In the increasingly fickle music business, we are always bombarded with all these "hot tips" from the likes of Edith Bowman or *shudders* Fearne and Reggie as to who will arrive in a cloud of hype and millions of record sales in the new year. BBC News' recent Sound of 2008 poll was a disappointment - the tuneless, po-faced Adele came top, followed by the "new Dusty Springfield" Duffy, suggesting to me that this so called new music had become something of all style and no substance and record companies deciding there and then what the trend was and following it like the sheep that they are.
Thankfully, there's a couple of exceptions to every rule. The exception here being part Antipodean part Greek chanteuse Gabriella Cilmi, who's quietly been beavering away on her forthcoming debut album "Lessons To Be Learned" with Girls Aloud hitmakers Xenomania since 2006.
However, whilst the pigeon holing comparisons to Amy Winehouse will be inevitable (and this next sentence is in no way dismissing Amy Winehouse, because she is an equally talented artist herself) but Cilmi is in a musical field of her own. With a voice that radiates a charm well beyond her 16 years of age, "Sweet About Me" is a sneakily fine effort of a debut single - it's catchy without being too repetitively annoying, and the production is one of the most stripped down but elaborate ever seen in a pop song so far this year. Instinct tells me that this will definitely be one to watch out for in the charts over the next few weeks.
