James Blunt: Dad might die on NHS kidney waiting list

Singer & sister fail as match for donating organ

JAMES Blunt fears his severely ill father will not live long enough to have a kidney transplant on the NHS.

The You’re Beautiful singer’s dad Charles Blount has stage four chronic kidney disease and needs an O positive organ donor.

Tearful James, 45, said: “I wanted to give him my kidney 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 NHS has very strict criteria for who is at the top of the list and because of reasons of age and so on my father isn’t a priority.

“We have no complaint about that. It’s absolutely right that younger people are given a priority – that is the way it should be.

“There is nothing you can do but wait and try to accept what can happen.”

James was talking about Charles, a former cavalry officer in the 13th/18th Royal Hussars, in an interview with Event magazine ahead of the release of his album Once

PAIN James Blunt Upon A Mind. It includes a ballad called Monsters, about the pain of a son saying goodbye to his father at the end of his life.

James said: “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’. I can write a song about how I feel but I find expressing emotions one-to-one very difficult. “Classic public schoolboy. Not really taught to say what you feel.” OLD LOVE Ron with Mick and kissing wife Sally STONES guitarist Ronnie Wood is rolling in it but still insisted bandmate Sir Mick Jagger pay up to see his new documentary, Someone Up There Likes Me.

Ronnie, 72, said at the London premiere that “Ole Mick Mack will be buying a ticket”.

Ron, who has revealed he took a Bunsen burner to parties to smoke cocaine said: “I never got too carried away, although I nearly got carried away in a coffin.”

It seems time really has been on Ronnie’s side after all.