KEY POINTS:
James Blunt is often photographed with a beautiful girl on his arm "because no one pictures me with a beautiful boy on my arm," he quips. "It wouldn't sell as many papers. There's a beautiful boy feeling my leg up right now."
He's just come off stage in
England, which could explain his cheeky mood. For the past month he's spent almost as much time chatting up journalists as fans as he works the promo trail for his All the Lost Souls tour.
This is not his favourite part of the job. He'd rather be playing music than talking about it. It's no secret his relationship with the press is purely a practical arrangement.
"I know the media world is definitely not an honest world," he says, in response to some of the negative feedback his music has received.
Whatever the critics say about his songs, it's been Blunt who has had the last laugh. Since his debut album Back to Bedlam crash-landed on the charts in 2004, he's won two Brit awards, toured the world and dated a supermodel (Petra Nemcova, from whom he has since separated). He's also become a rich man, selling more than 15 million copies of his first two albums. He's celebrated by spending the money on "a lot of Corona".
The venues are getting bigger to accommodate his growing fan base. The last time he played in New Zealand it was at the St James; when he returns in April it's to play Vector Arena.
"As the audiences have got bigger, the production has got bigger and I guess my engagement with the audience has got that much more dramatic as we go."
Anyone who saw his last gig will know Blunt wrings every last drop from his words. While some thrill to his passionate falsetto, his emotive singing style has also earned him comparisons with Eric Cartman and C3PO, particularly on his ubiquitous singles, You're Beautiful and Goodbye My Lover.
Days after he won the Ivor Novello prize for International Hit of the Year and Most Performed Work, fed-up listeners complained he got too much airplay and the ballads were banned by a popular radio station.
Blunt has also borne the brunt of critics' distaste for music deemed too saccharine, and was awarded the dubious accolade of having his name used in Cockney slang on the TV show Skins (to which he has said he is pleased to at least be named after his favourite part of the female anatomy).
Yet his confidence is unwavering, his self-belief palpable.
"You just have to enjoy it. I really enjoy what I do. I've got a great band and crew and I've got a passionate audience, so I have little to be thick-skinned about.
"I get out there and I do my thing and of course I've had some negative press along the way. But those people who are making money from their jobs certainly aren't going to influence the way I do music or live my life."
So far, it's been a life at the top. Born to parents who own the Norfolk coast landmark Cley Mill (an 18th-century windmill passed on through generations), Blunt was educated at Bristol University and followed his dad's and grandfather's footsteps into the military. He was sent to patrol the streets of Kosovo as an Army peacekeeper before being promoted to captain, a job that inspired the song No Bravery.
Music might seem a world away from the forces but Blunt found creativity in both.
"The wonderful thing with music is that it's entirely subjective, and if there was a formula it wouldn't be worth doing ... the Army is about freedom of thought as well because you're told what you've got to do but how you do it is up to you. And if you followed a formula, the enemy would work out what you're doing."
If the music career dries up, he says he wouldn't go back.
"They probably wouldn't have me because I've forgotten how to shave."
Within a week of leaving the Army, the singer-songwriter had hooked up with 4 Non Blondes singer Linda Perry, who signed him to her US-based label, after several British record companies passed on him, reportedly because of his "posh" accent. Next thing, the guy who looked like he was straight out of a shampoo ad had shot to number one and was being mentioned in the same breath as artists such as David Gray and Damien Rice.
Bedlam was a melody-driven album that spawned a run of hit singles, from the sappy to the uplifting (High, Wisemen).
He paid tribute to his musical heroes on the follow-up, All the Lost Souls last year, with Elton-like piano-based songs such as Give Me Some Love and 1973, a nostalgic tune inspired by a good time with his mates in Ibiza, where he lived during the writing process.
"I love Back to Bedlam for its innocence and I think that's part of its charm, but All the Lost Souls is a much more musically accomplished album for me. It shows great growth and development and you can see the experiences as a musician from the influences of working with other musicians and playing music every single day."
Blunt takes pride in the fact that he's influenced by songwriters from the 1970s: Elton John, Lou Reed, Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan. He says his fans are often pleasantly surprised at his gigs, thinking it would be just one man and his guitar when instead he performs with a five-piece band.
"It's very much like the bands of the 70s. We're not relying on any computers along the way, we're just getting out there and doing our thing and it's up-tempo, lively and fun.
"In the same way we record as a band and don't rely on the machinery, we rely on the musicians themselves. Because I'm writing songs about real-life experience, real human emotion, I don't want to lose that in a recording process. I don't want the computer to track down some beats. I want to keep that sense of the human spirit."
I Really Want You is not just a spiritually-inclined love song, he says, despite talk of prophets and clerics and a heartbreaking finale.
"It's that notion of what goes on in the world, of politics, race issues, religion issues. It's all something we have to deal with in life and in the world, from the metaphysical and the philosophical and yet, beyond all that, it's a basic human instinct, that desire to connect with someone, to share life with someone, to really breach the isolation of our own minds."
He insists Souls doesn't focus on celebrity but it's hard to ignore lines like this from One of the Brightest Stars: "One day they'll make you glorious beneath the lights of your deserved fame."
"It's definitely about the experience of celebrity culture, about that sense of ownership that certain organisations have of a personality or persona. It's not just relevant to me, I think it's relevant to lots of different people, about the highs and the lows of someone being in the public eye.
"I write songs from life experience, about the people I meet and the places I've been to, the experience of being a conscious human being and being alive in the world. I guess what I'm really trying to do is live life and get out there and do stuff and meet people and those are the things that inspire my songs, because it's like a diary."
LOWDOWN
Who: James Blunt
Albums: Back to Bedlam (2004), All the Lost Souls (2007).
Trivia: Blunt has been romantically linked to Petra Nemcova, the Pussycat Dolls' Jessica Sutta, Lindsay Lohan and Reese Witherspoon. By linked, we mean the tabloids reckon he was dating them.
Tour: Vector Arena, Wednesday, April 30.
