UK Edition
James Blunt interview: 'I have never cared about whether I’m cool'
With an arresting honesty, James Blunt tells me that he had considered recording our interview. I say that he can’t trust journalists very much.
“I stopped doing interviews for a long time because the words were mine but they were in the wrong order,” says the singer-songwriter. “Context is a very important thing – a lot of the things I say aren’t serious and so to remove the laughter does me no favours.”
This endearing frankness, of course, makes me worry that I am going to misquote Blunt, or make him sound pompous when, in fact, he is anything but. We meet in the offices of his label, Warner, and he’s a slight, unassuming figure with delicate features framed by rather questing blue eyes.
His RP accent is crisp and precise, his vowels perhaps clipped by an institutionalised life at Harrow and then the army, for whom he worked as a reconnaissance officer. He admits to being slightly nervous, but this is betrayed only by occasional hesitancy in his speech, which he will then try and correct by talking very quickly, pausing to emphasise the odd word. He is also rather playful.
“Of course,” he says. “We are in the entertainment business. This should be fun. We are musicians, we don’t save lives. We shouldn’t… we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously or be revered that much.”
Blunt does a fine line in flippancy which has, on occasion, got him into trouble. His Tweets are laced with self-deprecating humour: “If you thought 2016 was bad – I am releasing an album in 2017.” When he started out on Twitter, his handle was “@DirtyLilBlunt” until his record label intervened. “They saw what I was doing and they asked me to stop because they thought I would damage my brand. I thought, come on, what are you talking about? My brand is broken. This is who I am, it’s amusing.”
I say I am surprised that Blunt perceives his brand as broken. He is, after all, extraordinarily successful. His 2004 debut, Back to Bedlam (which included the hit single You’re Beautiful), was the best-selling album of that decade and his estimated wealth stands at $18million. But he’s right in a way.
The sneering metropolitan elite, those who write about him in the British media, have been less than kind and his music has always endured a critical mauling. This is probably because his earlier work was dominated by playlist-friendly ballads, evincing a sort of earnestness which is markedly different from Blunt’s more puckish online persona.
His new album, The Afterlove is not exactly a departure, but there is certainly more light and shade, and a certain expansiveness in terms of production. Blunt has collaborated with, among others, hitmakers MoZella and Stephan Moccio, who co-wrote Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball”, and his close friend Ed Sheeran. He says: “Whoever reviews my album for your paper will not be brave enough to say they like it – even if they think it’s the best album they’ve ever heard, because they are too worried about how they are going to be perceived. But it’s OK, I’m cool with that.”
But is he really cool with that? The opening line from Love Me Better, The Afterlove’s opening track, begins thus: “People say the meanest things. Yeah, I’ve been called a d***, I’ve been called so many things… But that… But that don’t mean it doesn’t sting.”
I ask whether that’s one from the heart. He laughs: “I’ve been called worse things than a d***, actually. It rhymes with Blunt.”
I can’t work out whether this jolly imperviousness is a defence mechanism. I hope, I tell him, that he is genuinely unperturbed by the naysayers who, it seems, include celebrity musicians too. Paul Weller once said that he would “rather eat his own ****” than perform with Blunt.
“If you look at that closely,” says Blunt, quickly drawing closer, “you will notice that it was a ‘friend’ [of Weller] who spoke to the journalist, so you think ‘I am not so sure [he said that]’. Indeed the reports are tellingly vague. A “spokesperson” for Weller endorsed the quote, saying: “He’s the last person Paul wants to sing with.”
This is, of course, swaggering snobbery and, to be honest, Blunt seems beyond caring. “It’s the same with the Gallagher brothers [Noel is quoted as saying that Blunt ”doesn’t get people’s backs up because he is posh, it’s because he’s ****”.] I’m sure they say these things with a wry smile and then everything just gets exaggerated.”
Blunt will open for Sheeran when his US tour begins in June. The younger singer has also had to endure a fair amount of press vituperation and, indeed, the hatred of the online community who Blunt describes as “lonely people in darkened rooms with their trousers round their ankles”.
I wonder if the pair ever discuss the potential damage this could do to their careers. “We haven’t felt the need to talk about that,” he says carefully. “No, I don’t think we have. Occasionally, we might comment when one of us has read something ridiculous in the media. But we’ll laugh and go for a pint. Ed has got his feet firmly on the ground.”
Another friend was Carrie Fisher, the US actress and writer who died suddenly in December at the age of just 60. The pair met in London through Blunt’s former girlfriend, Dixie Chassay, and, when he travelled to LA to record his first album, Fisher offered him her Beverly Hills mansion “and allowed me to call it home”.
She later became godmother to his son by Sofia Wellesley whom he married in 2014. It’s clear that Fisher’s death is still piercing - he has just written a song for the memorial service of Fisher and her mother, Debbie Reynolds, who died days later - and Blunt seems uncertain as to whether he wants to talk about her.
“I don’t want to appear to be selling my record off the back of my friend,” he says. “But what I will say is that she was hysterically funny and someone who was probably too bright for planet Earth. Life won’t be as much fun without her. She was quick with her humour – she laughed at herself and she laughed at the world. She and I had that in common, and I think that’s why we got on.
“The one timely thing about her very untimely death was that she went out at the top, as a big star again as General Leia. She chose her timing well in that respect…”
Blunt is now 43 and besides the constant self-sabotaging denigration, he possesses a sort of stiff-upper lip maturity, a sanguine quality which indicates that he is aware of his privileged position.
“I haven’t had the difficulties in my life that other people have had. I didn’t have an unhappy childhood. There was the experience in Kosovo [when he was in the army], but that wasn’t difficult for me, that was difficult for the Kosovans. We were just doing a job.”
The “we” in this sentence is telling. There is a sort of “Cry God for England, Harry and St George” quality about Blunt which is evident when he is talking about the camaraderie of his bandmates on tour (he hits the road for 18 months later this year) and also indicates his gung-ho approach to tackling social media.
One thing he feels less happy with is the level of fame which has stalked him ever since he launched his pop career. He is too grounded to ignore its many benefits, realises he has to embrace it up to a point.
“I think I was lucky to be a little older when I became famous. But still, the shock of the world starting to treat you in a weird way… I had come from the army where we had deal with life or death, and suddenly people were asking whether you were cool or not. I have never cared about whether I’m cool."
He has, however, cared about being called posh. He only went to Harrow, he tells me, because his father was in the army and they paid the fees. “The UK obsesses over my poshness, but it’s never mentioned overseas. I suppose it will always follow me because I have a stupid speaking voice, but I don’t think it’s an appropriate label.”
Accusations of poshness aren’t going to be dimmed by the fact that Blunt’s wife is the daughter of the ninth Duke of Wellington, nor by the news that Blunt has just bought The Fox and Pheasant, a pub near his home in Chelsea which he saved from property developers. It’s a quixotic act, unless of course he is going to use it as a base for a UK residency. That thought elicits a typical Blunt response. “I won’t be pulling pints, nor will I be performing there. Locals can breathe a sigh of relief.”
The Afterlove is released on March 24