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James Blunt
James Blunt’s family have served in one kind of army or
another since 995A.D. A long line of warriors. Savages really. Not a
musical bone in any one of their bodies. The only music he heard
growing up was “Happy Birthday” and “Silent Night”. His father
considered all music, even classical, to be unnecessary noise.
Although James was not one to rock the family boat, he didn’t really
think he was going to join the army – it sort of crept up on him. Plus
his family didn’t have a boat. Aged fourteen he just held the teenage
conviction that he would have an interesting life – maybe that’s why
he picked the guitar? Then again, maybe if he hadn’t, he would have
tripped over it. He went to University and studied Aerospace
Manufacturing Engineering and Sociology, spending most lectures asleep
on the floor at the back. In much the same way, he ended up in the
army. In essence, one day he was sleeping off a hangover at the back
of a sociology lecture hall and the next thing he knew he was in
Kosovo with a gun and a guitar strapped to the side of a tank,
wondering who he could possibly sleep with to get out of this war. To
break up the super attenuated monotony, James
would sometimes stroll through Serb villages wearing an East German
cap singing, “All we are saying is give peace a chance”.
“We were peace-keepers at that point,” he explained, shrugging
helplessly.
So how did the music get into him, you might ask? Well if you were
sent to boarding school aged seven, studied Engineering by mistake (“I thought we were going to fly planes,
but we just pulled metals apart – the brochure was very misleading.”),
joined the army by default, guarded The Queen, buried The Queen Mother
and pranced around London like a tit for Japanese tourists to photograph,
what you’re going to want to do very much after that, besides
getting stoned and laid, is put your gun down, pick up a guitar and
make an album in America with Linda Perry. So James came to Los Angeles
in September 2003 to record with Tom Rothrock et al. At night he’d
go to bars, bringing with him his valuable British accent (in the
U.K., too posh for some people – in LA, the best thing she’d
heard all night) and the fact that like 50 Cent he’d been shot
at numerous times, but unlike the Cent, had dodged the bullets. One
song, “Goodbye My Lover”, was recorded in his landladies’
bathroom (“She was a frequenter of mental hospitals and in general,
a freak – but pleasant”) where, naturally, she kept a
piano.
From birth in a military hospital in Tidworth, to Harrow School,
to Aerospace Manufacturing Engineering, to the Royal Military Academy
Sandhurst, to The Household Cavalry, to Kosovo, to Buckingham Palace,
to a recording studio in Los Angeles. How did James get from there
to here? Only James Blunt’s hairdresser knows for certain, and
either he isn’t talking or James cuts his own hair, and it’s
up to you to join the dots – there are ten of them on the album.
Written by The Landlady
To
read a more conservative biography, click here.
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