It’s fairly common knowledge in the industry that X Factor runner-up Fleur East’s cover of Mark Ronson’s ‘Uptown Funk’ was so popular on download last week that the producer was forced to rush release his original, which features Bruno Mars.
Speaking to NME, Ronson said he was a little annoyed about the whole situation, because he failed to realise at first that Fleur’s version would end up on iTunes. He was in America at the time Fleur performed the track on X Factor, and only realised what was about to go down when he saw a tweet from Nick Hodgson of the Kaiser Chiefs, who said that Fleur was “killing it”.
According to Ronson: “I was like ‘that must be X Factor, that’s cool’. Then I was like, ‘Wait, don’t the X Factor tunes actually come out on iTunes?’ and then slowly the logic in my head unfolded. I realised the girl’s cover is going to come out before our own. So yeah, for a minute I was a little bit annoyed and then we kind of rushed ours, which is good because I think whatever it takes to get the song out.”
Fleur East was popular with the voting public throughout the contest, but voting statistics released since the final show she never headed the eventual winner and only started to nose ahead of third placed Andrea Faustini in week six.
Uptown Funk – the Bruno Mars version – is currently trailing X Factor winner Ben Haenow in the race for Christmas number one by 23,000 sales.
