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ON THE COUCH WITH: James Blunt

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ARTIST INTERVIEW

Access All Areas.net.au: Firstly, can you tell us a bit about your debut album ‘Back To Bedlam’?
James Blunt: It’s collection of ten songs, basically ten chapters for me of a book but it’s all about personal life experiences and it’s really been a diary to me and it’s not so specific of me so that it can touch in a way that other people can relate to it in their lives. As a song writer, I recorded it in LA and used a band and not just one guy on a guitar so it has it’s up’s and it’s down’s. Some songs have been stripped down where it’s just with the piano and others are a full five-piece band. It’s a journey, it has it’s highs and it’s lows.

Access All Areas.net.au: The title for the album, how did that originate?
James Blunt: Well the whole recording process was madness in itself really and I was living in Hollywood and that was pretty mad and the songs are about subjects that you would lock away in cell of our own minds so it kind of made sense to call it ‘Back To Bedlam’.

Access All Areas.net.au: ‘You’re Beautiful’ is the new single in Australia, can you tell us about that song?
James Blunt: I wrote the words… it came in to my head faster than I was writing down and it was almost a panic where I couldn’t scribble fast enough.

Access All Areas.net.au: You grew up in a military family, although you did spend some time in military work, how did the transition to music come about?
James Blunt: I’d always done music, I’d always planned to be a musician professionally and I’d been writing song’s since I was fourteen and I gradually built songs up and in the last year in my job I knew I wanted to do music… the hardest decision was whether to stay in Army and give up on my dream. So I did what I had to do there and leave that job and do music so I had some demo’s recorded in some studios, meeting other musicians and eventually ended up with the right manager and together we sorted out various elements to get up and get things on the road and then got out and shopped for a record deal and some deals were offered, some we refused and some were really bad. I then played at South By Southwest in Texas and came to the end of the show and Linda Perry came up to me and said she wanted to give me a record deal and wanted to enable me to make what ever I want to make and not influence it artistically.

Access All Areas.net.au: You share a manager with Elton John which in itself is a big deal, would you say there could be opportunity for a collaboration between the two of you?
James Blunt: I have absolutely no idea… I think I’m too far down the scale to be cheeky enough to ask him… bit like royalty you know.

Access All Areas.net.au: Where do you see your songwriting taking you for future albums?
James Blunt: Personal experiences, whatever life brings your way is what I personally write about… about being individual, recognize solitudes of life and celebrating that, moments in time, being with a girl, going your own way… all personal experience. I think I’ve got lots to write about and still leading an incredible life. I think I can write a lot about doing interviews and living in hotel rooms.

Access All Areas.net.au: Do you get any time off?
James Blunt: I’ve got Christmas day off!

Access All Areas.net.au: Who do you cite as your influences?
James Blunt: I haven’t really listened to music, at school I heard bands like Led Zeplin and Pink Flloyd which I don’t sound like. But I guess I’m in a place where I am learning now more than ever especially form the 70’s, artists like Neil young, Elton john, the great golden era.

Access All Areas.net.au: So what are your plans from here?
James Blunt: Yeah well after here I’m starting to kick off a tour in Europe next month and through the UK for promotion and playing to crowds of about 2000. Then off to America and doing some shows with Jason Mraz as well as some of my own headlining shows. I then go back to Europe and the biggest venue I’m doing there is to a capacity of 10,000 so you can see how quick the growth is. Then I hope to do other countries like Australia in May.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

One of the biggest fears of any musician, in a musical sense, is the songwriting well running dry. That's something that's unlikely ever to worry James Blunt. He has, it can be said without exaggeration, lived a life that should provide enough material for a dozen albums, I know - that's what all the singer-songwriters say. But this is a definitively different singer-songwriter.
Take "No Bravery", the song that closes his debut album, "Back to Bedlam". It was written in a barracks in Kosovo in 1999, while James was a reconnaissance officer in the British army. By day, patrolling Pristina, he kept his guitar bolted to the outside of his tank. By night, it came into the barracks with him as he wrote about life as a 22-year-old peacekeeper in the aftermath of one of the decade's bloodiest civil wars. The rest of his unit ordered him to keep the noise down as he wrote and sang in the post-midnight stillness. He didn't keep the noise down. "'No Bravery' is the only complete song I wrote in Kosovo. I wrote while I was sitting in bed with my boots on. You had to sleep with your boots on. The song is fatalistic. And the rest of the album is fatalistic," he says wryly.

But his Kosovan experience is only one aspect of a new artist who's destined to find his way into a lot of record collections. Essentially, James is a find - an old soul who's somehow unafflicted by cynicism, a young writer who sounds likes he's been doing this for years, an angelic voice who's had a hell of a ride. Elton John, with whom he shares a manager, thinks his "You're Beautiful" is a modern successor to John's own "Your Song". An astute comparison, because much of "Back to Bedlam" is reminiscent of John's early-career best. Meanwhile, Tom Rothrock, who produced the album, sees James as a potential British answer to a couple of other clients, Beck and Elliott Smith. Rothrock had never heard of James until he stumbled across a live track he performed at last year's South by Southwest, upon which the producer was so smitten that he instantly agreed to work on "Back to Bedlam".

What's odd is that a military family like the Blunts - his father, a career colonel, has only recently left the army - should spawn a James. After gruadating from Bristol University, he joined the army, , "because my dad was pushing for it." He eventually made captain, and was the first British officer into Pristina, leading a column of 30,000 peacekeeping troops.

Music, though, has always been his mainstay. Actually, this needs to be qualified. James got into music lateishly, the result of growing up in a music-less house that didn't possess a CD player. "My dad was really practical, and saw music as just noise. The only CD player was in the car, and we had just three CDs - 'American Pie', and a couple of Beach Boys ones." When he went away to school, though, he learned piano, then appeared in a school musical, and that was it. From then on, he listened and learned as much as he could. A love of Queen and Dire Straits came and went. Picking up a friend's guitar at 14, he played along to Nirvana's "Nevermind", and wrote his first song soon after. In so doing, he made himself unpopular with the school housemaster, who knew that music drifting down the corridor late at night could invariably be traced to Blunt's room. His teen years were a battle between teachers, who were intent on imposing some sort of education, and himself, equally intent on making music his career.

Armed with "some dodgy demos" he'd recorded, he left the army in 2002 to become a full-time musician ("My dad was nervous, because I was leaving a steady job to do something risky"). Said dodgy items were an impressive enough showcase of his haunting voice and exquisitely personal songs to land him both management and publishing deals within months. "And then I met Linda Perry [songwriter-producer for, among others, Pink and Christina Aguilera], cos my publishers gave her some songs, and then I went to play South by Southwest, and then she gave me a deal with her own label, Custard Records," James says, still half-dazzled by it all.

He went to California in September 2003, to record his album, and has delivered a timeless debut album, "Back To Bedlam."

His current favourite listening is Cat Power and Lou Reed's "Transformer" album, and "Back to Bedlam" has a similarly enigmatic quality. He won't explain what most of the songs are about, though he does admit that the deceptively bubbly "So Long, Jimmy" was inspired by Messrs Hendrix and Morrison. As for the rest, he says only, "You can get away with murder in a song". There's a lot to James Blunt. The journey starts here.

www.jamesblunt.com

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MY FESTIVAL EXPERIENCE

My Festival Experience
Sneaky Sound System

It’s too hard to pick one, we love festivals. In no particular order: Playing the big Dance Arena at Glastonbury 2008, Main Stage Good Vibrations 2007, Splendour in the Grass 2007, Big Day Out 2009...I could go on and on.

What would be your Ideal Lineup?
One stage with David Bowie, Queen (we’d have to bring Freddie back from the dead), Daft Punk, The Cure, Bloc Party, Prince & Bon Jovi (yes, Bon Jovi). There would be DJ sets in between by Sven Vath, Boys Noize and me old mate Ajax.

Favourite artist you've seen at a Music Festival? Daft Punk, David Bowie & Bloc Party

What are your tips for attending Music Festivals?
Enter with an open mind and leave with a twisted one.