Natasha Bedingfield - Unwritten (Phonogenic)

Natasha Bedingfield’s latest single, just the kind of ballad that the UK has missed since Belinda Carlisle slipped off the radar, acts from contradiction and conflict; that is to say from what is not, rather than what is. Through a conscious denial of all originality and songcraft, and a burst of fleet-of-foot pop, we find that within the Top 40 resides a positive, enduring nothing, which helps to reinforce the music world’s continuing reliance on this remarkable and essential artist. Bedingfield has grasped the defiance/existence axis with consummate ease for such a young adult girl woman and every second of this track (be it the drunk-gospel chorus, day-care/night-nurse rhythm arrangements, or the independent-school cigarette silk of the vocal track) urges you to notice its complicated beauty.

Rejecting commerciality by sounding like a Pepsi advert, lineage by retaining the family name, and image by looking like everyone else, it is within Bedingfield’s title that she really has the last laugh. Not only has she called the track Unwritten, she has also left the song exactly this. By taking the enormously brave step of refusing to complete the track to the standard expected of most professional recording artists she has opened up herself to a raunchy and defiant self-awareness, nowhere truer than in the Shakespearian, split infinitive twist of “we’ve been conditioned to not make mistakes, but I can’t live that way.” To make mistake after mistake in terms of key choice, melodic structure and lyrical flow is one thing, but it takes a real innovator to reflect upon them within the very medium that they have themselves undermined. Genius.