James Blunt’s residence in Ibiza is more than a holiday-home bolthole. It’s a super-secret, super-swish hillside villa 30 minutes’ drive from Ibiza Town. The house that “You’re Beautiful” bought was purchased 13 years ago, right at the beginning of a music career that has resulted, so far, in 23 million album sales.
“When I started out, I always dreamt of a place in Ibiza and a chalet in Verbier,” the club-going, ski-loving host-with-the-most announces, as he leads me through the villa, wine in hand. “And now I have both.”
He says this more in shock than boastfulness, I think (not mentioned: the London pied-à-terre in Kensington and pub in Chelsea). But, yes, past the lush pool and terraced lawn, there is indeed a bar at the bottom of the garden, with a neon sign reading: “Blunty’s Nightclub. Where Everybody’s Beautiful.”
It’s the dog days of summer. Blunt is closing his Mediterranean home for the season with a boozy lunch for friends that he has, rather impressively but also somewhat discomfitingly, decided to combine with his first proper interview in two-and-a-half years. If I was shocked to find myself offered a Jacuzzi’s-worth of rosé, I suspect shoe designer Patrick Cox was equally surprised to see a journalist crashing his sundowners.
‘The record label panicked, because they thought my Twitter was vulgar. It took them quite a long time to realise it was quite healthy not just for me, but for the audience’
This, it transpires, is Blunt all over. He is the rock star as bon viveur, a millionaire musician who enjoys his money and his fame, and is thoroughly clubbable. No, not in that way – whatever the wishes of his many detractors, including the online Blunt saboteurs he tackles head-on in his notoriously funny, and often bitingly rude, Twitter feed. (To the baiting question, “Why does James Blunt sing like his willy is being stood on?”, he replied: “Damn thing’s always getting caught under my feet.”)
He admits his record label only belatedly noticed the content and tone of his social media activity. “Then they panicked, because they thought it was vulgar. It took them quite a long time to realise it was quite healthy not just for me, but for the audience – for them to realise I wasn’t the guy the label had painted me to be, this quite earnest man.
“I have my moments,” he concedes, earnestly, “but I’m certainly not that way all the time.”
Still, for all the enjoyment he clearly gleans from tweaking the trolls, the man with 1.8 million Twitter followers bats away the suggestion that he is a dogged tracker of his haters. “It just takes quite a lot of time to look through Twitter to see who’s been rude about you so you can make a funny remark. I go on once a month, realise that people are horrid to each other, make a joke about it, get out and get back into the garden.”
Today’s garden party is a last hurrah: tomorrow, Blunt flies back to the UK to start the heavy lifting on the promotion of his sixth album, Once Upon a Mind.
It is an album about the cycle of life – his father’s chronic illness; his guilt about leaving his wife to tour for months on end; the birth of his two young sons; the death of his old friend and patron Carrie Fisher – which may move his fans to tears. As it does Blunt, twice, over the course of our interview.
The key track is the devastating “Monsters”, a skeletal piano ballad, written with his father in mind, that features the Trinity Boys Choir and on which Blunt’s already-high voice cracks with pain. “The label asked me to rein that in a bit,” he admits of the song, which was recorded in the chapel at Wellington Barracks near Buckingham Palace, a place he knew intimately from his time serving with cavalry regiment the Life Guards.
“We’ve had a big discussion about it,” he continues, “weeks of me saying, ‘I need that’. Because it’s not just me singing a song, it’s me feeling a song, and that break [in my voice] is everything.”
‘It’s not just me singing a song, it’s me feeling a song, and that break in my voice is everything’
If he was to dedicate the album to a single person, he says, it would be his father, who has stage-four chronic kidney disease and needs an O-positive kidney donor.
“Sadly, I’m not a match,” he says. “The unnerving thing nowadays is you can look on the NHS website and see the life expectancy. As family and children, we can see what date they reckon we’ve got to… Yeah…” He falters, his default politeness wrestling with his desire to be honest yet not say the unsayable. “And my father’s a very healthy man – doesn’t drink, smoke, do drugs. He’s fitter than both you and I, I’d guarantee. So it’s shocked the family.”
Things, then, are “happening fast”. But equally, “they’re very inspiring to write about”, Blunt says, less callously than it looks in print. “You see a parent grow old, then you see that life replaced by other people,” he notes, referring to his two young sons – and here his other default setting, privacy, battles with the openness of the new album; he asks that I don’t reveal their names.
“So, for all the sadness, there is happiness at the other end of the scale. I find it very balanced, very grounding. But my father doesn’t know about the songs that are for him,” he says, eyes shining. “So I need to galvanise myself to speak to him – before you put this out.” Blunt manages to laugh. “These are songs full of love of life. There are no bad things, only good.”
Blunt’s fifth album, The Afterlove (2017), was deemed a flop, but it did well enough worldwide to keep him on the road, at arena level, for 18 months. Audiences from Bangkok to Buenos Aires were seemingly unconcerned that the breathy singer-songwriter with the light emotive touch had slalomed off-piste to dabble with electronica and beats.
“Yeah, to all my friends’ dismay when they go on holiday,” he smiles. “I’ve just had an email from a mate in China: ‘For f**k sake, is there no escape from this?’ It is mindblowing that it has gone across the world in the way it has.”
Still, everything wasn’t entirely rosé with The Afterlove. He mentions another of those big discussions, “not quite a row but pretty close”, about a song called “OK”, written with Steve Mac (co-writer of Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You”), who also produced it. “I really didn’t enjoy where it got to, but the label said: ‘This has to go on, this is the direction, this is your first single.’ I said, ‘absolutely not’.
“But after we put the album out – and it wasn’t on it – that song still became a big hit, still with me singing on it, everywhere but the UK. Because the UK has good taste in music,” he adds with a twinkle.
‘I’ve just had an email from a mate in China: ‘For f**k sake, is there no escape from you?’’
On his new album, the former military man was equally unyielding with himself. New single “Cold” is a mea culpa to his wife of five years, Sofia, the lawyer daughter of Lord and Lady Wellesley, in which he apologises for his prolonged absences. “I Told You” is a hymn to his infant sons, the younger of whom was almost a year old before the perennially touring Blunt spent serious time with him.
All that close-to-home candour meant there was no room to write a song about Fisher, an early supporter with whom he always stayed when working in Los Angeles. He did, though, try to offer quiet tribute when he was in LA working on the album, driving to her former home and laying a hand on her gate, “like a shrine”.
“I said, ‘God, I miss you so much’, and shed a tear,” he says. “And as I did that, three of the StarMap [celebrity tour] vans pulled up and I could hear the guide say: ‘And if you look on the left, there’s the late, great Carrie Fisher’s house – and as you can see, some fans are still deeply moved by her loss.’ And it’s me, blubbing on her door. She’d have laughed her head off at that, and said: ‘Your timing’s immaculate!’”
As, of course, it must be online, too. When someone tweeted, “Do you remember how shit James Blunt was?”, Mr Self-Deprecation was ready with an appropriate retort: “No need, I’ve got a new [record] coming out in September.”
‘Cold’ is out now. ‘Once Upon a Mind’ is released on 25 October