James Blunt
James Blunt’s family have served in one kind of
army or another since 995A.D. A long line of warriors.
Savages really. Not a musical bone in any one of their
bodies. The only music he heard growing up was
“Happy Birthday” and “Silent Night”. His father
considered all music, even classical, to be unnecessary
noise. Although James was not one to rock the family boat,
he didn’t really think he was going to join the army –
it sort of crept up on him. Plus his family didn’t
have a boat. Aged fourteen he just held the teenage
conviction that he would have an interesting life –
maybe that’s why he picked the guitar? Then again,
maybe if he hadn’t, he would have tripped over it.
He went to University and studied Aerospace Manufacturing
Engineering and Sociology, spending most lectures asleep
on the floor at the back. In much the same way, he ended
up in the army. In essence, one day he was sleeping off
a hangover at the back of a sociology lecture hall and
the next thing he knew he was in Kosovo with a gun and a
guitar strapped to the side of a tank, wondering who he
could possibly sleep with to get out of this war. To break
up the super attenuated monotony, James would sometimes
stroll through Serb villages wearing an East German cap
singing, “All we are saying is give peace a chance”. “
We were peace-keepers at that point,” he explained,
shrugging helplessly.
So how did the music get into him, you might ask? Well if
you were sent to boarding school aged seven, studied
Engineering by mistake (“I thought we were going to fly
planes, but we just pulled metals apart – the brochure
was very misleading.”), joined the army by default, guarded
The Queen, buried The Queen Mother and pranced around London
like a tit for Japanese tourists to photograph, what you’re
going to want to do very much after that, besides getting
stoned and laid, is put your gun down, pick up a guitar and
make an album in America with Linda Perry. So James came to
Los Angeles in September 2003 to record with Tom Rothrock
et al. At night he’d go to bars, bringing with him his
valuable British accent (in the U.K., too posh for some
people – in LA, the best thing she’d heard all night) and
the fact that like 50 Cent he’d been shot at numerous times,
but unlike the Cent, had dodged the bullets. One song,
“Goodbye My Lover”, was recorded in his landladies’ bathroom
(“She was a frequenter of mental hospitals and in general,
a freak – but pleasant”) where, naturally, she kept a piano.
From birth in a military hospital in Tidworth, to Harrow School,
to Aerospace Manufacturing Engineering, to the Royal Military
Academy Sandhurst, to The Household Cavalry, to Kosovo, to
Buckingham Palace, to a recording studio in Los Angeles. How
did James get from there to here? Only James Blunt’s hairdresser
knows for certain, and either he isn’t talking or James cuts his
own hair, and it’s up to you to join the dots – there are ten of
them on the album.
Written by The Landlady
轉錄自他的官方網站http://www.jamesblunt.com/profile_biog.html
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