#sorrynotsorry: Blunt is tired of apologising for his song Beautiful
James Blunt: He’s got tweet cred
They’ll probably never like his music, but the singer has reinvented himself via TV and has more than 1m Twitter fans
On December 13 last year, James Blunt tweeted: “If you thought 2016 was bad — I’m releasing an album in 2017.” Twitter has been the launch pad for a makeover for the singer, with people who thought he was bland discovering he is actually very funny. Fourteen days after that tweet, Carrie Fisher died, and nothing felt flippant to him then. She was godmother to his baby.
He admits that will surprise some. It clearly means a lot to him, tears forming as he talks about his late friend. “The saddest thing is that my son will never get to know someone I thought was the most special person,” he says.
The odd couple met before his debut album. When he told Fisher he was recording it in LA, she said he should live with her. So he moved into the Fisher-Reynolds compound, recording his Top 10 hit Goodbye My Lover using a piano in Fisher’s bathroom. Debbie Reynolds wouldn’t allow him within 20 yards of her when she didn’t have make-up on.
“Fisher was my American mother, and a real inspiration,” he continues slowly. “My first album was called Back to Bedlam because I lived in a madhouse with her. She put a cardboard cutout of herself as Leia outside my room, with her date of birth and date of death on her forehead. I’m trying to remember what the date was, because it was around now — and I remember thinking it was too soon.” He saw her at the end of last year. “She went out with a bang, as she was back in movies. Maybe it was a great time to go.”
It’s tough to rank Blunt’s most ridiculous moments. As if being in the army and having his debut become the UK’s biggest-selling record of the Noughties weren’t enough, there was a daft performance on Ellen DeGeneres’s US chat show. “Me, Justin Bieber and Ellen formed a band,” he says, beaming. They did a cover of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way to the tune of Blunt’s mega ballad You’re Beautiful. On Sesame Street, he serenaded Telly Monster with the same song, albeit an octave lower than usual because the puppet couldn’t reach his pitch. “He was just way more manly than me,” the singer deadpans.
Then, last year, it was reported that Princess Beatrice had cut Ed Sheeran’s face while pretending to knight Blunt. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says flatly. He giggles. So it’s not true? “Look, I don’t know what Sheeran’s made up to get publicity. Maybe the guy’s desperate to sell records.” Are you denying involvement? “Attempted denial.” Later, while explaining how he taught Sheeran to ski in return for the younger man teaching him how to write songs, he mock-snaps: “Well, if he wasn’t in the f******way, I’d be a knight by now.” So it is true? “Allegedly.”
We meet in a pub near a home he owns in west London to talk about his new album, The Afterlove, partly written with Sheeran. Blunt’s voice is plummy and he is dressed neatly in a buttoned-up cardigan. He is polite and, as gleaned from Twitter, self-deprecating to an extent that’s rare in any pop star, let alone one with Brits, Grammy nominations and 20m album sales. “We should do the important bit first, which is ordering, before I bore you shitless,” is an opening gambit over the menus. “This album will get terrible reviews,” is what he says of what he is promoting.
The Afterlove, though, is more interesting than anything he has done before. We’re not talking high-charged electro protest punk. In fact, nothing would sound out of place on a slightly risqué Cliff Richard album. Yet the music is clubbier than the guitar-and-piano setup Blunt is known for, and standouts Love Me Better and Lose My Number dance nicely on tidy house riffs. Another co-writer is Ryan Tedder, who has worked for Beyoncé.
Blunt is nervous about how his fan base will react. “Some would just like an album full of ballads,” he says. Good idea to put tickets on sale for the tour before they hear the new material, then. “Exactly. It doesn’t matter if they don’t turn up, as long as they’ve bought the ticket.”
There’s a comment under the YouTube video for Goodbye My Lover where somebody has written: “Rest in Peace Darling... I cry myself to sleep.” Say, snidely, what you want about Blunt’s music, but connection is what songs are meant for, and one of the tracks on the new album, Someone Singing Along, seems to be about that close relationship with fans.
It’s not. He was writing about President Trump (“Somebody’s gonna build a wall/Then smash it with a cannonball”). He does agree, though, that it is mind-blowing when people use his words to soundtrack their lives. Their letters to him — the positive ones — are kept in boxes in the attic.
Blunt, who owns a restaurant with the former England rugby player Lawrence Dallaglio and the motorcycling champion Carl Fogarty, is the century’s least cool pop star. An old Harrovian, born in 1974 to a military family, he married Sofia Wellesley, granddaughter of the 8th Duke of Wellington, in 2014. He’s the sort of star who says “Credibility went out the window with the first album, let’s not try to get it back”, before suggesting that the only way to alter perceptions would be to use his “urban name, JBlo”. Actually, one of his new songs sounds like Foreigner. The record is shot through with his signature self-deprecation: The Afterlove’s first line is “People say the meanest things/Yeah, I’ve been called a dick”. Another track, about You’re Beautiful, goes: “All I do is apologise for a song I wrote in 2005.” This is as self-referential as the most inward-looking Kanye lyric, but with a wit that makes its writer likeable, not egotistical.
The British do focus on the negative quickly
He really is unlike any other musician. There’s no weirdness à la Chris Martin. He’s not eager to please, like, say, James Bay, and he’s not at all loud, like most of them. He’s someone who talks so little about music that I ask if a tweet — “To be honest, I don’t even really like music” — was a joke or not. “Yes, that’s a joke,” he says, just about politely. “I love you had to check.” Maybe it’s the army, maybe a stiff upper lip from his upbringing (“Maybe”), but, either way, despite the madness that whirls about him, he remains calm in his celebrity storm, one that has put him at the same dinner tables as Bill Clinton and Cher.
Perhaps the key half-hour of his career was his appearance on Have I Got News for You in 2010, when he was on with the heavyweight wags Ian Hislop, Paul Merton and Nick Robinson, with Chris Addison as ringmaster. To them, and the audience, he was the silly pop star, comic fodder on a current-affairs show. Yet as he held his own and was laughed with, not at, respect from the panellists clearly grew. “I could feel that,” Blunt agrees. What was he thinking as the show was filmed? “I thought, ‘Why am I wearing this effing jacket?’” It was a shiny black mess. “I looked like kd lang.”
His appearance was strategic, though. In print, journalists twisted his words, whereas he knew he had a sellable personality and wanted it on platforms that are harder to edit. Twitter is an obvious extension of that, but for more than five years he focused on TV, even being a judge on an Australian talent show. “This is one of the only interviews I’ve done in six years,” he says. “I always felt uncomfortable discussing myself.” Has that changed? “No, but I was more uptight before.” Because people loved to hate you? “They all took themselves very seriously, didn’t they?” Was it your class, success or songs that people took against? “I’m not sure, but if you’re told you’re not supposed to like this music, and read it in three places, you go, ‘I don’t like that kind of music.’ Or it becomes difficult to say you like it.”
“[The British] do focus on the negative quickly, though,” he says. “The backlash... But I do shows to tens of thousands. We don’t ever focus on that. Which is why our news is as it is, because we focus on sadder, meaner, uglier things.” Does six years in the Household Cavalry — and being on the brink of World War Three during a stand-off between Nato and the Russians in Kosovo — help him rise above celebrity mud-slinging? He nods. “When I found things hardest, a call to someone in the previous job put things in perspective.”
What a turnaround, then, that such calls aren’t needed now. Since becoming a TV personality with 1m-plus Twitter followers, most of whom can’t stand his songs, Blunt has actually become popular. “It’s been hard to tweet,” he says, “because people have been too nice. It’s time to put out some music, so I have more material.” He is still reticent about offering grand political statements — “I’m the last voice this generation needs” — despite active charity work and an occasional anti-Trump aside. But, thanks to Sheeran, he is more open about his personal life than before.
“My filter just got so thick over the years, and he removed it,” he says sweetly. “Some songs I would have felt uncomfortable writing before.” One, about his wife and son, goes: “You gave me life, dear, and he’s got your eyes.” The family have a home in Ibiza, where Blunt moved in 2006. Because of the pressures of being in Britain? “No. Ibiza has sun.” Reports of his pre-nappy life on the island were that it was hedonistic, all yachts and intoxicants. Is it still wild? “I work, but I play hard,” he says, eyebrow raised. “You’re very welcome to come out.”
Which feels like a good point to mention his terrific old song 1973, the one naysayers nod along to. Its chorus, its beat. It’s perfect... He smiles, as he does for a lot of our lunch, a pariah of sorts who decided to make the most of that status. “It’s good to have one,” he says. “Because with this album, who knows? Maybe this is the end... At long last.”
Surprisingly cheeky stars
Cher (@Cher)
Bad grammar, with Odd Caps and nospacewherethereshouldbeaspace, but Cher’s emoji game is strong; her timeline furious and fun. “DONT FOOLED BY TRUMP’S SHINY(DOG ATE MY POPULAR VOTE)TOY “
Bad grammar, with Odd Caps and nospacewherethereshouldbeaspace, but Cher’s emoji game is strong; her timeline furious and fun. “DONT FOOLED BY TRUMP’S SHINY(DOG ATE MY POPULAR VOTE)TOY “
FOOLED BY TRUMP’S SHINY(THE DOG ATE MY POPULAR VOTE)TOY
GOP WET DREAM HAS ALWAYS BEEN2 EXPAND VOTER SUPPRESSION (OF BLK & LATINO)LAWS
Ryan Reynolds (@VancityReynolds)
One man having fun with his phone: “Went to Disneyland because my daughter’s obsessed with Mickey Mouse. She was so excited when I got home and told her.” Many of his other tweets are entirely unrepeatable
One man having fun with his phone: “Went to Disneyland because my daughter’s obsessed with Mickey Mouse. She was so excited when I got home and told her.” Many of his other tweets are entirely unrepeatable
Anna Kendrick (@AnnaKendrick47)
Has been known to tweet “Boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs” — which you don’t get from Amy Adams
Has been known to tweet “Boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs” — which you don’t get from Amy Adams
Boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs #AndMoreTalentThanMostPeopleHaveInOneFinger#KristenChenoweth #Hairspray
Our top 5 recent James Blunt tweets
For Lent, I’ve given up music. There is a god.
Yeah, I bought those 20 million albums myself. RT @TroyJosephDavis: no one really likes James Blunt right?
Yeah, I bought those 20 million albums myself. RT @TroyJosephDavis: no one really likes James Blunt right?
Anyone know any good dogging sites in Ibiza?
Sorry haven’t Tweeted in a while. I Blocked myself by mistake.
That generation tend not to use Twitter. RT @JonasKryptonite: @JamesBlunt why don't you tweet people that actually like you very very much?
That generation tend not to use Twitter. RT @JonasKryptonite: @JamesBlunt why don’t you tweet people that actually like you very very much?
The Afterlove is released on Mar 24
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