James Blunt - ‘The Iraq war lost me my GRAMMYS’

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0:38Welcome to How to Fail, the podcast that flips the traditional interview format on its head and asks its guests about three times things went wrong. Before we get to our guest today, I wanted to mention our subscriber podcast, Failing with Friends, where my guest and I answer your questions and we offer advice on some of your failures too. Here's a bit of agony uncle James Blunt. So it's a failing of men to not be open and say, can we talk about that? It's not working for me because if we did, we'd smooth it out much earlier. I know I just absorbed until I just reached a tipping point and then the tipping point is much more dramatic than it probably ever needed to be.

1:18Do join in by following the link in the podcast notes and you can send me an email or look out for my call outs once a month on Instagram for quickfire questions. Thank you so much. My guest today has a ski lift in Verbier named after him, built his own nightclub in his back garden, counted Carrie Fisher amongst his best friends, once gave Ed Sheeran a scar with a ceremonial sword, and at university formed one half of a busking duo with adventurer Bear Grylls called Limp Willie and the Disappointments. Despite these myriad feats, James Blunt is best known as a musician. His debut 2004 album, Back to Bedlam, which contained the worldwide number one, You're Beautiful, was the biggest selling album of the decade in the UK, shifting over 12 million copies.

2:12He's released another six albums since then, every one of them a top 10 hit, winning two Brit Awards and two Ivor Novellos along the way. A success then by any metric, but at the height of his fame, Blunt also faced an astonishing backlash. He decided to retaliate, becoming an unlikely sensation on Twitter for his acerbic putdowns and self-deprecating humour. This emotional resilience was partly formed by his background. Sent to boarding school at the age of seven, Blunt was sponsored by the army through his studies at the University of Bristol. He served for six years seeing active service in Kosovo before leaving in 2002 and releasing Back to Bedlam two years later A remastered 20th anniversary edition of the album that changed his life is about to be released and Blunt will be back on the road from February on a UK arena tour By his own admission, he loves being on the road and is famed for being the neatest person on the tour bus a legacy, perhaps, of his military service.

3:21Life is for living, Blunt says, and it's something I've been teaching my children. The saddest word in the world is no, and the most exciting word in the world is yes. James Blunt, thank you for saying yes to coming on to How to Fail. Elizabeth, thanks so much for inviting me. I'm so excited to have you in front of me. What are you like as a father? I'm very hands-on. I'm away a lot so I could be described as an absent father in that time this way this year I've been on tour the whole time but when I'm there I need to make up for lost time and I'm really hands on you know also I'm a shorter man and so they're really the only humans about my height and I really enjoy it Do you tell them that you love them?

4:04Of course Because I have had the great joy of meeting your parents through a screen because I watched this great documentary that's on Amazon Prime about you called One Brit Wonder and your parents other than you are the breakout stars of the show. They really are. And it's clearly a loving relationship, but the love isn't easily expressed. Do you think that's fair? Well, as you saw from the documentary, the painful word feelings is not something that we express very well. And I love my father dearly. He is my hero and guide. And even to this day, he's my bookkeeper as well. When I go on tour, he pays the bills while I'm away.

4:41and if my band invoice rather than a record label who take three months, my dad will pay my band in three days and they love him for that. But I've never had a conversation with him, you know, about how I am, what's going on inside. Other than, you know, the everyday workings of life, we've never had a kind of true conversation and we don't really need it either. I think my mother just got just emotionally stunted. But I've heard you say that the emotional repression is actually quite helpful because it comes out in your music. Exactly. I mean, I was, as you saw, I was sent away to boarding school when I was seven.

5:16It's a bizarre experience to not be around parents from that very, very early age makes you very, very independent. And boarding schools are pretty harsh places in that way. I don't know if you went to a boarding school. You certainly sound like you did. You're amongst posh friends here, James. No backlash from me. There's no hiding it here. Yeah. Part of the reason I imagine you were sent to boarding school so young is because your father was also in the military. I understand that the blunts have military service dating back to 850 AD. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, my father wasn't, you know, he was in the army as a colonel.

5:49He didn't really bring the army home. It's only my mother. I had to call her sir. He introduced me to the army as an option. Not that he forced it down, but then I had a bursary through school and through university. you can pay that money back, can't you? But if you don't, then you owe them the four years. I couldn't actually pay the army the money back because my parents, I think, had spent it on slot machines in Andover. So I was compelled to join for four years and I ended up doing six. But you moved around a lot as a child, didn't you? And I always find this very interesting. A lot of successful people that I have the honour of interviewing had some kind of itinerant childhood.

6:30Right, really. Very often it is military service, but sometimes it's just lack of funds. And I'm very interested in that because did you feel the pressure then to make new friends quickly and to perform almost? Well, definitely to make new friends, yes. We would arrive on an army patch, having moved every two years, as they do in the army. And my mother would kick us out of the door, me and my sister at the time. And she would say, go and make friends. and you walk around an army patch knocking on doors saying hi there do you have any children who are our age and they would say no and you get to the next door until you meet someone who goes yeah I have and then those people would become our best friends for the two years that we'd be in there so I remember specific you know I've had a few best friends in my life for two years and then and then we'd move on and I never see them again ever.

7:19Is there any sadness about that? Not really it's just something we were used to I remember those particular friends with great warmth and great memories. So when you see your children now, is there part of you that wants to give them a different experience of childhood? I'm not saying yours was unhappy because by any metric it was very happy and you knew you were loved and we love your parents. But is there part of you that wants to give them a different experience? No, I think I probably made it worse. With the army, you move around every two years. Nowadays, I'm as a touring musician moving even faster.

7:53And And so at the moment, mine are in school in Ibiza and a school in the UK and a school in Switzerland. And we move them every single term. So, you know, my children, they can't, as a result of that, they can't even read or write. But I have an amazing way of life. Well, that's fine. Yeah. Do they speak three different languages then? Yeah, vaguely. That's so impressive. Which is amazing. If I'm in a shop, I can turn around to a six-year-old and say, what am I trying to say here? And that person can translate for me. What do you like about touring? I mean, so much of it. it's a young person's job in many ways because we're living on a bus with 16 bunks on there 16 people sleeping together and we play in different cities we have an after party after every concert really and we fall asleep your bed is only 3 metres away from where you've been drinking on the bus where the upstairs or downstairs lounge is where you have your party fall into a bed 3 metres away wake up in a new city and get up and play so the fun we have as a band and a crew is unmatched.

8:54It's absolutely amazing. And the pleasure of doing your hobby as your job of musician is just amazing. I don't stand on a stage and love the screams or the cheering. It's the fact that I'm singing songs that mean something to me and that people should connect is an absolutely amazing experience because we are in a world where we're so divided by so many things. You know, every politician is trying to tell us why we're different from the next person. Social media is totally antisocial and bad for our health in every way. And music is one of those rare things that brings strangers together. And I love that.

9:30And as I say, I'm singing songs that are about what's going on in my tiny little mind. And other people seem to say they feel the same way. And that's rather magical. And I get to do it with a bunch of mates. While you're talking, I was thinking about that backlash that you experienced at the height of your fame. And we're going to get more into it because it relates to some of your failures. but there's this quote on your official website which I thought summed it up very well where it said that it was one of those weird cultural moments where dislike of an artist becomes a kind of living shorthand for all that's wrong with music and indeed British society and there's something about the kind of binary nature of opinion that I wonder if your training in the army helped equip you to understand what was happening.

10:14Yeah, I think so. It is bizarre nowadays how we are separated into titles, aren't we, of left or right, leave or remain. And I think my time in the army at least taught me to understand both sides and understand also that the answer probably is in the middle. I don't want to be red or blue or left or right. The answer presumably is somewhere in the middle. Do you remember the moment when you thought, I'm just not having this anymore and I'm going to tweet this? Well, no, it was the invention of Twitter that gave me that freedom because before I was doing interviews with journalists and my publisher, this is a great journalist, it's a great publication.

10:54And, you know, and they'd arrive with a present and then stab you in the back and the thing. But all my words had been completely turned around. And then they invented Twitter. And suddenly I didn't have to go through a journalist or through a record label. James Blunt was taken. So my first title was Dirty Little Blunt. And I could just write what I liked. and suddenly that was just incredibly freeing.

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12:53Your first failure is that you were rejected by every record label in the UK. Yeah. So you have left the army. You've recorded Back to Bedlam. I hadn't, no, at this stage. My last job in the army was I was the Queen's Ceremonial Bodyguard based in London. And so I was the guy who rode beside her when she's in the carriage, you know, a group of us on horseback riding, protecting the Queen on horseback. And I would, at night, go and do concerts. And I found my manager that way. And he's still my manager to this day. And then I, through him, really had the confidence to say, okay, I'm doing it. Leave the army.

13:27Chucked up a salute to my commanding officer. I gave him a demo and said, I'm out of here. And I'd got myself a kind of songwriter's deal with EMI Music Publishing. But I was searching for a record deal and and I was being rejected left right and center it was an amazing experience of going through all of them I got really close with a company called Virgin who have you know you will have heard of led by a man called Philippe Ascoli a Frenchman and it was exciting I'd really been rejected by everyone at this stage it was kind of getting down to you know last ditch moments and Philippe Ascoli called me and said that he would like to sign me and so they'd all gathered together uh and and i was in with my manager but i was also in with the senior manager um who was elton john's day-to-day manager and there they were saying you're going to be a star and we love your music and we love you and then the marketing guy threw this deal and the paperwork was there this was the you know the only label in the uk that offered me a deal the marketing guy said we love you but we have a problem with your speaking voice do you think you could do a different accent and I said yeah sure I can do Pakistani and at that stage my very Scottish manager stood up Derek McKillop was his name and said right let's get the fuck out of here I said you know we're not signing on the basis of of that how ridiculous and so that was that deal gone that was the last UK deal that that didn't happen and I so I went to the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin Texas flew out a keyboard player and another guitarist to come with me we weren't playing in the main festival we found ourselves playing in the fringes um and i was talking to those guys who had come up with me and they said i they said that i didn't really understand i didn't really understand how this was the last throw of the dice and there i was on the 20th floor i think of the ramada hotel on the fringes of the south by southwest music festival and playing to 20 people and and as i finished the last note of the song a woman who'd had a tear tattooed under her eye and wild dark hair and a hat on stormed over to me and said, hey, if you sign with me today, I'll send you a check for tomorrow.

15:35But I have a record label called Custard Records and I want to sign you and I want you to make the album of your dreams. And we went and got drunk together. I signed on the dotted line. She turned out to be a woman called Linda Perry from Four Non Blondes, the band. And she was the one who gave me that big break. Amazing. I'm very interested in accents and I'll tell you why because I grew up in Northern Ireland but obviously I've never picked up the accent and as a result of having this accent I was mildly bullied at secondary school in Belfast. I ended up getting a scholarship to a boarding school in England where immediately I fitted in because I sounded right.

16:12So I have an interesting relationship with my own voice and with how posh I might or might not sound. Because although I'm deeply privileged in so many ways, I don't actually think I am that posh. It's just that I have this voice. But at the same time, I have this voice and I chose not to change. I must have chosen at some point not to develop an accent, not to pick up the nilt. I mean, to put on an accent is disingenuous in the first place, isn't it? And yeah, I mean, I could have gone on radio shows and interviews and tried to put off, but I just don't think it would have been very convincing.

16:48You know, and so yeah, mine I just apologise for and say it's my parents' fault and not mine. I want to talk more about poshness. What does poshness mean to you? Yeah, it's tricky. Well, it's different from snobbism or snobbery. You can call them a snob and that's someone who thinks they're elevated from other people and looks down on other people. Posh is, yeah, well, what does it mean? I don't know. It's someone with this silly accent. It covers a range of different people, doesn't it? But you can't necessarily place where a person is from. It's, I don't know. How would you call it? Well, I don't know.

17:27It's a perception that is more about the person perceiving, I think, sometimes. And the reason I want to talk to you about this is because you had an experience of sounding posh in the 90s and early 2000s, and so did I. And I think it was a specific time in our culture where it was one of the worst things you could sound. Well, I think it's an affliction, isn't it? You could have a limp, you could have a lisp, or you could be posh. They're terrible afflictions, burdens that we have to live with. Yeah, we're a minority that has prejudice that we're still unrecognized. Yeah, I know you're joking, but I actually think there is something here, which is it's separate from privilege in the sense that...

18:11Well, there's a real problem that you're a minority who are probably privileged too. You're deeply privileged. I'm deeply privileged. And you've always made it clear that you acknowledge that. You've always, whenever I've heard you interviewed, been very grateful for the opportunities that have come your way. But that's, it's sort of unfair in my eyes for you to have been discriminated against purely because of how you sounded. Yeah. And purely because of a perception of what your background might have been when your demo tape was landing in these record companies. And I think we're at a time now where maybe we can say that.

18:42Yeah, I would hope so. I employ a band and a crew from all corners of the country. And, you know, they take the mickey out of me and my accent from the get-go. But in those stages, do they judge me or think that I look at them in any way. We're, you know, we're friends and equals and I respect them. God, they get me through so much. it's when you are judged in any way that it becomes yeah that I'm uncomfortable with you've said before that the backlash that you experienced afterwards did remind you of school that potentially reminded me of school because it just felt like bullying which if we're honest it was it was it was a media-led backlash which they had even a selection of music journalists who got together and decided that that was that I was the target that they were going to go for.

19:28And my manager was told about that. And those people know who they are. And if you go through their press cuttings, I've just put a book out actually, and I put all the negative press in one thing and you can just see the same names again and again. And it's so petty and it's so puerile that it's just basically just like school bullying. I find the music industry quite small-minded. My job is a touring musician. I think I'm a touring musician. and just also happened to be in the petty-minded music industry at the same time. You mentioned Elton John, and one of the first major gigs you played was supporting him in Ipswich.

20:05And in the audience was a young Ed Sheeran. Yeah, amazing. Who was incredibly inspired by you. Will you tell us the story of your friendship? Yeah, I bumped into him on the management corridors of Rocket Music Management, which Elton John had set up. Elton has set that company up because he was mismanaged. And that firm looked after Lily Allen and me and who else? Mystique Dido was on that books and Ed Sheeran. And so he and I bumped into each other as he was stepping out. And I didn't know at the time he'd been to the Ipswich gig. And he'd been to another show of mine where he'd actually stolen my empty Corona bottle from the front of the stage.

20:43And I guess in some ways, you know, we were both singer-songwriters. So it made kind of sense that we should be managed in the same way. I mean, his manager now today was my old day-to-day manager. And I think in many ways, they learned a little bit about how to deal with any kind of backlash. They'd seen what had happened with me and with Ed. They kind of had the foresight to know where the traps lie ahead. And he played You're Beautiful when his wife was giving birth. No, that would have been miserable. He didn't. But he was playing, I think he was playing that album and another song that I think he and I had written about our children.

21:25Okay. Yeah. I think she's playing your beautiful wife, she's giving birth. We end up in a divorce now. Put her through any more agony. All of these rejections that you experienced in the UK, what do you think they have ended up teaching you? Well, I think all failures are for a healthy reason. They teach you something. They teach you that that path was the wrong one, but it wasn't wrong to go down it. You kind of need to, in life, go down as many paths as you can to see which is the right one. If you just found the right path immediately, you wouldn't know how great it was. You wouldn't know how lucky you've been or how much hard work has gone.

22:05And you wouldn't have learned the resilience, built the team around you. And so, yeah, I've always thought that every dead end, the journey down that dead end was incredibly useful. Do you think you get more creative inspiration from failure than from success? No, I get my creative inspiration from misery, primarily because misery sells. But pain is something I can translate into music more easily than happiness. Normally because if I'm happy, I'm having fun. You know, if we're out and about having fun, I'm happy and I'm not going to say, I've got to step off now, I'm going to write a song. You'd say, hang on, what are you doing?

22:43We're having a good time. Whereas if I'm on my own and you haven't invited me out on the fun night out that you're having, I'm going to be at home going, oh, poor old me, Elizabeth hasn't taken me out. I promise always to invite you. Thank you. As long as I get to come to your nightclub in Ibiza. Absolutely. Well, your lyrics are often very profound. And I wonder if I could speak about a specific song that you wrote. I don't know if you can find a profound lyric of mine. I'm about to quote you one. You're beautiful, you're beautiful, even if it's true. But this one speaks to me personally because of my own experiences of this.

23:17And it's a song about miscarriage. Right. The girl that never was. And there's a lyric in it, the first casualty of life is the plan. Somewhere she's probably dancing with her blonde hair just like we always saw. The first casualty of life is the plan I thought was so beautiful. Yeah, thank you. It is taken really from expression in the army saying the first casualty of war is the plan. But it's true to life anyway, isn't it? Because you never know what life is going to throw at you. Can I talk to you a bit about the experience that you went through that informed that song? Because I think it's very rare that men talk about this.

23:56And very often there's a grief attached to miscarriage that a lot of men feel they can't claim because they're not the ones who physically went through it. Yeah. Everyone has a different experience, you know, of what stage, of what time, of the journey of trying to have children, the ambition of having children and how two people go about that and the struggles that they may have. And I try not to go into the detail of that too much publicly about that. But what I've learned from it a little bit is that, yeah, men and women's experience of it is so incredibly different and yet to be there as a sort of just a witness to someone else's physical trauma is what I was really writing about.

24:41You know, I don't go through the physical trauma, but I'm a real witness to someone else's. And of course, I have my own experience and pain of that. But yeah, but it doesn't match my wife or any woman's who goes through that. So just to try and, you know, again, yeah, And there are some terrible words in that song as well about the guilt that comes with it and the blame that women, I suppose, can put themselves through at some time. And just as the person in the relationship who watches that, as I say, witness to that, I suppose is what I mean, is a struggle to vocalize. Because, yeah, I guess what I mean more words, you know, I'm in it, and I'm in it with you, but not quite in the same way.

25:30Well, I'm sure your wife hugely appreciated that beautiful song. And I know that it's spoken to many other people in the same situation I know it did for me. And I'm so sorry for what you went through. Yeah, thank you. And to you too. And I suppose what's most interesting about it is it's an experience that many, many women go through and we don't get the opportunity to talk about it so much. you know almost anyone I've now spoken to who's had that ambition to start a family it hasn't gone in the smooth way that we all think it is and it's something that often we don't talk about until it happens and really we need to talk about it earlier so that young couples you know starting off on that journey know that it's very real prospect.

26:13I think the other thing that's difficult about it is that you're grieving an unlived life but the moment you discover you're pregnant you assume that it's going to have a happy ending. This story of pregnancy is going to end with a person. And so that grief is tricky to navigate as well because you're grieving in absence and a presence. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I think that's what my song is about really is about the idea in your head of that little person is sort of exists. And that's the struggle that they exist in a way.

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