How the military still plays a role in James Blunt's life

It's so very good to see you, Nick. Great to see you. Right, you get the call, your agent gets the call. James, they're offering you Celebrity Traitors. Was it a yes, I'm in? Was it a let me think about it? I swore I would never do any kind of reality TV, and so much so that my manager never even told me that I was being asked to do it. And really, he'd passed on it, he'd pushed back on it, and my wife walked in one morning and said, I've signed you up to cheaters. I hate it. I hate it. She got the call from Claudia. What did she particularly like about it? Did she think you'd do well? Well, I think she thought that, you know, time with me out of the house. Punishment. Punishment and send me up to Inverness. To be locked away. What did you learn about James Blunt in the time you were up there? I actually really genuinely was affected by the whole experience, genuinely. Because, you know, I had volunteered, volunteered to go up and spend time with all these long-haired civvy celebs. And who actually, I have to say, were lovely people. But I really sat there. I'm looking out of the window occasionally thinking, you know, I go away on tour so much. My last tour was 21 months on the road. I'm just about to embark on 12 months on the road. I haven't even told my wife how long it is. And here I am up in Scotland volunteering to do this again when I have a very comfortable bed at home and a very lovely family. And what am I doing? And I swore to myself, I'm going to go home and spend more time with them. How many days are you up there? Am I allowed to ask? It depends how long you live. And stupidly, no-one would kill me and no-one would banish me. I was trying to commit game show suicide throughout the period and no-one would banish me, so I was there for 22, 23 days, I think it was, in the end. If we look at the detective process, who was the surprise Poirot and who was the surprise Clouseau? Well, I was thinking, you've nailed it for me. I'd hoped it would be Poirot and ended up Clouseau. I think, yeah. You did make a couple of bad calls, I've got to be honest with you. Yeah, I mean, a couple of them weren't explained. You know, I voted for Hannah to actually keep her in the game. Right. You know, as a dub, I was trying to give some heat on her. And we had that conversation, but that wasn't explained. But no, on the whole, you know, I knew where all the traitors were. They just edited out my genius. Yes. Later in life, they'll be studying my strategy to make full sense of it. You know, at the end of the day, if you saw people as uncloaked, Everyone got every single person wrong. Every single person went wrong. We know that in there, as they were uncloaked, apart from Ross. Ross, actually, who you wouldn't necessarily, you know, from his own paranoia, wouldn't expect to have got it, He named, in his uncloaked, two of the Traitors. So you have to give him credit for that. Oh, that's right. Who did you, surprisingly, find yourself really warming to? Because it's such an eclectic... I'm going to be absolutely honest with you. Did I know every single one of you that gathered in the church that afternoon? I have to admit, I didn't. No. Obviously, I do now, because I've watched you. But who did you find yourself really drawn to that surprised you? Kenny. Kenny and I were very, very close, and you only saw it for a moment. There's me excitedly calling him my friend. But he's just a charming, lovely human being. And, you know, we were the odd couple in there. Can we talk about your military background? My wife and I loved it whenever there was a trial because you automatically dropped into military mode. Right, you are with me, you are with me. Yeah, they needed structure. Um, uh, But as my wife watched it back, she said, Oh, my God, you're bossy. But you're not, it's a military... Hang on, Dad is military, right? Dad's a colonel in the army and I was a captain, exactly. And speaking on the day, I don't know whether you've had sight of this, a survey's come out and said that 35s and below would not sign up because they don't feel that they've got anything invested in the country. Were you always going to be a military bloke? I was. Actually, the army had funded my university, and so I owed them four years. I ended up doing six years in the end, and I'm really, really glad I did. You know, I was a lazy student, and it gave me some drive, and I really only think I do what I do now because it's given me... You know, the notion of hard work and attention to detail and some discipline along the way. We run my tour like a military operation. Genuinely? Yeah, it is pretty much. You know, my band and my crew are, you know, the non-commissioned officers and soldiers of my troop. My tour manager is the troop sergeant or sergeant major, exactly. And we stand by our bunks and inspect the bunks. But they're all experts in their field and it's run very much like the team that we would have in the army. I understand why people nowadays wouldn't, because I think we have through, you know, politicians do try and divide us so extremely nowadays to choose whether you are left or right, choose the extremes of whether you are leave or remain. But our social media is anything but social now. It is entirely antisocial. Our phones are no longer things that we pick up to communicate. You know, if someone calls me, I get angry. If a friend calls me, I'm upset. What are you doing? You're bothering me. And instead, I use my phone to look. at strangers, or argue, worse, argue with strangers online. You're always right, me. Me too. And so I think, yeah, I think, you know, the notion of meeting in the middle, dialogue which should be respectful and kind and compassionate and also understand someone else's perspective. And I know this from being in war. You know, you have two sides, and you hear one side of an argument. I was in Kosovo, and if you hear the Serbs' side of the story, it was entirely understandable, and the Kosovo-Albanian side was entirely understandable, but because they couldn't understand each other's meet in the middle, they would end up in war and not be able to coexist. Right. We're going to talk about what you're up to now. Just last question as regards traitors. Why the headband? I was trying to just summon my inner 118 commercial. I thought you were John McEnroe. I couldn't read it. Right, Airplane Mode is the new album. We must talk about it because you've been gracious enough to come in. What's the driving force behind that album? You know, I've been in this business for a long time. My first album, Back to Bedlam, was about the madness of the mind. This is about the same sort of thing, the loneliness, the isolation of the mind. Airplane Mode is when you switch off the outside world. And you know what? You know what, when you've been in the business this long, sometimes it's very hard to keep up with what you're doing. It's very hard to remove the audience, to remove what people want or expect of you. And so this album, I've been long enough to say I don't have anything to prove. They put my greatest hits out two years ago. And you normally put out a greatest hits when you die. And so anything else I put out is a gravy. And so this album is not for my record label or even for my audience. It's for me. And you mentioned the tour and how it is like a military operation. Where are you going? Gosh, I'm just looking. You're going all over the country, aren't you? I'm kicking off in February, but I'll reach the UK in March. Jamesblunt.com for tickets are out now, and I will go in London O2, Manchester, you know, the arenas. Glasgow, Bournemouth, Brighton, Cardiff. This is like reading the football results. You're going everywhere, yeah? Yes, exactly. I will eat this out, milk it for all it's worth, but I have great fun on the road, and I have a band who make it. They're the rock stars I always wanted to be. But never achieved. And we have an amazing time on the road to come along. And last question. The military still does play a role in your life, do you think, now? Yeah. How many years were you in? I was only in for six. But it never leaves you. And, you know, I'm very much, you know, my best friends are still serving. I still have connections. I work with Help for Heroes. But I also work directly with the army themselves in different ways. We're going to announce that shortly of the ways I'm working with their military. And we know you only did this show because of your missus. Can you assure us she's not a fan of Strictly Come Dancing? We'll see. We're not going to suddenly see you pop up on that. Fortunately, I have two left feet. Well, great luck with the new album. Thanks, Jane. Thank you so much for coming in.