Amanda Holden Songs From My Heart (out Friday)

Picture the scene. You’ve been a talent show judge for 14 years, a lively presence in millions of living rooms on a Saturday night. You have a husband, two daughters and a comfy sideline as a DJ on Heart FM. You do great things for good causes, often involving animals.

At 49 you’re glamorous enough to make headlines just by wearing a new dress. But you want more.

Watching all those wannabes, you yearn to be a pop star yourself. You grab the chance, in mid-pandemic, to record Over The Rainbow in aid of NHS Charities. You’ve loved musicals ever since you were a child, singing into your tape recorder. So you gather 12 more old chestnuts to make an album aimed squarely at middle England’s Christmas stocking. It can’t fail, can it?

Commercially, no, but artistically is another matter. Amanda Holden has a good voice, to go with her good heart. What she lacks as a singer is the very thing that makes her successful on the telly: a personality.

The songs, from Somewhere to I Dreamed A Dream, feel as if they were chosen by feeding the collected works of Elaine Paige into an algorithm. The closest thing to a bold choice is When She Loved Me, from Toy Story 2, but it would take more than a pinch of Randy Newman to stop this album drowning in its own treacle. The arrangements are so bland, they make Paige look like Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex.

Even the lone highlight is a mixed blessing.

For I Know Him So Well from Chess, Amanda is joined by Sheridan Smith, who walks in and blows her out of the studio. The record company should have released that as a Christmas single and spared us the rest.

As lockdown looms again, we’re going to need new music to nourish us. Cometh the hour, cometh the band – Dawes, the California quartet fronted by a genial genius called Taylor Goldsmith. Their seventh album, Good Luck With Whatever (out Friday, ), sparkles with soulful intelligence. If you don’t know Dawes, the best place to start is with their latest gem, Still Feel Like A Kid.

Goldsmith is the Billy Joel of the 21st Century: not fashionable, just formidably talented.