Voice coach Rachel Stevens: 'Bressie mumbles a lot and he's hard to understand'

This season marks the fourth year of the singing contest and with the past three winners being male, S Club 7 singer Rachel wants to see a girl win the show this year.

"I think we need a girl to take it home this year. Bressie has won it the past two years so I think it needs to be snatched from him," Rachel told the Herald.

"The show is really, really tough but it's a platform for people and it gets them out there which is so hard to begin with. You've just got to work so hard and it would be interesting to see a girl win it, but there's lots of strong male vocalists so we'll just have to see," she added.

Mentor

The mum-of-two has vowed to be a really strong mentor in the hopes of bringing one of her acts to glory.

"I'm definitely going to be a really involved mentor. It's interesting when you've been on the other side of it and you're watching when they're nervous and when they're holding back and I can sort of see myself in them," she admitted.

The first episode aired last night with the blind auditions and Rachel (36) believes that the contestants not being able to see the judges takes the pressure off.

"Ireland has some really great talent. There was just such a mix of characters and people, especially at that beginning," she said.

Rachel is a big fan of the format and is looking forward to working on her team's performances.

"The concept is brilliant - you're just basing it on the voice and then all the other elements come into it and you can think about the whole package, how they perform, their style, their confidence levels - all those things come into play later on."

While Rachel has performed in Ireland numerous times with S Club 7, she is still getting used to the lingo and has had a few embarrassing moment - one of which involved an audience member asking if he could 'shift', meaning kiss, her.

"I know what shifting means, we've done that one now," she laughed. "I'm getting all the slang down now. It's a good job it was all quite innocent because I was like 'sure' when a guy in the audience asked if I would shift him and I was like 'of course, no problem'.

"Learning the lingo is fun but it's tricky because I'm sitting next to Bressie and I'm always following on from him with my comments - he speaks really fast and he mumbles a lot so it's quite difficult to understand him sometimes," she added.

hnews@herald.ie