2003 Daniel Bedingfield: Never Gonna Leave Your Side'

Third number one from Bedingfield, 'Never Gonna Leave Your Side' picks up from more or less where 'If You're Not the One' left off, though in terms of quality it's most definitely less. Another step away again from the garage dance of 'Gotta Get Thru This' , 'Never Gonna Leave Your Side' is a wobbling jenga tower of a meandering melody line populated with badly rhymed, "I feel like a knight without a sword, a sky without the sun, cause you are the one" bad metaphor that compliment in a way suggestive of Dan sitting down at his piano and making the whole thing up on the hoof. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't - whatever, 'Never Gonna Leave Your Side' plays itself out like a dribbling guide lyric, rough cut demo waiting to be fleshed out and finished off (try as I might, I can't work out from the "There are no words that could describe how I miss you" and "And I'm never gonna leave your side, again, still holding on, girl, I won't let you go" contradiction as to where exactly the "girl" herself stands in all this - has she gone or what?). Unfortunately, those finishing touches are never applied and so to paper over the cracks between the joints, Bedingfield puts his keening simper into overdrive in an attempt to convince that we're dealing with Greek tragedy here. But, of course, we're not - "They tell me that a man can lose his mind living in the pain, recalling times gone by, I'm crying in the rain"; Dan and his song are wetter than a Wednesday washday, and the only tragedy here is that so many people were happy to be taken in by his asinine guff.