For Noel Gallagher, former member of the British band Oasis, there is nothing in the world more soporific than the singer James Blunt (Tidworth, United Kingdom, 49 years old). “If I wrote songs about my own life, they would be more boring than James Blunt. If that were possible, because we all know, of course, that it is impossible,” he declared in February 2015 to the BBC. Blunt was quick to respond via X (then Twitter): “For once, I agree with him.” The ironic zascas from the author of You’re Beautiful Their detractors are so famous that for years there have been lists on the Internet that include them. Like when a user commented that he would punch him every time he opens his mouth and he replied that he was glad it wasn’t his dentist or when someone suggested that not even James Blunt would go to his own concert and he admitted that only if they paid him . The most praised are precisely the messages in which he criticizes himself. “I must be one of the two people who likes all James Blunt songs. The other is him,” posted a user. “No, you are the only one,” the singer responded. He also joked when someone asked a station to please stop playing his music: “Dad, is that you?”
What is perhaps not as well known as his scathing activity on networks is the wild experience that turns into the tours of someone who for decades has been the target of jokes about how dull he is, judging by the languid pop ballads – basically the ballad― that have made him famous. According to Chris Atkins, the British filmmaker who directed the documentary about the singer’s life after accompanying him for a year, Blunt, being bland, has little. “Having previously been imprisoned for tax fraud, I found numerous similarities between prison and touring with James. “Every day is the same, it’s impossible to go out and you’re stuck in a small space with a bunch of guys farting.” Atkins wrote for The Times last November 30six days before the documentary was released James Blunt: One Brit Wonder (a British wonder, in Spanish) in English and Irish cinemas. “Life on the road with James Blunt is almost as terrifying as landing in Wandsworth Prison,” he admitted in another writing published in the Daily Mail the day of the single premiere, this Wednesday, December 6.
Atkins describes Blunt’s year of touring as a “massive party” after each show. “The pranks, the alcohol, the endless traveling and performing, and the emotional tension are exhausting. By the end he was broken, begging to escape. I told his manager on tour, Robert Hayden: ‘Please drop me off in any city with an airport,’ confesses the documentary filmmaker. The bus they were traveling in, as he details, was similar to a pigsty on wheels. “James happily explained that he had a liquid-only bathroom. ‘Don’t shit on the bus or we’ll throw you on the shoulder.’ The next stage always seemed identical to the one we had just left, and I would stumble backstage clutching a towel, desperately searching for a shower and a working toilet,” he says in The Times. In his writing for Daily Mail He also remembers when the aristocrat Sofia Wellesley – granddaughter of the eighth Duke of Wellington -, married to Blunt since 2014 and mother of his two children, joined them for a period. “Her only luxury was a pair of plastic flip-flops to protect her feet from dirt in the shower,” she says.
But beyond his sordid experience as part of the musician’s team, Atkins makes it clear that his touring antics now are a pale echo of his debauchery in the early 2000s. His great friend and godfather to his eldest son, singer Ed Sheeran, attest to that. In addition to appearing in the documentary to confirm how much he loves him and how much he has inspired him, Sheeran also reveals that Blunt’s band devised a type of “suppositories” to get drugs into his system faster than smoking, smelling or swallowing them. . “He’s had a doctor come in after a hard night to put him on an IV drip,” he confesses to Atkins.
Blunt’s bassist, John Garrison, also acknowledges that the chemical excesses were compounded by the questionable habit of giving away “golden tickets,” which consisted of passes to the backstage “no photos, no autographs, just fun.” “We used to go around picking out people who looked interesting, and 99% of the time they were pretty girls. People would get on the bus drunk and get off the next morning saying, ‘Where the hell am I? How do I get back?’ And we did it for two years,” she explains. His bandmates believe that, at his wildest, Blunt slept with up to five or six women a night. “Unsurprisingly, it’s not something I’m eager to get right now,” Atkins clarifies.
Even so, what has impacted the filmmaker the most about the singer’s life are not his crazy evenings of sex, drugs and Rock And Roll, but his unknown military past. Return tickets for those confused groupies getting off the bus were charged to the band members by their financial director, Blunt’s father, former cavalry officer and Army Air Corps colonel Charles Blount (James changed his last name to make it easier to pronounce). “His father never talks about stupid things like feelings,” says Jane, the artist’s mother, in the documentary: “Charlie is a straight guy. James is too, but he has a soft side,” she adds. And he has seen horrible things. Born in a military hospital in Hampshire, James Blunt trained at the Sandhurst military academy and at the age of 22 he enlisted as a volunteer in the NATO peacekeepers, who were trying to stop the genocide in the Kosovo war. “He smuggled a video camera into his tank and gave me full access to these incredible images,” says Atkins. “He filmed rows of temporary graves and had to deal with the bodies in bags that were later exhumed to identify them,” describes the documentary filmmaker, for whom this experience supports Blunt’s black jokes. As the musician himself confessed: “There is a sense of black humor that comes from anguish, from trying not to end up deeply affected by what you have witnessed.”
The first time James Blunt performed at Sony Music he did so dressed in a military uniform on horseback. He was rejected by the record company EMI because “his voice was too elegant,” Atkins reveals, but was discovered by the American label Custard Records: “Fortunately, Americans love an elegant accent.” In 2005 he released the incredibly catchy You’re Beautifulthat It reached number one worldwide. The song was so ubiquitous that Blunt performed it live at Elton John’s civil union ceremony with her now-husband, David Furnish.
Almost 20 years later, the ballad, which he himself confessed tells the story of a drug addict who harasses another man’s partner and has little romance, continues to be part of the collective imagination and Blunt continues to sing it on tours to that thousands of fans still come to chant it. The singer, who turns half a century next month, has become almost as famous for self-mockery as he is for selling 20 million albums. “His crude gags self-criticism almost gave his heart attack manager, but they brought him legions of followers and completely changed his public persona. Younger fans now come to his concerts because of his Twitter account, and his shows include a long routine of stand up”, acknowledges Atkins, who has experienced it firsthand and admits that, although he has never been a lover of his music, now he cannot get it out of his head. On the day of the documentary’s premiere, Guardian posted a review in which I gave it four stars out of five. Immediately, Blunt echoed on your X accountflaunting, once again, that humor: “A four-star review of Guardian. “It’s the first time for me.”
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