James Blunt: 'I remember the smells of war and it is truly devastating'
James Blunt plays INEC Killarney on Friday,
Contrary to what you may have read on social media, James Blunt doesn’t hate his own music. It is true the You’re Beautiful singer has a history of self-deprecating tweets ( “If you thought 2016 was bad.. I’m releasing an album in 2017”). But these are just jokes. Of course he loves what he does. If not, how could he get up on stage and sing his heart out?
“It means the world to me. And more importantly a tonne of people have gone out and bought it. And I wouldn't want to be disrespectful to them. They keep me with a roof over my head,” Blunt says over Zoom.
“And so I'm very grateful to them. It [ his reflexive mickey taking] came initially from… isn't that kind of a modesty we have in our part of the world? The Irish and the English. We’re not so good at saying, you know, ‘oh I’m fantastic’. If you asked me to say, ‘oh this is my greatest album ever’… I can say it. It’s not going to be convincing. It’s not in my blood.”
Blunt, who plays INEC Killarney on Friday, June 10, and then returns for a gig in Dublin in July, has come to be defined by his contradictions. On record he is extravagantly earnest. However, his Twitter feed brims with savage wit: if he isn’t putting himself down, he’s unleashing a flame thrower at his detractors. It’s almost as if he is two different people: the sincere troubadour and the sharp-tongued banter merchant.
“I write quite serious earnest songs. ‘Poor old me, here I am on my own, writing a song’. And that’s not who I am on a day-to-day basis. I'm a bloke who enjoys going out and having fun and it’s not necessarily reflected in my music. Maybe the two are a healthy balance.”
Blunt (48) is speaking from a hotel room in Lithuania, where he’s touring. Bordering Russia, the country has obviously been convulsed by the invasion of Ukraine. Blunt is horrified by Russian savagery, too. A former reconnaissance officer with the Life Guards regiment of the British Army, he knows the ugliness of armed conflict. He’s even stared down Russian soldiers across a potential battlefield, when his regiment was involved in a stand-off at Pristina Airport during Nato’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo.
“I remember the sights, I remember the sounds and I remember the smells of war and it is truly devastating,” he says. “And it’s humans at their worst. Sometimes at their best, but most of the time at their worst. And it is always the politicians and their egos and their thirst for a power that brings us there and, counter to that it, always the civilians on the ground who suffer the most as a result of those politicians’ egos. And this is the same thing, isn't it? One man’s ego has created this environment: millions of people displaced, hundreds of thousands killed and for no good reason.”
Blunt is charming in the way that posh English people tend to be. And yet he’s had testing time in the spotlight. When he had his first number one with You’re Beautiful in the summer of 2005, he was pilloried as the worst thing that could ever happen to music.
His true crime was of course to have arrived at the height of the UK’s landfill indie boom,when groups such as The Libertines and Kaiser Chiefs were cheered as saviours of British pop. A lone troubadour with a guitar and a pocketful of sincerity, Blunt was regarded as beyond the pale.
And yet, how far ahead of his time Blunt was. Today, heartfelt singer-songwriters are all the rage, from Ed Sheeran to George Ezra via Dermot Kennedy and James Bay. Were You’re Beautiful released in 2022 it is tempting to conclude that Blunt would receive a different response.
“I was definitely very open and still am with all my songs. I'm very raw. I never invented the genre. Before me, there was your own Damien Rice. And before him, David Gray. And those guys didn't invent the singer-songwriter, did they? We have just been in a long line of people who picked up a guitar and opened their heart out.”
Still, Blunt understands why he would make for a tempting target. As his recent 'best-of' album, The Stars Beneath My Feet, confirms, he’s always worn his emotions on his sleeve. In the UK especially sincerity has long been viewed with suspicion. It was inevitable Blunt –who had also committed the ancillary offence of being privately educated – would become a punch-bag.
“It's easy to mock because they don't really appreciate the courage it takes. I stand up on stage without a band. When you say, ‘I don’t like Oasis’, you're talking about a band. When you say, ‘I don’t like James Blunt’, you mean a human being. And rather than sing about how cool I think I am, which I'm not, or about my fast car, which I don't have, instead I stand up and say, ‘hey look – these are my feelings, fears and frailties’. I effectively take my clothes off on stage. And opening up takes a certain amount of courage, which isn’t necessarily appreciated.”
He’d been trying to crack music since his early teens (in Kosovo he would go around with his guitar strapped to his tank). However, the big time, when it finally arrived, did so in a heartbeat. In early 2005, Blunt was booked to play the tiny (since shuttered) Crawdaddy venue in Dublin. Six months later, he was filling stadiums. It must have been quite a ride.
“I've been working on it for years. I said I was going be a professional musician when I was 14. And you're talking about when I was 28. And in between, I went down many, many paths. But when everything fell into place, then it moved quickly. And I suppose I can give advice now on that result. I learned a lot from my mistakes. I have a very good path: which is to write a tonne of songs and get a good team around you and a great manager. So that, when everything falls into place, then you can go and there’s no hanging around.”
As with David Gray before him, much of his initial success was in Ireland. He’d played the Ruby Sessions songwriter showcase in Dublin on several occasions. And his first sense that things were happening for him on a large scale was when he set off on an early Irish tour.
“I played a tonne in Ireland. The Irish, you’ve got music in your blood. As a guy with a guitar, my first ever tour was with my keyboard player – we borrowed my then-girlfriend’s Mini, we drove around Ireland, both north and south, and played small, small gigs. We cut our teeth there, as many musicians have done.”
- James Blunt plays INEC Killarney Friday, June 10; and Iveagh Gardens, Dublin, July 10
- When his sister needed to get to a funeral in Cork: "I put her on eBay as a damsel in distress who needed to get to Cork and these men started bidding and bidding and eventually a man with a helicopter won and got her to the funeral."
- Paying tribute to the late Keith Flint of Prodigy: “At the Q Awards years ago, when Noel Gallagher was saying he was leaving Ibiza because I’d moved there, and Damon Albarn refused to be in the same picture as me, and Paul Weller was saying he’d rather eat his own shit than work with me, Keith Flint came over, gave me a hug.”
- When someone tweeted, Can we all take a moment and remember just how terrible James Blunt was: "No need, I have a new album coming soon."
- After a Twitter-user asked,"Who the f**k invited James Blunt to the Invictus Games?", Blunt replied, "Prince Harry. By text. BOOM!"
- When Spotify refused to censor right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan: "If Spotify doesn’t immediately remove Joe Rogan, I will release new music onto the platform.”
