James Blunt Tickets at 3Arena

At the end of 2021, James Blunt released a greatest hits album. “Or as I like to call it – The Greatest Hit And Songs I Wish You’d Heard,” he says, which, as anyone who follows his Twitter account will tell you, is a very James Blunt thing to say: it’s self-deprecating, funny, and predicated on the recurrent gag that the only James Blunt song anyone knows or cares about is his multi-platinum 2005 single, ‘You’re Beautiful’.

In fact, the greatest hits album, called 'The Stars Beneath My Feet', rounded up the first 17 years of an extraordinary career by anyone’s standards. Shortly after leaving the army in 2002, Blunt released the biggest-selling album of the decade in the UK: 'Back To Bedlam' sold over 12m copies. He also released a further succession of hit albums, every one of them a Top Ten hit, and a brace of huge singles including ‘1973’, ‘Stay The Night’, ‘Bonfire Heart’ and ‘OK’.

Blunt became quite astonishingly adept at social media – his pithiest tweets were even published as a book, 2020’s 'How To Be A Complete And Utter Blunt: The Diary Of A Reluctant Social Media Sensation' – which seemed to have transformed him into something approaching a national treasure in the UK. He started attracting a noticeably different audience to the one you might expect: anyone who turned up at his Greatest Hits tour might have been surprised to find not just 40 and 50-somethings, but people too young to remember 'Back To Bedlam' as anything other than a fuzzy memory from their primary school years.

In October 2023, James Blunt released a new album, 'Who We Used To Be'. The first single, 'Beside You', is, as Blunt puts it, “pop, very, very easy on the ear, sweet, incredibly simple”: it’s also the latest in a series of James Blunt songs that seem gently infected with the spirit of the dancefloors in his adopted home of Ibiza. But, as Blunt also points out, the rest of the album is markedly different in tone: a collection of songs that address some very grown-up concerns: the pleasures and difficulties of long-term relationships, ageing, fatherhood, death.