Listeners to Radio 1, however, discovered Lewis’s secret a few months before, when she visited the station’s “live lounge” to perform a cover of Snow Patrol’s lighters-aloft anthem, Run.
Backed by a 14-piece band, the singer’s slow-burning performance suddenly burst into a planet-sized, full colour crescendo.
“People did cry,” wrote DJ Jo Whiley on her blog afterwards.
Lewis herself seems to have been impressed – recording a new studio version of the song for a special edition of her million-selling debut album, Spirit.
But, she admits, it can be a tricky number to perform live.
“You have to pull it back at the beginning, because at the end it goes crazy,” she laughs.
“It’s really hard to do that. You just have to control it.”
Vocal control is the one thing that sets Lewis apart from her peers, who flit around melodies like butterflies, afraid to land on a note for anything longer than a semiquaver.
But despite her stage school background – she attended Italia Conti, Sylvia Young and the Brits school – Lewis maintains that her style is 99% intuition.
“I just sing how I feel it,” she says. “If I feel like the song needs a bit of colour, I’ll do that.”
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