“I promised I would have done it,” he says of his possible name change. “I’m a man of my word.” As it turned out, Charli XCX, Paul Heaton, Sabrina Carpenter, Coldplay, Chappell Roan and Ed Sheeran all outsold him that week. Was he out buying up multiple copies of these rival albums to avoid the deed poll humiliation?
“I heard in the latter part of the week that the record label hadn’t even produced enough of the vinyl or the CD to reach number one, unless there had been a major push on streaming,” he says. “So they had my back. We were all praying for number two.”
An anniversary tour of the album started in November in Brisbane and ends next July in Buenos Aires, including a run of arenas in the UK in February. “That’s the album people actually went out and bought,” he says, grabbing for the self-mocking comment before anyone else can. “That’s the one we should try and milk. For all it’s worth.”
Is he concerned that leaning on such nostalgia is a retreat from the future? Or an admission of creative failure?
“I write about the passing of time, how short life is, and the questions that life throws up and the answers that never come,” he swiftly responds. “Nostalgia and misery have been my mainstays for over 20 years. Our news is so torrid at the moment, our politics so divided. We reflect back and think those were perhaps calmer times. Nostalgia is a rather wonderful tool in our lives to take us back somewhere.”
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You’re Beautiful is, by considerable distance, his biggest song. It is closing in on a billion streams on Spotify, but others – Goodbye My Lover (348 million), Bonfire Heart (259 million), 1973 (231 million) – still have the kind of numbers other acts would kill for.
“It’s a cornerstone of my career,” he says. “But you can’t live off just a single. I was very lucky that it went with an album – an album that sold 13 million.”
While he’ll never escape the shadow of that song, he hasn’t grown to loathe it as some acts have of their biggest hits, seeing them as creative millstones.
“I’ve always loved it, and I consistently love it,” he insists. “For musicians, we pray for a big hit. Why then not be happy with your big hit when you get it? I’ve always joked that The Rolling Stones are still out there looking for their hit, whereas I got it on my first album. Boom. And away you go.”
He does, however, admit he panicked when it took off. “I was praying for number two in the charts,” he says. “I remember getting the phone call and being told that the song was at number one. I was walking up and down my hotel room swearing. With fear, really. Fear it had gone too big, too far, and that my life would change in a way I wasn’t ready for and hadn’t really wanted.”
Blunt says being managed by a company set up by Elton John, who understands the difficulties of fame, cushioned him from the worst. He was, however, the target of tabloid intrusion, including phone hacking by the News of the World (for which he was awarded “substantial” damages in 2012). He says he was “in a pretty lonely place” at the time.
We talk about Liam Payne’s tragic death and what the music industry can do to better protect young pop stars.
“Record labels are a commercial enterprise,” he sighs. “Sometimes they pick up very young people, children, with ambitions and dreams, and they monetise that. Perhaps there should be a higher level of duty of care.”
He says the cult of celebrity is upside down, where the most deserving in society – “people with proper jobs, like doctors and nurses, firemen, police, aid workers in other countries, teachers” – should be celebrated “rather than me as a minstrel, a court jester, or an actor who simply reads out someone else’s lines”.
He became the poster boy for claims that posh people have taken over music (The Last Dinner Party are the latest act to be tried for crimes against class). While he came from money, and music has put him at least in the same postcode as Croesus, he warns against musicians becoming too greedy.
The imbroglio around Oasis’s reunion tickets was the first time he had heard about “dynamic pricing” (prices rising sharply when demand hits a threshold), but asserts that musicians need to take greater responsibility here.
“I wouldn’t want to get in that kind of situation myself,” he says. “You want fans to come in and leave happy. I get an update on the number of tickets that I’ve sold and I can see, roughly for each venue, the prices of the tickets. Speaking to my agent or my manager [I’ll ask], ‘Is this the going rate?’ Having seen what’s gone on with the dynamic pricing debacle, I’ll definitely make sure I keep a tab on that. As artists, we should be asking that question much more.”
James Blunt – that wealthy posho? – becoming the burning conscience for musicians not wanting to fleece their fans? As with much of his career, it turns out he’s not exactly what you presume.
Back To Bedlam 20th Anniversary Edition is out now on Atlantic. James Blunt will play the album in full on a UK and Ireland tour in February and March 2025.
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