'People get blackballed if they speak out in showbiz'

Rebecca Ferguson won the hearts of the nation in 2010 with her soulful voice on 'The X Factor' but was then overworked and overwhelmed. She tells Helen Brown about that time, a new Christmas song - and the 'young, innocent' Liam Payne

- Helen Brown

"Did you know it takes three years for a new Christmas song to embed itself in people's minds?" asks Rebecca Ferguson. "That's what my publishers told me." It's why the 38-year-old singer and former X Factor star is “not making a big fuss, just yet” about the release of her gorgeous new single.

I doubt it’ll take three years for “Christmas Will Find You” to sink into the nation’s hearts. It took about three minutes to melt mine. Co-written with Eg White – who also collaborated on Ferguson’s debut single “Nothing’s Real But Love” back in 2011 – it’s a heartbreakingly direct song for those moments “when you’re broken in late December”. Across steadily consoling verses, Ferguson’s gently grazed voice addresses the financial pressures and the pain of divided families. Each line settles softly, like snow, before soaring into a chorus that runs: “When you’re so far from Happy Christmas/ Don’t start/ When you’re sure you’ve missed it/ It’ll find you, might be two in the morning/ But it’ll find you...”

“I absolutely love Christmas,” says Ferguson over the phone from her home near Liverpool. Her own tree has been up since early November. “But I wanted to write a song that expresses all the sadness and hardship people feel at this time of year. It’s so tough for people who’ve been bereaved, people who are going through breakups…” She sighs. “And that’s on top of the struggles that go on all the time in families. The arguments about whose house you spend the day in. Who has a bigger house, who has a bigger table, whose husband or wife doesn’t like you...”

Ferguson knows all about complicated families. Although she fought hard against being sold as a “sob story” when she appeared on