‘I wanted to give Dad one of my kidneys’
In a deeply moving interview, singer James Blunt reveals his anguish at his father’s chronic illness and explains why he’s written a new anthem in his honour
CARRIE FISHER WAS A SECOND MOTHER TO ME. SHE WAS A WISE WOMAN... I WAS LUCKY TO KNOW HER
James Blunt is not a man who cries easily. He may have made millions from one of the world’s most sentimental love songs, You’re Beautiful, but Blunt is an army man whose stiff upper lip was formed at birth. Yet now there are tears in his eyes.
We are talking about his new album, Once Upon A Mind, and in particular one deeply poignant piano ballad, Monsters, a very different sort of love song. It is about age and loss and the pain of a son saying goodbye to his father at the end of his life. It is about Blunt’s own father, Colonel Charles Blount, a former cavalry officer in the 13th/18th Royal Hussars, helicopter pilot and colonel of the Army Air Corps.
The reason this is so difficult for Blunt, 45, to talk about is that his father has stage four chronic kidney disease, and he needs an O positive organ donor. None has been forthcoming so far, and the family have been shown a timeline of life expectancy in these circumstances. ‘I wanted to give him my kidney,’ says Blunt, ‘but I wasn’t a match. My sister wasn’t a match either. And so we are waiting, because all we can do is wait. The health service has very strict criteria for who is at the top of the list and all the various placings on the list, and because of reasons of age and so on my father isn’t a priority.’
He pauses and you can see him struggling to contain his emotions, averting his gaze to the wall to stop the tears from dropping. ‘And we have no complaint about that. It’s absolutely right that younger people are given a priority, that is the way it should be, but it is on your mind all the time and there is nothing you can do but wait and try to accept what can happen.’
He pauses again, then says with heart-breaking understatement, ‘It’s just a bit difficult.’
He looks me in the eye once more. ‘And as you see it’s very hard for me to talk about it. I can write a song about how I feel but I find expressing emotions oneto-one very difficult. Classic public schoolboy. Not really taught to say out loud what you feel, just taught to get on with it. Which makes it more complicated.’ He wrote and recorded Monsters without telling his father, who has only recently heard the lyrics of a song that is inevitably going to become an anthem for grief across the world. ‘I just played it to him. Just the two of us in a room. He listened. And he said: “That’s the way it is.”’
He shrugs, focusing his eyes momentarily once more on the wall.
Blunt has always been a rather complicated man, although on the surface he has always liked to keep things very simple. After graduating from Bristol University he spent six years in the army, rising through the ranks to captain and serving in Kosovo and as part of the Queen’s Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment. He left to become a musician and changed his name (Blount being too complicated a spelling for a stage name). Against the odds, his debut album, Back To Bedlam in 2004, contained one barnstormer of a ballad, You’re Beautiful, which was released as a single in 2005, sold millions around the world and won him three Grammy nominations, an Ivor Novello and two Brit awards. Suddenly, Blunt was front and centre on the post-Britpop music map.
But there was a backlash, and the man who had witnessed the atrocities of war was not prepared for the open hostility of the music industry, where a former public schoolboy with a military record was considered the height of uncool, and his multimillion-selling song dismissed on social media as ‘pure vomitinducing cheese’.
At the Q Awards the year after the release of his album, he sat at a table while Noel Gallagher told the audience he was leaving Ibiza because he’d just heard Blunt had bought a house there (Blunt still lives on the island), Paul Weller announced he’d ‘rather eat his own s*** than work with James Blunt’ and Blur’s Damon Albarn refused to be in a photo alongside him. The NME named Back To Bedlam Worst Album Of The Year.
Blunt’s response was to go large in the face of conflict. He toured the world, reinvented himself as the James Bond of music, dating beautiful models, including Petra Nemcova, partying hard and splashing out on classic motorbikes, pads in Verbier and Ibiza and amassing a €16.5million fortune. In the army he was taught to fight back and as a civilian he turned his Twitter page into a robust – and rather hilarious – platform where he would be the first to take the mick out of himself and turn the tables on his trollers. He currently has 1.8million followers. ‘I have been much misunderstood,’ he says with a smile. ‘But you can’t let it get to you.’
Right now, Blunt has a truly enviable life. He is married to aristocrat Sofia Wellesley, a lawyer, who is the mother of their two sons, both under five (whose privacy he has fiercely guarded), though he reveals that his current worries about his father have made him realise how much he needs to be around, not just for his father but for his wife and children.
‘I have spent so much of my life touring and that has been great for me, but not so much for everybody else,’ he admits. Songs on the album contain veiled apologies to his wife and sons for being away for so long. Has it got him into trouble?
He squirms slightly. ‘Well, you know how those conversations go. “I’m going to be away for a few months, and now they’ve added another month.” It’s tough, but I’m incredibly lucky in that my wife understands. She came with me on one tour for 18 months and I was able to bring my eldest son with me for one month. I loved that. And it was a big thrill for him to stand on a stage and sing The Wheels On The Bus to an empty stadium during a rehearsal.’
Blunt’s friendships include Ed Sheeran, who is godfather to his youngest son, and Prince Harry (they served together in the army). He attended Sheeran’s wedding, Prince Harry’s wedding, and, most recently, Ellie Goulding’s wedding to art dealer Caspar Jopling. ‘You can hire me for weddings. That’s my new business. I’m doing well.’ The jokes are a deflection as he won’t be pushed for details on these events.
His life seems to be populated with stars. When he was at Bristol, Blunt reveals he was in a band with fellow army man Bear Grylls. ‘We would go out busking, we co-wrote a very long song and we’d go up to couples, ask their names and sing it to them including their names in it. For some reason we sang in a very northern accent and we’d carry on until they would pay us to leave them alone. It was a sort of form of musical mugging.’
When he wrote his first album, he was taken in by Hollywood star Carrie Fisher, who allowed him to live at her home and remained his good friend until her death in 2016, which hit him hard. ‘She was a second mother to me,’ he says. ‘You could say anything to her – she was the most incredibly wise woman. I was very lucky to know her.’
Blunt is no longer living out the Bond lifestyle. His latest album – his sixth and possibly his best – is testament to that. The sense that mortality and reality have hit resonate through all 11 songs while harking back to the man he was when he wrote his debut album. If Back To Bedlam was his songs of innocence then Once Upon A Mind is his songs of experience.
‘The connection between them is the emotional honesty,’ he says. ‘I wrote my first album exposing my emotions and I was ripped apart. Then, to an extent, you lose that or you disguise it, but with this album, with what was happening in my life, I wanted to be honest again. I don’t care what people think. I will go out there and sing and expose myself through my music and if I connect with people that is what I set out to do.
This has been the hardest album to write because I’m not hiding anything. It’s nearly killed me to do it, but it’s what I had to do.’
We return to the subject of his father, whose presence hangs in the room and throughout the album. ‘When I released my first album my life changed. The world around me went crazy but my parents gave me absolute solidity,’ he says. ‘My dad is, and always was, my hero. I always knew that whatever was going on, he would be there for me. Now it’s my turn to be there for him.’
It is interesting that a boy who was ‘kicked off to boarding school at the age of seven’ has no angst about that paternal separation; neither does the teenager who desperately wanted to be a musician have any regrets about putting that dream on hold to follow his father into the army, coming as he does from a family who can trace their military connections back to the tenth century. Everybody knew Blunt wanted to make music. When he studied sociology at Bristol, his final dissertation was entitled The Commodification Of Image – Production Of A Pop Idol.
In Kosovo, where he served with distinction as a troop commander, he strapped his guitar to his tank and composed the song No Bravery, which became a hit five years later. But Blunt is all about old-fashioned duty. He says, ‘My dad was a helicopter pilot and a colonel in the Army Air Corps and we travelled all over the world, so being in one place was my security. I loved boarding school. I understood why I was there. I never had a problem with my parents sending me there – people do what is best for their children. I spend a lot of time away from my children when I am on tour, it’s something I have to deal with and try and balance, but we all live different lives.
‘And going into the army was, again, something I understood. The army paid for me to have an incredible education from school to university and the payback is four years’ service. I did six years. It’s an education as a man, an education in humility and humanity and to be honest it’s perfect training for a life on the road as a musician. Camping at Glastonbury is no problem for me. Creeping around in bushes, sleeping in mud, that’s what I was trained to do.’
His father had major reservations when his son announced he wanted to leave the army to write music. ‘My dad thought it was dangerous because it was taking a risk on something you couldn’t count on. But what I admire most about my father is that for all his background, he is a complete free thinker. He is
MY MEASURE OF SUCCESS WAS DOING SOMETHING THAT I ALWAYS WANTED TO DO
charming, he is loved. Whenever I meet anyone who knows my dad they always say: “What a great guy”, and that’s always made me feel unbelievably proud.
‘I remember having a long discussion with him saying it was just something I needed to do. That I wasn’t going into the music business for fame and fortune because that was not my measure of success. My measure of success was doing something that I had always wanted to do, to see if I could do it, to prove it to myself. My dad understood that and gave me his blessing.’
In the early days Colonel Blount was often seen at concerts manning the merchandising stall, selling Tshirts for his son. ‘And my mum kept an eagle eye on my Wikipedia page. I decided to knock three years off my age at one point and she corrected it. “We’re not having that, James,” he laughs. ‘But in the early days, when there was a lot of negativity, it was incredibly important to know they were in my corner. And I do know my parents are proud of me.’
I ask if the James Bond life is over and he smiles. ‘Well, I should definitely be doing the theme song,’ he says. ‘Not Ed [Sheeran]...’
He shakes his head again. ‘To be honest at the moment I’m in London. I’ve bought the first car I’ve ever had in London so I can go down to Hampshire and be with my parents as much as I can. We have to be grateful for this time.’
He stops. I ask him after all his chart-topping albums, the 20million records sold, the high-profile marriage and the trappings of fame, if there are any ambitions he has left.
‘To get a kidney for my father,’ he says, his face turned to the wall.
James Blunt’s new album Once Upon A Mind is out October 25.