James Blunt is a man of reformed reputation. Formerly known as the slowly undressing man behind that cheesy song and the heartbroken soul behind that other cheesy song, it turns out the more you know about the man’s personality, the more you’re likely to like him. He has a pointed sense of humour, spends his life having fun, seems to take the barrage of only semi-playful slagging thrown at him on the chin, and get this: he’s excellent live, too.
In fact, he’s always been excellent live. I know this because way back in 2007, when I was invited to write my very first articles on music, I was sent to review him in Seoul (don’t get too excited, potential music journalists, I lived there at the time). Rather than what I expected (a fairly static singer-songwriter with a guitar), I was treated to a man of boundless energy, a man who ran a lap of the Seoul Olympic Gymnasium in the middle of a song (a trick he repeated tonight), and generally came across like it all meant everything to him and he intended to let you know it.
So yes, James Blunt supported by Toploader is a line up that, if we were feeling particularly cruel, we might point to as the first dance selection for the world’s most basic wedding, but, music snobs, that would be unnecessary. This was good. The man can really perform. We can even say that without using that pointedly diminishing word actually.
First, of course, we have a band who have not held onto their prime quite so well. Toploader barely get a crackle out of the slowly assembling crowd, but there’s some decent tunes in there. I’ve no love for their big one, if I’m honest, but ‘Achilles Heel’ and ‘Higher State’ are more than decent pop songs. They’re not really connecting tonight, though, until ‘Dancing In The Moonlight’ (itself a cover) is served up as the inevitable closer, following directly from a solid cover of ‘Mr Blue Sky’. They’re a tight band with doing a decent line in early 00s pop, but it does feel a touch like they’re being clapped largely for serving up two very danceable bangers at the end.
Blunt, though, is another story entirely. That sense of humour is on display early: to advertise his merch, he throws some photoshopped pictures of all kinds of celebrities in his t-shirts and clutching his albums onto the big screens: Trump, Musk with a robotic girlfriend, King Charles, Conservative leader Kami Badenoch, Keir Starmer, and Vlodimir Zalenskyy, who gets several rounds of wild cheering whenever he appears.
When the world’s most musical squaddie himself appears, it’s to dive straight into the opening track of today’s album of focus, 20-year-old ‘Back to Bedlam’, a soaring ‘High’. In fact, Blunt’s approach is to play the album in full, in order. A brave approach given it means that both ‘You’re Beautiful’ and ‘Goodbye My Lover’ (both absolute tearjerkers live, we can’t lie) are dropped in the first four tracks of a 100 minute set. Three minutes later a couple arrive next to us, oblivious to having missed both the songs until they look at each other confused after the encore. What can you do, come to gigs on time, folks!
The tracks are near enough as they sound on the album, though perhaps with a little more oomph behind them, and performed with a staggering enthusiasm that gives them a power no studio could hope to capture. It’s clear Blunt thrives in the audience interaction. When he gets going, he comes out with some absolute belters.
Early on, he asks who was around when the album came out (“thanks, you bought me a lovely house in Ibiza”), and then who is only out tonight because their wife bought them along (“I wouldn’t come to a James Blunt concert either unless you paid me – and you did, thanks!”).
The slightly edgier side comes out occasionally, too, like before ‘Billy’, which he explains with a story that involves shipping a former flatmate off to live with a man he didn’t know, he was expected to pay in sexual favours, and that he later played the song to Billy’s girlfriend, who proceeded to hit the same flatmate in the face (“and Billy’s here tonight!”).
There’s a real depth here, too, though. ‘High’ might be about drug use (yes, by James Blunt), but ‘No Bravery’, in particular, is harrowing. It features as a backdrop footage filmed by Blunt in Bosnia as he went through some harrowing peacekeeping experiences in his pre-music life. ‘Back To Bedlam’ has a few highs, then, the most obvious of which is the gorgeous ‘Goodbye My Lover’, but frankly ‘Tears and Rain’ and ‘Cry’ could have stood in almost as well.
The end of ‘Back to Bedlam’, though, was expected to come with a decline, and to some degree it does, though certainly not to the degree expected. ‘Postcards’ and ‘Stay The Night’ bracket a decent-ish cover of Slade’s ‘Cos I Luv You’. Then there are a couple of surprising high points, with a cover of Robin Schulz’s ‘Ok’ giving a real 90s dance feel to things temporarily, and ‘Monsters’ a song for Blunt’s dying father, bringing back some real intensity of emotion. The second half of the show is musically weaker than the first, but not by the margin we’d expected.
By the end of it all, we’ve witnessed that lap of the audience, Blunt standing on top of his piano in surfer pose lapping up applause, and the entertaining supposition that some of us were conceived to ‘You’re Beautiful’ (not me James, far too old), and it’s actually a song about looking at hot women on the subway while wasted.
Blunt finds that funny, and in fairness, so do we. The whole thing feels a bit like we’ve all been had by the idea that he’s just a sappy singer songwriter, and oddly, it all feels slightly subversive. Though of course, if you’ve been paying attention, the signs have been there for years. He’ll probably never be cool, but he owns it. He’s a born performer, and the whole night is just effortlessly entertaining. Plus, Blunt is just so damn likeable. No wonder the more derisive part of the world’s music fans is finally, quietly, coming around.
That said, closer ‘1973’ is awful lyrically, musically, and existentially, but I suppose we can’t have it all.
