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There are all sorts of stories as to why he changed his name. James Blunt was, as we noted earlier, born James Blount. And the other one was, 'So, who's the real you?'." "The first was, 'Tell me something that no one else knows about you' – I get asked that once a day. I got asked two really awful questions earlier," he goes on. I'll think, 'Right, I know where we've started, let me just give you the whole thing now in half an hour, and we've done it and you've got what you want.' It's not a conversation, it's a monologue. "Actually, if someone starts an interview in a certain way, I can probably just give them the whole interview in one go. It's really strange, and by the end of the day I'm exhausted because my mind hasn't really been working at all but my throat has just repeated certain shapes over and over again.
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I can actually feel my throat change shape when I say them. My tone of voice really changes when I start saying them. "In some interviews, all I'm doing is pulling out answer five and answer nine, because I have all those answers tucked away. Then, he says, there are the hundreds of inane questions he gets asked by lazy interviewers on the pop PR merry-go-round so frequently that he has stock answers at the ready. The not-being-able-to-hear stuff I think is just because I find it difficult to express myself." So that one was about boys and this one is about girls. There are some women in this album, but there were boys in the first one. There's an awful lot about not being heard or understood, and references to screaming and shouting. Simone, the muse of the song "1973", is looking a bit haggard from spending too much time in the Ibizan superclub Pacha "Carry You Home" laments a girl whose only friend is "trouble" "Annie" is about a woman reaching for stardom but falling short. To go by its lyrics, All the Lost Souls is preoccupied with miscommunication and damaged women. We move on to the safer ground of his new album. The strangest thing about him is his hair, which is hanging about in his eyes and has been flattened into a monk's tonsure where it has been squashed under his baseball cap. He holds your gaze while he talks, sometimes with an intense, John the Baptist-like stare. He has at least a centimetre of stubble, and wears a raggedy T-shirt under a jacket, which he keeps on, jeans and a pair of very battered-looking brown biker boots. This, too, is the James Blunt paradox.īlunt looks everything you'd expect him to be.
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Beadle's Daily Telegraph obituary noted sagely that he "achieved the paradoxical double distinction of being voted Britain's second most- hated man (after Saddam Hussein), and of being the most avidly watched presenter on television". But it's the way the two men's marketability clashes with their apparent unpopularity that makes them oddly similar. It's a strangely appropriate occasion, since you could argue that Blunt is a kind of pop equivalent to Beadle. We meet shortly after Jeremy Beadle dies. Blunt strums a guitar, forgets to shave, and looks a little posh, and suddenly he's the most hated man in Britain. Other pop stars commit antisocial crimes, like Pete Doherty brawl in public, like the Gallaghers or kill animals on stage, like Ozzy Osborne, and we think they're charming. On paper, he's little more than a staggeringly successful, clean-living, middle-of-the-road singer-songwriter a veritable angel, by the standards of his trade. It's pretty unfair, when you think about it, that so many people seem to harbour an irrational hatred of James Blunt.