Am I alone in thinking this is extremely forgetable on first listen other than the "I fall in love with every ------" and the line about seven out of nine lives?

Oh this has actually suprised me! I was expecting another trend chasing song (a la Crazy Stupid Horns) but this feels like it’s in its own lane compared with what is currently doing well and still feels very current.

Wasn't too sure about it at first, but it's proven itself to be such an ear worm - I really like it now! Video is a bit eh~

 

Welcome back, Cheryl x

Am I alone in thinking this is extremely forgetable on first listen other than the "I fall in love with every ------" and the line about seven out of nine lives?

 

It did nothing but disappoint me when I first listened yesterday but now I am obsessed.

This really grows with every listen!

Pleasantly surprised tbh

I like it. Very Selena Gomez.

 

Hate the video though

I love it but she needs to stop losing weight she’s way to skinny now

Edited November 10, 20186 yr by Blond 2.0

that video is DREADFUL!!!

 

the gratuitous swearing, the song DEVOID of any personality

 

i just don't understand how she became a solo star :|

I just don’t think I’ve ever been enough of a fan of her voice...she sounds so flat on so much of this song.

This is awful :(

 

One of her worst ever singles

i actually think this coulda been a bop but the production is SO bad 😆

i just don't understand how she became a solo star :|

 

I do. She built a media profile on a certain event, which led to the X-Factor gig and then the solo career.

 

I think what cucumberella means is how shes somewhat a successful solo star.

i actually think this coulda been a bop but the production is SO bad 😆

Agreed! Especially the 'yeah yeah yeah' bit - terrible!

I think its great, a definite ear worm.

I won't hear a bad word said about it.

Down to #3 on iTunes and #161 on Spotify - 2 days as the highest paid download and more than 1 day in the top 200 streamed songs is far more than I expected before release. I'm expecting a debut in the 30s officially.

 

Cheryl's first interview in four years is in the Sunday Times today! It's behind a paywall so I hope it's okay for me to post the full article here:

 

Cheryl talks motherhood, Liam Payne and overcoming anxiety in her first interview since 2014

 

From pop star to national sweetheart, the ups and downs of Cheryl Tweedy’s life have made headlines for almost two decades. Now, she’s back with a new single and a new outlook. By Decca Aitkenhead

 

Cheryl Tweedy has never had a one-night stand. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I just said that!” she exclaims, eyes widening in surprise at her own indiscretion. But the woman curled up beside me on the sofa strikes me as someone who could say almost anything and really not care. After four years away from the music business, one year in therapy and 19 months as a mother, the Tweedy — she’s back to her maiden name now — about to make her come-back looks the same as ever. And yet everything seems different.

 

“You’re looking at a completely different person, you really are,” she agrees. “I feel like I’ve had two lives — me before Bear, and me with Bear. I’ve always had a shyness and that’s gone. I was always floating around, just not sure of anything, and now I’m certain. I feel like a woman now.”

 

The singer was just 19 when she became famous in the first girl band to be created by a British talent show. Sassy, gobby and absurdly sexy, after winning Popstars: The Rivals in 2002, Girls Aloud — Tweedy, Sarah Harding, Nadine Coyle, Kimberley Walsh and Nicola Roberts — became the UK’s biggest-selling girl band of the 21st century, with No 1 hits from Sound of the Underground to The Promise.

 

By 2009 they had amassed a collective £25m fortune and took a break from the band, but they were never out of the headlines. They briefly reformed in 2012, before splitting for good, but it is Tweedy’s unhappy relationships with men that have gripped her fans. At 23 she married the England footballer Ashley Cole, and for a while the couple looked like becoming the new Posh and Becks, until the tabloids ran lurid revelations of his multiple infidelities. Tweedy stood by him, refusing to believe the reports, and her 2009 hit single Fight for This Love became the soundtrack of her defiance. But as more kiss-and-tells emerged in the tabloids, her marriage was reduced to a soap opera.

 

A year later she was divorced and the most famous woman in Britain, on the cover of every tabloid and glossy magazine. She became the global face of L’Oréal and another romance followed: in 2014, she married the French restaurateur Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini in a secret wedding after a three-month romance, but divorced him two years later. She has never said why.

 

Her last album, Only Human, came out in 2014, and in the interim she fell in love with Liam Payne. They first met in 2008, when he was 14 and auditioning on The X Factor, for which Tweedy, 10 years his senior, was a judge. Clips of them smiling at each other resurfaced multiple times during their relationship. Payne returned to audition two years later and won a place in the boyband juggernaut One Direction, and when the pair met again on the show in 2015, he was one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, and she — with five solo No 1s to her name — the UK’s most successful female pop star.

 

Despite the age gap, viewers were quick to spot the spark between them, and media speculation went into overdrive until, months later, the couple confirmed they were in love. Tweedy quit The X Factor, more or less vanished from public life, and last year gave birth to their son, Bear. But in July they announced their separation, offering no details of the reasons behind their split, though she later tells me that he is the only man who has ever been faithful to her.

 

Now she is making her comeback, with a fresh single, Love Made Me Do It, and this is her first big interview in four years. We meet in a London hotel room that smells exquisitely of the scented candles she carries with her everywhere. She is wearing ripped black jeans, elaborately laced heels and what appears, to my non-fashionista eyes, to be a sort of bronze satin dressing gown, her famous chestnut mane tumbling to her waist. She has no entourage and we talk alone, unchaperoned by any publicist.

 

Warm and relaxed, quick to smile, she has an appealingly self-deprecating, dry wit; when I ask if she’s still Cole or has reverted to her maiden name of Tweedy, she laughs: “Honest to God, I don’t know, I’ve had too many surnames. That’s just the crazy choices I’ve made along the way.” An impression of profound contentment is overwhelming, and I’m not at all surprised when she tells me she has never been happier. “Yes, because I feel full. My heart’s full, I’m fulfilled. I’m not looking for anything any more. I’m whole. I’ve got the man of my dreams.”

 

From the moment Bear was born, she had eyes for nobody else. “When I think back to the early days of new motherhood, I was in such a bubble of love, I actually don’t think I saw anyone else.” Some new mothers, she reflects, rolling her eyes, “get all dolled up” to stop their man feeling “jealous” of the baby, so I ask whether Payne had felt a bit excluded. “Maybe. Maybe.” He had been wanting to be a father from the age of 16, she says, “so he wanted to settle down and have a family and not do the solo thing. Then we encouraged him to do that [she has the Geordie habit of referring to herself as ‘us’ or ‘we’]. And then it didn’t work out.” It wasn’t what he wanted after all? Her expression brims with words unsaid. “You’ll have to ask him that.”

 

Love Made Me Do It sounds unmistakably autobiographical, with lyrics such as “I’m such a sucker, I fall in love with every f*****”. But when I ask if they were all f******, she laughs and says “every f*****” just means “everyone” to a Geordie. She and Payne remain friends, and she has nothing bad to say about him. She even sounds quite sympathetic when she muses that maybe it was “hard” for him, “almost having two lives. You have to switch your head onto pop star [since One Direction disbanded, he has had his own solo career], and then switch it back to daddy.” I tell her I’m struck by how sanguine she seems, and she shrugs. “You can’t rely on someone to make you happy. In the past, I was looking for someone to fix things. But I’ve come to that point in my life where I’m a happy person. I might want somebody else to be in my life, but if they don’t want to be in your life, what are you supposed to do?”

 

Payne has always said the choice of their baby’s name was Tweedy’s, but she tells me it was his. “Anyway, I liked the name. It’s cute, and then it’s masculine. There are so many people that say to me, ‘I so wanted to call my son Bear, but I didn’t.’ Why? Because of what the f*** other people would think?” She grins. “Sorry for swearing. But I’m, like, do what you want.”

 

She developed gestational diabetes while pregnant — a condition that affects about one in 10 pregnancies and causes blood-sugar levels to surge. She couldn’t eat pasta, had to prick her finger every time she ate and text the results to her doctor. The diabetes vanished the moment he was born, but she was obliged to deliver him by C-section, and part of her will always wonder “Did I miss out?”, so she had no intention of missing anything else. She was amazed when everyone kept telling her, before he was even born, to get a nanny. “The way I grew up, that’s so alien to me. Nobody had a nanny. We didn’t even have a babysitter.”

 

I ask if Bear sleeps in her bed, and she smiles. “I’m going to get mum-shamed, aren’t I? But yes, he does. Best thing in the world. I know I’m making a rod for my own back. I am aware of that. But when he was born, he used to sleep in the crib that you put on your bed, and then he never really left.” She tried moving him into a cot in his room, but “he wouldn’t have it”, and she couldn’t bear to leave him to cry.

 

“I don’t want to give him insecurities or a feeling like I’m not around. But at the same time I don’t judge anybody that does the crying-out thing. Do what works for you, and the rest of you shut the f*** up, because it’s not your business, is it?” I ask if mum-shaming hurts more than any other kind of online criticism. “I haven’t experienced it, because I haven’t done an interview [since Bear was born], so I have no idea. But I read about other people being mum-shamed and I think, get a life, deal with your own kids, why are you interfering in everyone else’s?”

 

She pulls out her phone to show me a photo of Bear, and her face melts with delight. “Isn’t he cute? He’s so tall. He’s such a mummy’s boy.” He’s already “babbling away”, she says proudly, though it bothers her “a little bit” that he doesn’t share the Geordie accent of her nieces and nephews. Her mum, Joan, travels down from Newcastle a lot to help look after him, but Tweedy wants to make it very clear “she’s never lived with me. Never, ever!” After her first husband was exposed as a serial cheat, the tabloids reported that her mum had moved in with them to keep him in check, but that was, Tweedy scoffs, “just bullshit”.

 

Tweedy grew up in a tough, working-class neighbourhood in Newcastle; an impression of vulnerability has always been part of her popular appeal as the nation’s sweetheart. Her father had an affair when she was 11, which caused her parents to split up, one of her brothers sold a story to the press about her, and I’m struggling to think of a single important man in her life who hasn’t let her down. When I ask if one exists, she says simply, no. She has no nostalgia for her twenties, most of which she spent with Cole, and has even less for her teens. “They were the hardest years of my life,” she says. I ask why, and she offers, a little vaguely, “It was teenage-related, environment-related anxiety,” but I guess she is referring, in part, to the drug problems both an early boyfriend and an older brother struggled with. “I hated being a teenager. I wouldn’t even go back through my twenties. I’d skip the lot,” she grins, “and start at 30.” As soon as she became pregnant, her anxiety vanished: “I was so warm inside, and I found it amazing, I guess because I’ve lived on adrenaline and anxiety for so many years.” She went into therapy when Bear was a few months old, “because I didn’t want the anxiety to come back. I wanted to stay in that strength. And it really has been helping a lot.” What has it taught her about herself? “I think I love too easy. I think I tolerate too much. I don’t set clear enough boundaries in the beginning.”

 

When her first marriage ended, she told herself: “I’m not going to allow myself to become hard-faced or a different person because of the way you decided you wanted to treat me.” The trouble with this plan, she discovered, was it left her vulnerable to being mistreated again. “Yes. Again.” If she sees two dogs in the street, she tries to explain, “and you’ve got the one sitting with the glossy coat, waiting for his owner, and then you’ve got the mangy one in the corner that looks like it needs a bit of help, I would always go to that one and be like, ‘Oh, do you want something to eat? I’ll stroke you. Are you feeling better?’ And at some point, they bite you. So then you’re like, ‘Hang on a minute, there’s something clearly not working here with this tolerance and understanding and forgiving.’ So I thought, because I have Bear, it’s time to look at what’s going on for me, you know? I’m looking at myself and the changes I need to make to then make a more solid choice.”

 

I think Tweedy could happily talk about nothing but her son. “I would spend every breathing moment with him and not do anything else,” she says. “But I know that’s unhealthy. You can get lost in mummy world, and you need a piece of you to continue being right for him.” In the new year, she will be making her TV comeback as a judge on BBC1’s The Greatest Dancer and releasing an album. She says that, during her four-year sabbatical, the record industry “changed upside down. It’s a totally different world.” Spotify wasn’t as big the last time she made an album, but although there is a lot less money around now, for the first time Tweedy found herself in “total control”. She co-wrote the album with Roberts and chose her own producers, who include Naughty Boy, a British DJ and musician who has worked with Beyoncé, been her own choreographer, and even edited the video she shows me for Love Made Me Do It, her first single from the album. “It was such a different experience. And so much fun.” The first her record label had to do with the album was when she played them the finished article.

 

I’m not sure I’d even have recognised the confident woman in pared-down make-up I watch dancing on Tweedy’s phone screen. She feels more like Debbie Harry than the pop starlet of Girls Aloud days; it is a revelation. “My whole body, even my face, everything’s changed since Bear was born,” she says, cheerfully. “But I feel like I’m better than who I was. I don’t care what my body looks like in that respect. I’m not obsessive about it. I created a life! I’m amazed by myself. And I’m kinder to myself because of it. I focus less on my insecurities, because they’re so much less relevant.”

 

She hates taking selfies, but that has nothing to do with insecurity. “I just think it’s a bit odd. It really doesn’t come naturally. I see everyone else around me doing it — people can’t help themselves — and I know it’s part of the way the world works. But I’m just like, if I did that taking pictures of myself when I was growing up, there would have been consequences. Everyone would have said, ‘What the f*** are you doing?’ You would have been a poser, ‘Who do you think are?’, cringeworthy. Because it’s just vain. And now we’re all like this.” She mimes pouting into her phone. “That’s acceptable now.” She shakes her head in bewilderment. “We’re just living in a different world, I guess.”

 

She brightens when I ask what she thinks of this season’s X Factor and the show’s new judges. Her favourite is Louis Tomlinson, Payne’s bandmate from One Direction. “I think Louis is fantastic. I have totally fallen … ” She clamps a hand over her mouth, laughing, reluctant to finish the sentence for fear I’ll take it literally. “Don’t. I’m not. I just think he’s great. He’s totally himself, and he’s so sweet. I even sent the producer a text over the weekend, like, ‘Louis: great man.’” We meet ahead of a performance on the show, “and when they ask me who I like the most, I’m not going to say any of the acts. I’m going to say Louis.” She grins mischievously. “I’m sure the One Direction fans would love that. They’d be like, ‘Oh, she’s onto another one.’ ” One Direction fans are notoriously mad, I laugh, aren’t they? She shoots me a deadpan stare. “Barking.”

 

There’s no need for them to worry, for there is more chance of Tweedy staying single for ever than getting together with another One Direction member. “I do seriously think I might be. I do. I would never ever say never, obviously, but I have zero — I tell you, zero —desire to start up a new relationship.”

 

She once famously said, following the end of her first marriage, that the only people she trusted were her mum and her dogs. Who, I ask, does she trust now? “Oh, that’s a good question.” She thinks for a moment. “I trust myself. Which is new. And more important than anything.”

 

Love Made Me Do It is out now. @cherylofficial

 

Hair: Peter Lux at The Wall Group using L’Oreal Professionnel. Make-Up: Andrew Gallimore at CLM Hair and Make-Up using NARS cosmetics. nails: Pebbles Aikens at The Wall Group using Leighton Denny Expert nails. Tailor: Amy Ward at Karen Avenell

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/magazine/style/c...-2014-6ntlgld68

 

They confirm an album is coming in the new year and that she's pre-recorded a performance for The X Factor! :D

She has left it waaaaay too late. 4 years for this song?! Even Katy Perry couldn't manage a 4 year pie baking gap. Cheryl most certainly cannot.

I don't think she has pre-recorded a performance for X Factor.