Since I doubt if anyone gives much of a toss and almost no one will see this it seems like a suitable place to vent somewhat about my involvement with the popular pop singer James Blunt - he's a folky balladeer who's shifted a couple of million records in the UK and is set to be the next big thing in the world (this year at least...) according to Tom Sturges, the screaming cover of Billboard and just about everyone who knows about these things. I think if I stick to the facts then nobody could accuse me of doing anything other than that.

I was introduced to James late in 2001 by a friend of mine, Dixie Chassay, who was his girlfriend at the time. She told me he was a singer and I should check him out. We met and he sang a couple of bits for me with his guitar and we hung out. His stuff was crude, occasionally laughably direct, and betrayed his relative lack of musicianship or discernible influence - it sounds unlikely but I think he genuinely hadn't even heard of some people like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell let alone taken any of their music on board (a fact about which he was at least open and affable). But I kind of loved the guy. He was great looking in a short-arsed Tom Cruise-y kind of way and he had this girlish singing style that brilliantly offset his back story - he was an actual serving Captain in the Queen’s Coldstream Guards or something and he'd served as a UN tank commander in the Bosnian conflict, where by all accounts he'd seen a fair amount of action.

It would probably be an overstatement to say that in terms of his professional musical aspirations James had nothing going on, but he definitely had next to nothing going on. He was being semi-repped by some half-baked college friend and as far as I could tell he'd been pretty much laughed out of the few A&R meetings he'd managed to get - if you hear his record and his strange falsetto style you could probably understand why. He was also "posh", which within the curious reverse-snobbism of the British music industry made him about as enticing as a crooning leper. But this stuff just made him all the more attractive as a prospect to me, a similarly public-school educated (the opposite of what that means in the US) writer/producer with a bit of pop success that I wasn't particularly well equipped to exploit and on the lookout for a project that I could nurture and sink my teeth into. It has also always seemed abundantly clear to me that while the expense-account drones are all looking off towards one horizon in search of the next so-and-so the actual next big thing tends to trot over the hill behind them that they were resolutely ignoring.

So James and I got on well, and I felt that he had all the ingredients to become a major commercial artist – a housewives' choice, a sort of prettified David Gray without the genuine writing, singing or performing chops. And this is not to say I didn't like his stuff, because I liked it a lot - it was so direct and rudimentary that it was hard not to find it effective if one was willing to be affected by such things, which I generally am. I suppose it’s just that I’m also aware of a wildly popular form of commercial music that appeals to the broad swathe of people who don't actually like music that much, or for whom at least music isn't particularly important, beyond its function as something to fill in life's sonic background. And it seemed to me that James had every chance of being such an artist, who could whip up the masses into a tepid, toe-tapping frenzy as they commuted along the motorway with their suit jackets hung up on the handrail behind them. And it excited me that I could see this while everyone else was apparently blind to it. If you're someone who looks for talent and/or commercial potential in the entertainment industry you'll find yourself cooing over fool's gold often enough - belief being the primary fuel required to inject the necessary time and energy into a project that has no existing momentum. But in this case I really felt like I was holding an ace against a pack of jokers (or some such similar hard-boiled metaphor).

So in spite of the general indifference towards him as an artist I suggested to James that he come out to L.A., where I had recently moved, so that we could work on his material and really get something going. Early in 2002 he flew out. It was kind of a stressful time for me. I'd shot myself (somewhat purposefully) in the foot career-wise by moving to the US and I was expecting the birth of my first child. But not to get too schmaltzy about it, I really believed in James and I felt I was doing the right thing by devoting myself to a single project rather than chasing around after elusive pop cuts and production gigs. As I can often be heard to say (with a folksy twang): sometimes it's better just to pick your horse and ride it to the finish line. For his part James seemed happy, excited and grateful that I was showing such belief in him and was prepared to give up so much studio time, musician favours (not to mention my own unique brand of musical nous, personal guidance and dry-cleaning tips) to develop his project. He stayed in my little house in Los Feliz, sleeping on the sofa, and we worked hard at my studio in Laurel Canyon, working on the songs, starting to turn some of them into full-blown productions. A couple of people told me I shouldn't be working with him without a contract in place, but to be honest the love couldn't have been thicker in the air - lots of talk about how great the record was going to be and how cool the whole situation was - I love you, you love me, we'll never do wrong by each other and so on. And this is quite apart from the fact that a) James didn't have anything too solid in the way of representation to whom I could make a proposition, and b) I genuinely prefer to work on a handshake (or at least I used to...) whenever I can, contracts tending to sour most creative relationships on some level or other. In spite of what came about I was and remain a strong believer in some kind of karmic universal bank (which hopefully has better interest rates than my own bank... and should not be confused with my publisher, Karmic Universal Music). I felt that if I showed James such unconditional creative support the love couldn’t fail to flow back around to me.

At some point during this working process I invited my friend and regular collaborator Sacha Skarbek to join in the sessions. We had worked on a lot of stuff together, had recently co-written a big pop hit for gone-today pop sensation Samantha Mumba. He was in L.A. because we were working together on an album for the artist Amanda Ghost, which I was producing. Sacha played on three of four of the songs, helped James and I to shape them musically, and did a beautiful job as he always did. I was aware that he was a little miffed to be working on the project under my auspices rather than on a more equal footing, but this was not an uncommon feeling when working with Sacha. He had strong writing, production and entrepreneurial aspirations of his own, but his unwillingness to devote himself to some of the less glamorous aspects of the game (i.e. endless sitting in dark rooms developing R.S.I. and a fat arse) left me generally reticent about bringing him in as an out-and-out partner on projects I was working on. Compounding Sacha’s vague sense of disentitlement, particularly as he heard how well the material was coming together, was the fact that he had been aware of Blunt on some passing level in the UK (though there’s no logic by which Sacha could say that he’d actually done anything about it…). For my part I was just happy to have him involved on a musical level. I felt that we had a project that we could all get well on and I would have been happy for Sacha to be involved on every level.

So James & I got this great batch of material down and then he headed back to the UK. I was going to continue working it up and then take it to the labels, where I was sure someone would bite based on what we were doing. I was convinced that I’d done everything necessary to earn James’ total fidelity but I nonetheless asked Sacha (also returned to London) to keep an eye on him and the project, make sure everything stayed cool at that end. James and I communicated regularly by phone and email talking about how the material was coming together. He was very upbeat about the progress but I sensed a little uneasy about my desire to try a few interesting things with the tracks. [Check out the link below to the song “Really Want You” and you’ll probably see what I mean - I felt that James’ whole vibe was so mainstream that it could be incorporated into a couple of more unconventional productions and lose nothing of its mass appeal] On the whole though James and I remained united in our excitement and confidence about the whole process. At some point and despite that fact that the complete package wasn’t ready I played some of the material to my friend Beth Halper at Dreamworks, really just because I was so excited about it and couldn’t resist giving someone an early look (Beth, of course, had her own problems…).

After a few weeks, however, communications with James began to turn a bit strained and patchy and I instinctively knew that something was wrong. I asked James for the truth and he told me that he had a new manager and was flying over to L.A. to discuss it with me. At this point and sensing the worst I asked my (previously less-than-interested) UK management to put some kind of production agreement together that would give James a chance to do the right thing, but the proposal they came up with was pretty producer-heavy/artist-unfriendly and it probably just exacerbated the situation. It certainly must have made James feel better about the decision he had already made. James flew out and sat with me in my studio where he explained to me that he had been introduced to Derek McKillop (Elton John’s manager) and that Derek wanted to manage him. McKillop had advised him to sever all ties with me and in the interest of furthering his career that is exactly what he was going to do. He explained all this to me with an air of propriety and rectitude as if his simple willingness to fly out and break the news to me somehow made his decision any less callow and self-serving. I think in his mind it certainly did. He seemed to have convinced himself that he was making a brave and resolute decision in line with his military instincts. To me of course it was pretty much just an outright betrayal, a huge waste of my time, resources and energy. It wasn’t so much that I was angry, just completely gutted. I had pinned an awful lot of hope on the project and devoted a huge amount of painstaking effort to it. I had breathed life into it and I simply couldn’t believe that the universe was going to repay me with such abject treachery. Clearly my own karmic account was somewhat overdrawn in those days, but at the time it just seemed exasperatingly unjust. I told James: “I’m not sure what you want me to say”, and he basically just said his piece and left. I was supposed to take some kind of cold comfort from his solemn word that he had used none of the material we had worked on to secure interest from McKillop (which was somewhat unlikely and can only have been untrue, as it turned out) and that nothing we had worked on together would ever appear on any future record of his.

Any anger I did have was reserved for Sacha and Amanda Ghost, who, it transpired, had been responsible for introducing James to Derek McKillop . I’m not sure what was particularly wrong about the introduction itself - I myself had sent Blunt to see a couple of managers in the UK. But since it was orchestrated without my knowledge, resulted in Sacha and Amanda supplanting me (for the ensuing period at least) as the primary creative force in Blunt’s life, and rendered all my work on the project effectively pointless, it was definitely a tricky pill to swallow on a personal level. I confronted Sacha about it and, as people do when they know they’ve done something a bit dodgy, he turned extra defensive and self-justificatory. And that pretty much put me and my good friend Sacha Skarbek on the outs from that point on.

I don’t know a lot of the details after that because I genuinely couldn’t face hearing about it. I think James toured about a bit on McKillop’s juice, worked on some more material with Sacha and Amanda, at some point got in with Linda Perry. She signed him to her imprint on Elektra and he made a record with veteran producer Tom Rothrock. It’s the same record that’s now blown up but at the time nobody was interested and it sat there doing nothing. Eventually Elektra folded as part of Warners consolidation and Blunt was left effectively in the wilderness, with a record that no one cared about on a label that no longer existed. During this time friends of mine would periodically urge me to claim this and that on the record, sue James etc. but to be honest I was so beaten down by the experience that I couldn’t even revisit any of the material we had worked on together, let alone face hearing anything about the record he had actually made. At some point a bit later Warners Euro boss Korda Marshall heard the on-the-shelf record, recognized its commercial potential, decided that since it was Warners-owned-and-paid-for they might as well take a run at it. I understand that they did some major blanket promotion and press coverage in the UK and after a while it caught on with the masses bigtime. None of this is any great surprise to me. James is exactly as successful as I knew he would be, not that it does me, my bank balance or my family much good to say it… Various people I introduced to James or involved in the project have gotten (relatively) rich from it and received huge career boosts. But, like the Murphys, I’m not bitter (or am I…?). And as a post-script, when I finally got up the spunk to look at a copy of the record a couple of months ago, it turns out that James wasn’t quite as good as his Queen-and-Country word and three of the songs we worked on closely together are in there among the ten nuggets. But that’s another story for another day…

So there you have it. It’s a cautionary tale for you kids out there – Don’t believe in, trust or rely on anything in the crazy world of show bid-ness unless you’re prepared to take terrible betrayal and collective amnesia on the chin and trust blindly that it will all even out over both legs (to borrow a British sporting metaphor)… But KEEP BELIEVING IF YOU CAN![soaring Vaughn-Williams type music swells in the background]

And here are three of the things I did with James (2 of which appear on his album in different productions), so you can say “They sound terrible! What the fuck are you talking about!? Please stop talking about this now and get a hobby! Why do I waste so much of my time on Myspace?!”

"Really Want You"

"Goodbye My Lover"

"Cry"