At the end of the day, however, it still sounds like a James Blunt album. While Moon Landing is not quite the stripped-back affair that he paints it to be, it is certainly less bombastic and glossy than his more recent albums. You can’t posture and pose to yourself, you can’t lie, you have to be more honest, and that’s why you can hear that this is a very honest album. Instead, sing to me, the producer, through this pane of glass – or even use the glass itself as a mirror, to be more reflective’.
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“I’d be there with a microphone, and I’d say to him ‘I’m struggling to connect to an audience that I can’t yet see – they’re not here in this room and I can’t see the whites of their eyes’, and he’d say ‘Well, y’know, stop singing to that imaginary audience and second-guessing them. To cement his back-to-basics approach, Blunt also rekindled his relationship with producer Tom Rothrock, who produced Back to Bedlam. It’s as it is, and it’s honest, as a result.” There was no screwing with it afterwards, or touching it up, or using a computer to enhance it in any way.
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It was about playing live and capturing the performance. Even the control desk was in the same room, so there wasn’t even a pane of glass between producer and musicians. We recorded live in a room, so some songs on the album were done in one take, with all the musicians in the same room together. I started with Martin Terefe, who did Jason Mraz and KT Tunstall, in London. “It’s going back to a more indie sense of recording. “This is the album that I would have recorded if Back to Bedlam hadn’t hit, if it hadn’t sold,” he explains. His fourth, Moon Landing, also puts paid to the chitchat that abounded last year about his exodus from the music industry rumours of his retirement have been greatly exaggerated (or more likely, taken out of context). So I’m pretty much at ease with what goes on.”īlunt has sold more than a “few” million albums – 18 overall, in fact, with 11 of those attributed to 2004’s world-beating Back to Bedlam – but he sees no shame in celebrating the fact that he is mainstream. At the same time, lots of people say they don’t like it – but there’s a much more positive story there too, which is lots of people are turning up to concerts and buying the albums. If you sell a few thousand or a few million of something, it means things are going pretty well. I think it sometimes becomes more of a story than a reality. That’s the nature of music, and I’m pretty comfortable with that. “Anyone who puts music out is gonna get some praise, and some people who don’t like it. “I think the moment you put music out there, you have to realise that it’s going to be judged,” he says, shrugging.
#James blunt back to bedlam album skin#
So I’ll take that – be it in the media, or real life, or in the digital world.”Ī thick skin and ability to poke fun at oneself have proven equally necessary for the one-time army man, but being scorned and stereotyped by the masses is not something that bothers him. “I come from the army, where we took the piss out of each other all the time – where, if someone’s taking the mickey out of you, it’s a form of affection. “Yeah, I really enjoy Twitter now – it’s taken me a while to find it so, but now I’m really enjoying it,” he says. Another user tweeted “SHOCK NEWS!!! I have actually found myself liking and tapping foot to a JAMES BLUNT song!?!!’ (His reply: ‘You’ll never live this down.’) Sum 1 give me a lobotomy”, and adding the straight-faced riposte of “Somewhere in here, there’s a compliment”.
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Skeptical? Take a look at his Twitter account, where several exchanges over the past few months have included his re-tweeting of comments such as “Just heard a song, liked it & then found out its James Blunt.
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Yet while he may be painted as an Alan Partridge-style character by some factions of the media, and is, undeniably, quite posh (“In real life I have a Yorkshire accent but I put this posh one on for interviews,” he deadpans), James Blunt is, whisper it, actually a rather witty chap. Paul Weller once said that he would rather “eat his own shit” than share a stage with him, and his name has become embedded into modern rhyming dictionary slang (use your imagination). Blunt is, after all, often referred to as ‘the most hated man in pop’, even by his fellow musicians – Noel Gallagher (half) joked earlier this year that he had sold his home in Ibiza because Blunt had bought a house nearby, allegedly complaining that he “couldn’t stand the thought of writing crap tunes up the road”. If you’re James Blunt, it’s not just useful: it’s essential. Most musicians would agree that a sense of humour comes in useful in the crazy, surreal, occasionally vacuous world that is the music business.