James Blunt reveals the truth about his celebrity friends and enemies, and his extraordinary new "non-memoir".
Where to begin with the fact/fiction mash-up and riotous rollercoaster of self-deprecation, name-dropping and shaggy-dog fantasy that is James Blunt’s autobiography, titled Loosely Based On a Made-Up Story and billed by the author as a “non-memoir”?
Perhaps with the truth behind his slashing of Ed Sheeran’s face with a ceremonial sword at Prince Andrew’s Royal Lodge home. This boozy 1am joust in 2016 necessitated the “Ginger Ninja” having six stitches, with the 1.73-metre “Pop Midget” blaming Princess Beatrice for the injury - Blunt “foolishly joked” to the press that she was in fact trying to knight him.
Maybe with the claim that Boris Johnson pulled out of buying the singer’s London house on the day the parties were due to exchange contracts. And that the deposit the perfidious PM was due to pay on the singer’s house - £800,000 ($1.66m) - amounted to exactly the sum the sometime politician was loaned by a contact of Richard Sharp, the crony whom Johnson later made BBC chairman.
Or the time at military academy when he faced the possibly adverse results of a compulsory drug test, only for his father, a Colonel, to get him off the hook by engendering sympathy in Blunt’s superiors by alerting them to the “fact” that Blunt’s “sister has passed the test for leukaemia”.
Or the time Lieutenant Blount of the Life Guards was drunk in charge of a tank as Nato peacekeepers prepared to roll into Kosovo. So drunk that he lost said tank.
Well?
”That would be incriminating!” comes the cheerful reply of the Harrow- and Sandhurst-educated career army man who dropped an “o” and was reborn as one of the biggest-selling British pop stars of the Noughties. “I don’t know the drink-driving laws in Macedonia. But I suspect it’s frowned upon.”
What about the reality of his relationship, personal and financial, with BoJo (“I bumped into him at the Duke of Wellington’s funeral - I’m married to the duke’s grand-daughter, obvs,” begins one perfectly Wodehousian passage, “and he immediately crowed, ‘Blunty! How’s your mother? Has she forgiven me yet?’”)?
”Well, he was looking for 800k, wasn’t he? There’s lots of rumours, but I hear he’s now got a place in Oxfordshire. Is that the case? I don’t know.” A pause for effect. “I know that ‘cause my builders told me.”
Blunt is a musician once infamous for his soppy songs, now better known for his sword-sharp social media retorts to detractors. The morning of our interview he’d tweeted his 2.2 million followers, over a video of him laughing uproariously at his own book: “Oh dear. Think I’m gonna get cancelled.”
As I intimate my desire to fact-check a few other stories in the entirely self-written tome, Blunt halts me in my tracks.
”Before we go on, I’ll struggle to tell you what’s true and what’s not,” he claims as he shrugs off his biker’s leather jacket and we settle into a corner table at the Chelsea pub he owns, The Fox and Pheasant, his CCM motorbike, handcrafted in Bolton, cooling outside. “Just because it’s nice for me to be ambiguous.” Then he non-elaborates: “It’s not a memoir. It’s a non-memoir.”
Whatever Loosely Based On a Made-Up Story is or isn’t, it’s certainly not unentertaining. It’s full of ripping yarns about the “inbred” Blounts. About his establishing an officer-class male escort business. His disquieting - not to mention heroic - experiences in Kosovo. Entanglements with Bill Clinton and Elizabeth Taylor. That time he sold his sister on eBay (that one’s blue-tick verified). That time when he blocked the toilet in Jamie Foxx’s hotel room and so, on the advice of old uni chum Bear Grylls, swallowed his own “party poo”.
His stratospheric and against-the-odds rise to global fame in 2005 with You’re Beautiful - and the resulting backlash that saw him pilloried as a posh pariah by the tabloids and the pop establishment. Damon Albarn refused to be photographed with him, Paul Weller preferred to eat his own faeces than work with him, Lily Allen went for the rhyming slang of his surname and even then-little Charlotte Church weighed in: “He’s awful posh. I don’t like him.”
Blunt also claims Mick Jagger refused to shake his hand at the Brit Awards and that his father told Chris Martin, who went to Sherborne School, that “the least he could do was to stick up for another posh t***”. Blunt then writes: “Chris took to the podium and said, ‘Would everyone stop being so mean to James Blunt?’”
Are his musical peers still mean to him?
”Not really. I think eventually they thought: ‘Okay, he’s still around!’ People have moved on.”
Really? Even Albarn?
A quizzical eyebrow. “I thought he was dead.”
In fact when it comes to Albarn, according to the “non-memoir”, it was Blunt who had the last laugh. At the 2005 Q Awards, Albarn and Blunt were seated next to each other and were up for the same award, Best New Act. Blunt writes, with barely restrained glee: “Albarn turned his seat away and refused to speak to me for the entire three-hour ceremony. When the awards ended, I tapped him on the shoulder and told him that I thought he was a genius, that I loved his album Demon Days, and that I was sorry he didn’t feel confident enough to talk to him. And with that, carrying the award, I left.”
Now, four months shy of his 50th birthday, James Blunt, indubitably, is having a moment.
Loosely Based On a Made-Up Story will be a bestseller, enjoyed by people despite their best intentions, just like his music is. He has a new record deal, albeit with the same label that released his first seven albums, although these days any long-in-the-tooth artist re-signing a deal is a victory. His latest LP, Who We Used To Be, is a winning set of pop-tuneful, midlife-facing compositions written with a brace of young producers and writers. There are moving songs about his wife Sofia (a beautiful aristocrat, obvs), his two young children (“posh t***s as well” given the family’s luxe living arrangements in Verbier, Ibiza and Gloucestershire) and Carrie Fisher, the late actress who was best friend, benefactor and godmother to his first-born.
For next year’s arena-scale world tour, his concert booking agents tell him that he’s “sold more tickets than I ever have done for any tour. Honestly”, Blunt adds with a smile, acutely aware of the posh-boy-who-cried-wolf credentials he’s merrily established in his book. Meanwhile, that heavy touring schedule that is, these days, his financial bread-and-butter is entertainingly exposed in a documentary coming soon to a cinema near you.
One Hit Wonder is blessed with another pithy title - although talking-head contributor and good pal Sheeran points out how short Blunt, now reborn in the Ginger Ninja’s opinion as a “national treasure”, is selling his songwriting achievements. Blunt is pre-emptively billing the film as “Alan Partridge meets Spinal Tap”. But while it’s definitely, again, hilarious, it’s actually considerably more thought-provoking and revealing than that tagline would suggest.
The documentary lays bare just how much opprobrium Blunt faced by virtue of his background, accent and, with his breakthrough ballad, ubiquity. A multi-millionaire pub owner and resident of three countries with a Swiss ski lift named in his honour can easily chuckle about the deathless afterlife of You’re Beautiful. But the tabloid vitriol was unyielding. He was a phone-hacking victim (his claim was successfully settled).
And, yes, while he enjoyed the lusty fruits of his success, he wouldn’t reasonably have expected a News of the World sex-sting. There’s absolutely no self-pity from this rich, privileged kid made even richer and more privileged, but the film zeroes in on the nastier tabloid stories - all unflinchingly collected in the scrapbooks kept by his aghast parents.
For all the joking: did a backlash that drove him to leave London for warmer (in every sense) climes get to him?
”Definitely yes,” Blunt replies with intense feeling, the wisecracks gone. “I didn’t necessarily speak about it too much in the book. The only [mention] is how I bought myself a really lovely place in Ibiza, on the top of a hill, so I can see the enemy coming. And I sat there thinking: ‘Yeah, I [deserve] this... But what’s going on back home?’”
The other time he quietens in our interview is during our discussion of Fisher, for whom he’s written the heavy new song Dark Thoughts. When he was a struggling musician in Los Angeles, the actor put up the Englishman and mentored him. It was the beginning of a deep friendship, one that reached a peculiar kind of high at the 2007 Grammy Awards. Blunt was nominated for five and there seemed a reasonable chance he’d win at least one of them. So the night before the ceremony Fisher, ever helpful, wrote him a hilariously rude acceptance speech on a piece of paper which, claims Blunt, included the lines:
”I just want everyone to read in the tabloids that even in my wildest fits of self-loathing, I never would have made daddy promise that this could ever validate my own mediocrity. And to the other suck-a-**** nominees, I want each of you to know how totally wonderful your fake smiles make me feel right now!... You know, there are so many star-f***ing, Napoleon complex-suffering label execs to thank!”
Perhaps fortunately for all concerned, America’s then-favourite Brit went home empty-handed. But you can see why Blunt loved Fisher - so much so that he made the actor godmother to his eldest son. The Star Wars star, in turn, anointed young Master Blunt a Jedi knight and gifted him a lightsabre.
I ask if she was an obvious choice for the godmother gig. At first Blunt replies with another joke. “I’ve got other mates, too, obviously, she’s not the only one.” Then, when I push for an actual explanation, he swallows before saying: “I asked her to be godmother because I...” he falters. “Because she didn’t look after herself. And I did say at the time: ‘I want you to be godmother so that my son will know you. So will you look after yourself a little bit so that he’ll know you? That’s why I want you to be godmother’.”
Did Fisher understand that?
”Obviously not!” he replies, eyes shining. Fisher, who had long struggled with addiction, stopped breathing on a London-Los Angeles flight in December 2016 and never recovered. She was 60, her godson, 2. “And that’s why the emotion [of the song] is mixed with anger and guilt and sadness,” continues Blunt, tears in his eyes.
In the book the musician describes his method of helping his friend with her drug problems: “[I] did them with her, pretending to myself that I would guide her to redemption one day - just not today.”
When I press him on the veracity of those details - he also writes that “as a result, her daughter Billie blames me in part for her death, and no longer speaks to me” - he wriggles out of an answer yet again. Eventually, he says: “Rather than asking me if something is true, it’s worth finding a person in the book and saying to them, ‘is this true?’ I’ve got a chapter on Bill Clinton, but if you ask him, he might not have a clue who I am!”
I don’t have Clinton’s number, but I do have Steve Morton’s. The music industry executive is mentioned early in the book, in comic passages detailing Blunt’s desperate attempts to get signed by a record label. Recalling a meeting at Virgin Records, Blunt writes: “And then the marketing director, Steve Morton, who is married to the DJ Jo Whiley, perked up: ‘We love your music, but we do have one issue... with your speaking voice. Any chance you can do a different accent?’ I paused for thought, and then replied, ‘I can do Pakistani?’”
”I would hate for the truth to get in the way of a great story!” a laughing Morton tells me, before going on to clarify his actual job at the time (media director) and the circumstances.
“Back then, no one was aware of James’s wonderful self-deprecating humour... As far as we knew, he had just returned from a war zone, where he had been entertaining the troops like a modern Vera Lynne... A great story, but not exactly the rock and roll persona of Liam Gallagher.
”We met him and he was charming. However, he spoke like he was third in line for the throne,” Morton continues. “I expressed concern about selling him to the media. I thought they’d give him a kicking for being too posh. To be fair to me, initially, they did. To be fair to James, though, he wrote one of the decade’s biggest singles and has sold millions of records since.”
Recollections, as they say, may vary - a line the author uses early in his book, attributing it to the former employer he dubs “Big Liz”, the late Queen whose own mother’s coffin he guarded as an officer in the Household Cavalry. But all parties can reasonably agree: James Blunt is having the last laugh.”
You talk about the negatives, but I’ve really had a f***ing blast!” he concludes with Tigger-ish chirpiness. “I live an amazing life in Ibiza and Switzerland, and I’m starting my eighth world tour. And all of that has gone on while I’ve kept my feet slightly on the ground.”
Loosely Based on a Made-Up Story (Hachette) is published on October 31. Who We Used To Be (Warner Music NZ) is out now. One Hit Wonder is in cinemas soon.
The magical world of Oz, where you can expect the unexpected. Watch the new #WickedMovie trailer now. Video / Universal Pictures