By BRUCE DENNILL
James Blunt: The Who We Used To Be Tour / SunBet Arena, Time Square, Pretoria
James Blunt has carved out a very specific pop-rock niche, knowingly built on a career blast-off – the 12 million-selling Back To Bedlam album – that will always give him enough credibility to support whatever touring or new releases he feels like doing. That album made his reputation in a couple of different ways, with its big hits You’re Beautiful and Goodbye My Lover establishing him as a high-end balladeer while also, for some reason, making him a target for critics and industry colleagues who added the singer’s posh-ish background, lyrical earnestness and regular use of falsetto together and came up with someone worth making the subject of endless mockery.
To his eternal credit, Blunt, if he took that bizarre commentary to heart, never showed it and his current brand is probably at least as much built on his darkly funny self-deprecation (hilariously exhibited on his popular X account) as it is on his current musical output.
His current world tour is theoretically to promote his 2023 album Who We Used To Be, but with Blunt’s casually aware perspective – he knows his audience have come for the hits and assures them that that’s understandable – this concert, the last before a significant break in his touring schedule quickly becomes a love-fest between artist and fans.
Even in that generally happy space, there are – as with any artist – ups and downs in terms of tone and impact throughout the setlist. Wisemen, Carry You Home, Goodbye My Lover, High (with its amusing preamble about the song being so high that the men in the audience can’t hear it), Postcards (cheesy but fun), You’re Beautiful and encores Bonfire Heart and 1973 are all songs known to fans of any stripe, with some of the others more familiar to more dedicated listeners. Two more – Monsters and The Girl That Never Was (taken off the recent album) – show off perhaps the side of Blunt most confusing to his detractors: his ability to take something utterly heartbreaking (the passing of his father and he and his wife losing a baby, respectively) and communicate its profundity and meaning, in a way that takes enormous courage, to a huge audience. The latter song, given its recent release, also confirms that the artist’s songwriting chops remain in good shape.
But the most compelling and entertaining part of Blunt’s live act – and one he seems to genuinely enjoy – is the way he controls his audience, making them laugh more or less constantly, getting them on their feet, involved in Mexican waves or lighting the arena with their cellphones and generally feeling great about being in the room, even if the soundtrack is mostly the singer’s self-described “miserable songs”. This aspect of his stagecraft is of the highest order and a tight, no-frills band (guitarist Paul Sayer has some lovely lead lines and is a superb backing vocalist) provides a rock-solid platform for Blunt’s distinctive vocals, occasionally betraying the wear and tear of a long tour – though he’s never afraid of the high notes and the added grit adds further character to familiar melodies.
A James Blunt concert is a hoot, and the number of times you find yourself singing along confirms the quality of his catalogue.