remix compilation from synth master Depeche Mode. Contemporary takes on classic tracks like the amazing Stargate mix of Personal Jesus easily make this album worth the cash - and the three-disc deluxe edition contains enough electronic wizardry to keep you happy until Christmas. It also comes in a posh cardboard box/slipcase type thing and with a booklet printed on some of the glossiest paper I've ever seen in my life.
Allow me to introduce the world's new favourite popstar. Because that, surely, is what Nicola Roberts deserves to become.
With her delicate, model-like beauty and such an effortlessly charming personality, she gets the adorable-factor spot on, and never is it more evident in the video for her debut solo single Beat Of My Drum.
Throwing some moves down in a hall, accompanied by a troupe of dancers and drummers galore, she even finds time to come up with one of the best pop dance routines I've seen in a long time. 'L.O.V.E.' she raps out, spelling the letters out with her arms. I'm in love.
It's plain to see here that this is the moment Nicola has been building to all her life; and for a young singer making her first forays into the solo world after nearly a decade in a band, she carries it incredibly well. The video is fierce, fun and full of that distinct pop essence that we all felt only Nicola would be capable of creating.
Sometimes, with an artist's album campaign, everything comes together so well, so brilliantly, you start to think it must be fate.
And Nicola Robert's Beat of my Drum looks to be one such case. Just look at the video teaser - tantalisingly short, it still manages to give us a real essence of just how awesome the complete thing is clearly going to be. Because Nicola Roberts is pure awesome. And that's Fact.
A dance routine to rival the famed Biology and Love Machine for sheer pop ingenuity. That super-smart sense of style Nicola has so rightly become famed for of late. The clip has it all. And she just exudes so much Fierce!
It's Nicola Roberts - Actual Nicola off of Girls Aloud - and her solo project is what pop lovers everywhere have been waiting for all their lives.
And so, at long last, we're hearing it. Yes. Nicola Roberts, singing on her own. Without the other Girls. The prospects of Nicola's solo career have driven Twitter into something of a frenzy of late, and earlier this week saw a brief instrumental teaser clip of her debut single Beat of My Drum. Well, now we have another brief teaser clip... only this time it's got vocals on it!
'L, O, V, E' - That's Nicola rapping away, and with real gusto too. Of course, it's hard to judge the whole track on just a 30 second clip but there's a definite vibe of what I like to call either ArtyPop or CoolPop. M.I.A., Mark Ronson, Santogold - they all come under that same umbrella. There's a trend of stitching together twitchy beats and bleepy synths in a glorious whirlwind of sonic wonderful-ness.
It is resolutely pop, but so far removed from what Blue are trotting out for the Eurovision song contest or anything like that. And it doesn't sound like Girls Aloud - a risky move to make perhaps when you helped revolution pop with your sound, but then Nicola and the band as a whole have never been ones to play it safe. And you admire Nicola all the more for doing something completely different and out there like this.
Porcelain Heart - Beat of My Drum's very own b-side - is of course not a song about a person with a heart made of fine china (cos that'd be impossible), but rather employs the whole 'porcelain' business as a lovely metaphor about feelings. This kind of poeticism fits Nicola's own complexion and style to perfection, as does the icy stomp of the synth line in the chorus as Nicola cries out 'Please don't break my porcelain heart!'
Keen Girls Aloud fans will be quick to testify that Nicola has always had a considerable set of lungs on her, but that she never really got to show them off to the extent Nadine and Cheryl did. Well, now is Nicola's moment and while her voice still has much of that ethereal beauty to it, there are moments here where she really belts it out too.
Compared to Beat of My Drum, Porcelain Heart is far closer to the traditional Girls Aloud 'sound', and as such is sure to appease fans (how brilliant is it that we're getting a proper b-side anyways, in an age where they're increasingly dying out).
Daring, bold, adventurous - Nicola is all of these things. And a bloody good pop star. We salute her.
Beat of My Drum and Porcelain Heart are out to download on iTunes on the 5th June and can be pre-ordered here.
All week we've been getting excited about Nicola Roberts posting pictures of her legs on her new Twitter account, but now we have a full, proper picture of her! Legs, body, head, arms - everything!
This accompanies an amazing rundown of some of the album's tracks on Popjustice featuring some of the lyrics. A sample includes the heartbreaking "Too young to buy my own bottle of vodka so I begged the driver, 'please I need another'. How funny that I was too young for so many things, yet you thought I'd cope with being told I'm ugly over and over. I'd read it, believe it, said no to the shrink. I can fix it, I think…" With emotionally charged, close-to-the-bone stuff like this, I can definitely imagine a few tears amongst fans as they listen to the album.
The Sun has also run an article on Nicola's solo material where they reveal her album will be entitled Cinderella's Eyes - how delightfully pretty! They even compare her vocals to Kate Bush. Speaking to the paper, Nicola shared her excitement about the whole project: "It's a fun record. It was important my first single was different to anything else around. I love that it's a song everyone can sing and dance along to."
Beat of my Drum is released on June 5th, Cinderella's Eyes comes out in the Autumn.
