Former army captain James Blunt swapped his gun for a guitar, and he's ready to take on the world, he tells Tony Clayton-Lea
You can get away with murder in a song, says James Blunt. This is a funny/strange thing for a former army captain to say, but then - in a good way - James Blunt is a funny/strange guy.
The latest in an inordinately long line of UK singer-songwriters, Blunt stands out from the rest - mostly a straggly, banal lot too fixated with the ghosts of Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley for their own and our good - for two main reasons: firstly, his debut album, Back To Bedlam, has the kind of songcraft reminiscent of a younger, slimmer, straighter Elton John (with whom he shares management); secondly, his songs have been forged under extreme pressure from a mixture of family and career dictates.
Talking hours before his show at Dublin's Crawdaddy venue last week, the slight Blunt shows little sign of his former occupation; the hair is unkempt but rakish, the beard ditto. He bears the fundamental hallmarks - straight posture, rather clipped accent, an almost cliched level of civility - of someone whose upbringing was resolutely Middle England middle-class. Blunt's father, a former career colonel in the British army, effectively pushed his son into following in his footsteps. An army scholarship at Bristol University was followed by four years training, touring and commanding. As an army captain, Blunt experienced duty visits to Canada and the former Yugoslavia (where he was the first British officer into Pristina, leading a column of 30,000 peacekeeping troops).
"I really enjoyed the army, it was an interesting and varied experience," he says in a tone of voice that almost sounds like a recruitment advert.
"Kosovo was harrowing and extreme, but it was a life experience wholly worthwhile. That said, I didn't want to make a life of it." By day, patrolling Pristina, Blunt kept his guitar bolted to the outside of his tank. By night, it came into the barracks with him as he wrote about life in the aftermath of one of the decade's bloodiest civil wars. How did the disciplinarian and militaristic aspect of the armed forces suit his character? Was it galling for a burgeoning singer-songwriter to have to toe the line? "I saw it very much as a game, and I played along with it. When someone shouts at you, you don't take it personally. You just go along with it. At times, it gets almost childish in a Forrest Gump way. But you know, perhaps I needed a boot occasionally. Having come out of university a little lazy I'm sure I needed that." One of the things he says his armed forces experiences instilled into him was attention to detail. Indeed, Blunt is quite obsessed by fine-tuning. He recalls listening to his album in Los Angeles at five in the morning, on his own, obsessing over minutiae that no one else would ever notice. "The need to get it right is above all else," he says.
As far as getting things right, it's a case of so far so good for Blunt. Every step of the way to the release of his album has been in the right direction. There have been, he asserts, no steps backwards. Determination is the key. Song writing is the goal. What else was he going to do, anyway? "The first thing was to resign from the army, which I did in 2002, and then after that to work on the songs. I also tried to meet other musicians in order to understand what it was all about, rather than touching base with an occasional person from the music industry and asking what should I be doing.
"Someone else around at that time advised me to get a manager, and from then things formed a really clear path. Actually, most things have fallen into place all at the same time: I've come to understand songcraft in the past few years. I met my manager and within a month of that signed a publishing deal with EMI; as a result of that I signed to a record label within six months. I firmly believe these events took place through a combination of my focusing on things and wanting to make things happen before I reached the age of 30 and beyond."
Blunt's music and lyrics seem keen to extrapolate on the notions of understanding, connecting and communicating with his (steadily growing) audience. It's something he can't avoid, he insists, as these same notions form part of his own defining characteristics. Again, his family background is the reason; because of his father's army career, as a child Blunt moved from military base to base, missing the kind of solid connection with people that stems from a relatively stable, stationary working life.
"I've had lots of best friends along the way," he explains, "people I've never seen again following an initial period of friendship, so perhaps there is that sense of isolation and loneliness.
"Yet loneliness is the wrong word, because it implies sadness, which I don't adhere to. Songwriters - particularly the singer-songwriter breed - follow quite an individual path, so perhaps something akin to isolationism is the closest way to describing the life I lead. Loner? God, that word has such a negative connotation, and is very unfair to apply haphazardly."
It seems as if Blunt is a morose figure of a man; a singer-songwriter archetype blessed with a talent to make the listener glad they're not as miserable as he is. He might agree with the latter description, but not the former.
"Generally, I'm a happy person," he blurts out. "I enjoy making those emotional connections with an audience. I like and enjoy the interaction between the listener and myself because it makes me feel very calm and comfortable walking such an individual path, and living such an individual life." Is it not a self-imposed exile, though? He shrugs.
"If you find comfort in that, then it's a chosen life. A song from the album, for instance - Goodbye My Lover - is a hugely personal song. It's the core of an individual thought that has run through my mind for years, and the truest feeling I could possibly express, which I couldn't do in plain conversation. There's a common bond in that people have told me they connect with the song so incredibly strongly. In terms of being a singer-songwriter, you can't ask for better than that, can you?"
• Back to Bedlam is on release. James Blunt plays Spring & Airbrake, Belfast, Mar 30; Róisín Dubh, Galway, Apr 1; Whelan's, Dublin, Apr 2; and The Vault, Cork, Apr 3
