ENCORE – Lucy Thomas (Cavendish Records, released on 29 May 2020)
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
Two years after Lucy Thomas’ debut album Premiere, made when she was 14, comes Encore, another beautiful set of stage and movie covers, laced with pop and country.
If this young lady doesn’t make it to the showbiz peak, whether it’s West End stage, films, pop or cabaret, I shall have to eat my hat because this warm, pure, powerful and fast-maturing voice is right out of the top drawer. But it won’t happen for a while as she’s still at school, studying hard.
Lucy comes from a musical family in Wigan – her ten-year-old sister Martha duets nicely with her on one track, the slow-tempo Christina Aguilera hit ‘Say Something’ – and is in safe hands that won’t be rushing her.
Composer Chris Broom, boss of Cavendish Records who produced both albums, plans for Lucy to take the title role in his musical Rosie – about an Irish girl, rejected and dumped as a child, who dreams of theatre stardom, becomes a Gaiety Girl and hooks up with an aristocratic cavalry officer – which he hopes to launch when she is ready.
Four of Broom’s compositions were featured on Premiere, ‘Starlight’ and ‘Suddenly’ being the most memorable, and a fifth ‘Gentle Breeze’ makes its bow on Encore.
He is mixing with some big names here, Pasek and Paul’s ‘A Million Dreams’ from The Greatest Showman, the Celine Dion smash from Titanic ‘My Heart Will Go On’, ‘I Have Nothing’ from The Bodyguard, and ‘I’ll Never Love Again’, the spine-tinging Lady Gaga ballad from A Star is Born.
From Cats, the inevitable ‘Memory’ is joined by ‘Beautiful Ghosts’, the striking Taylor Swift-Lloyd Webber collaboration specially written for the much-derided 2019 movie.
‘Reflection’ from the Disney film Mulan, the Snow Patrol number ‘Run’, later a hit for Leona Lewis, and Linda Ronstadt’s country classic ‘Desperado’, as catchy as ever in the Thomas treatment, complete an outstandingly well-sung but ultra-safe collection.
What we need to see in Lucy Thomas 3, being put together now for release next year, are more changes of pace and fresher material that stretches the gorgeous instrument with which this young lady has been blessed.
For the time being, easy but exciting listening from a voice in a million and the face of a young Elizabeth Taylor or Natalie Wood. As they say, what’s not to like?
Jeremy Chapman
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