ninme

Read the whole, considerably long and informative, thing. Highlights:

Times Online - One man went to war, and got to the top of the charts

James Blunt, the singer who suddenly bestrides the pop charts, is an unlikely modern superstar. Schooled at Harrow, the 28-year-old troubadour is a former army captain who served in Kosovo, guarded the Queen and took part in the Queen Mother’s lying-in-state. His cut-glass accent is a tribute to the Household Cavalry.

At the beginning of the year Blunt was a virtual unknown. Last week he achieved a double whammy when his single, You’re Beautiful, and his debut album, Back to Bedlam, claimed the number one spots. Both are remarkable, having risen by word of mouth rather than the more usual route of crashing in on a wave of hype.

Of course, Blunt is not the first pop star to have done time in the armed forces. Elvis Presley served as an army GI in Germany, Jimi Hendrix was a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division and the reggae artist Shaggy drove a tank during the first Gulf war. But they were not officer class.

Jimi Hendrix was a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division?

Love songs also loom large in his repertoire. He recorded Goodbye My Lover in the Los Angeles home of the actress Carrie Fisher, to whom he had been introduced by a friend. “Carrie said, ‘If you’re doing an album, you might as well come and live in a weird house’. So she was my landlady and I recorded in her bathroom because she keeps a piano there, which is the kind of thing they do in Hollywood.”

Hah! In NoCal, we keep our pianos in the kitchen pantry! Take that, Hollyweird!

The image of poet-soldier fits well with his family’s military history which stretches back 1,000 years to the time when his ancestor King Gorm of Old Denmark (“That’s where the term gormless comes from”) sent his son to England in the 10th century. The family’s fair hair earned them the surname Blond, which transmuted into Blount. The singer shortened it to Blunt, which he thought more catchy, when he left the army in 2002 after five years’ service, intent on a musical career.

Heck, it beats Madonna’s story.

He remembers Serbian soldiers “standing around reading a porn mag and laughing, smoking a fag over the bodies of Kosovo Albanian families they had just murdered”. His reaction was to stroll through Serbian villages wearing an East German cap singing “All we are saying is give peace a chance”.

That amuses me terribly.

Blunt’s military credentials may enable him to crack America when the album is released there in September. British singers are usually viewed as cool in the coastal cities of Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, but the indifference of middle America often sends them home defeated. Blunt, pictured atop a tank in his publicity shots, may turn that process on its head.

One drawback may be his limey self- deprecation, but he is working on that:

“I take sex, drugs and rock’n’roll incredibly seriously.”

Oh lord, if he’s anything but country, I’m joining the fanclub.