Beyond a catchy tune, you’d be hard-pushed to identify a common quality that propelled Petula Clark, Lulu, Sheena Easton and Kim Wilde into an elite band of chart-topping British females Stateside.

But one thing that can be said about Leona Lewis’s predecessors was that all of them were palpably British affairs. In 2008, the same cannot be said for Bleeding Love. Though raised in Hackney, Lewis has clearly spent the years before her 2006 X-Factor victory in thrall to soaring American balladeers.

Composed by two Americans — the OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder and former boy band member Jesse McCartney — Bleeding Love pays enough lip-service to modern R&B while pushing enough MOR buttons to appeal to both young pop fans and the millions of Americans who once used to buy records by the likes of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey and, more recently, Kelly Clarkson, by the lorryload.

The latter are still out there. They’ve always been in the market for a song such as Bleeding Love. But with both Houston and Carey currently inactive and American Idol winner Clarkson increasingly at odds with her record company, Lewis couldn’t have come at a better time.

To a US music industry that has long since questioned the ability of British artists to put in the promotional legwork required to break the US, Lewis is a safe bet. The US mogul Clive Davis — who appears to be overseeing her American progress — will be drawn to the utterly compliant Lewis.

Her apprenticeship at the Brit School in Croydon means that she is under no illusions as to what’s expected of her. That’s great news for a US publicity and marketing team probably pencilling in a year’s worth of meet-and-greets.

America belongs to Leona Lewis — and the feeling’s mutual.

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