Fleur East apologises to Mark Ronson over Uptown Funk

Fleur East has apologised to Mark Ronson after her cover of his song on X Factor caused the music producer to release it early.

The release of single Uptown Funk has been brought forward by five weeks.

After the 26-year-old performed the track on the ITV1 show on Saturday night it topped the iTunes chart.

Simon Cowell called it "one of the top three performances" in X Factor's history.

Fleur told Newsbeat: "Yeah I'm really sorry but all I can say is it's props to all their creative hard work because it's an amazing song."

"I don't know what they were thinking in their minds. I don't think anyone expected my performance to be as popular as it was."

"We didn't expect it to go to number one on iTunes. That's crazy like."

Uptown Funk, sung by Bruno Mars, has been available digitally for a few weeks and was due for release in the UK on 11 January.

Some bookmakers have now suspended bets on the song, sung by Bruno or Fleur, reaching Christmas number one.

Fleur says the music team on the show were surprised at the success: "I think straight away they were like oh wow, what's happened here? So they had to speed up the release date."

Ladbrokes stopped taking bets late on Monday night.

Other bookmakers slashed their odds, with William Hill offering 7/1, making Uptown Funk its third favourite for the festive top spot, after The X Factor winner's single and Band Aid 30.

But Fleur says she hopes Mark Ronson's good gesture won't affect the success of his hard work: "It would be a shame in many ways, obviously because it was their song and they created it, it would only be right that theirs got to number one."

Bruno Mars in the video for Uptown Funk

Featuring Bruno Mars on lead vocals, Uptown Funk is the first single from British producer Mark Ronson's fourth album, Uptown Special.

Ronson's record label, Columbia UK, is part of Sony Music along with Simon Cowell's label Syco.

Analysis by entertainment reporter Nesta McGregor

With Mark Ronson and Simon Cowell both under the Columbia Records umbrella this could be seen as a clever PR ploy. But it could backfire. Anyone who bought Fleur's cover version may not want to spend more money on the original. Uptown Funk will also enter the charts at the most competitive time of year - the race for the Christmas number one. It's likely to go up against the Band Aid charity single and The X Factor winner's song - which ironically could belong to Fleur East.

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