James Blunt says 'it is our responsibility to support the troops'

James Blunt, Singer

ANDREW MARR: His first album sold more than 11 million copies and turned James Blunt, a former British Army officer, into one of the world's biggest pop stars.

Now he's back with a new album "All the Lost Souls" and a new single which comes out later this month.

I spoke to him just before we came on air this morning and asked him about his new song. Very much a theme of the times which deals with the death of a soldier abroad. JAMES BLUNT: Yes, actually I didn't obviously write it, thinking about the situation as it would be now, I wrote it just from past experience and that kind of very sad moment.

And it really recognisable at the moment, isn't it, with so many soldiers laying their lives down the line and doing a phenomenal job out there and the fall-out from that.

ANDREW MARR: Do you feel quite engaged with this whole debate about, you know, the way the military are treated in this country?

JAMES BLUNT: Yeah. I mean there are two things that seem to be in the papers at the moment which are a kind of a notion of lack of support for the soldiers, when instead I think it's in us who voted in the government, it's us who then gave them the mandate to send our troops out to do whatever job it was and they could have given them shovels to build, or guns to destroy, and so it's our responsibility and we should support the troops doing that.

ANDREW MARR: When you read about things like people in Peterborough jeering at, in this case, RAF people so they're not allowed to wear their uniforms in public. How do you feel about that?

JAMES BLUNT: I think they should be jeering themselves really, because they voted in the government and it was the government's responsibility for their actions and they're just sending, you know, our men and women who at the end of the day are just regular people.

ANDREW MARR: Yeah. Do you think we support the military enough in terms of money apart from anything else?

JAMES BLUNT: I mean, I think traditionally we've supported them emotionally and, you know, of course finances have always been tight. That's the other thing I've been involved in is Help for Heroes which is to raise money for soldiers who come back here who've been injured or maimed. Because actually our facilities for looking after them are pretty appalling.

ANDREW MARR: Your time in the army, Kosovo was the big issue, British soldiers out there. And you were actually, I think, the first British soldier or certainly British officer into Pristina when NATO forces went in and you were sitting on a small tank. And you went back and you made a film, talking to some to some of the families that you helped liberate...

JAMES BLUNT: Yes exactly, I mean you know 18 months ago I went back there. It was some six years after the war itself and yet I really wanted to find out if anything had improved and changed. And so I took a camera crew and it was amazing going back really to see what had improved.

That definitely security and stability had improved in some ways, but I guess also the fact that we got up and left so quickly to go to a place like Afghanistan, to Iraq, definitely has, you know, at a cost of the place we had sort of made a responsibility to stick around in in the first place.

ANDREW MARR: And you were in particular protecting some Serbs. Because they were then the minority within Kosovo against the Kosovo Albanians.

And you went back to a village, well actually you made a film about this which has been shown in the States but not here yet. Let's just see a little moment of what happened when you arrived at the village. It was empty.

JAMES BLUNT: Yes exactly.

[FILM CLIP]

ANDREW MARR: Did that make you think when we British soldiers, western soldiers go out into somewhere to protect local people in the end it's often perhaps always impossible, because we always come away again and then local conditions reapply?

JAMES BLUNT: Yeah, I think in many ways we make a commitment, but all too often the political will changes and focus goes elsewhere and we pull out and we go somewhere else. So that was always what was going to happen there.

It was very sad, having gone in there and assured them that we'll be here for a long time, and I've been told to tell you that I can be here for, you know, for years, and we'll pass it on to other armies. But a few years down the line they had no support and they'd all fled.

ANDREW MARR: And they fled presumably back to Serbia. Serbia central I should say.

JAMES BLUNT: Exactly. And I guess what was also really relevant there was that I could really see two sides of the story. You know, we were there aggressively pushing the Serbs back at one stage and then trying to defend them the next day, and I think it was really clear that both sides were right in their views and their opinions. But also both sides were wrong.

ANDREW MARR: Yes. Now, you've had huge success with some of your songs. You're back on the road again with your new album coming out. You're known for love songs and yet there's quite a lot of songs that are about killing and death and all the things that you experienced at war.

JAMES BLUNT: All these happy things.

ANDREW MARR: All these happy things. It is odd sort of trying to write a love song one minute and then move on to something quite darker the next, and how do you deal with that in a concert?

JAMES BLUNT: Well I guess actually I just write songs about life itself, you know, the ups and downs of life, and the are ones that might work on radio better are the ones that you're then known for and pigeon-holed.

I guess that you know for me the sign of the media, they enjoy pigeon-holing anyone and so it can be frustrating. But in the concerts, you know, people know the albums and they know the ups and the downs. And in fact we show some footage from Kosovo while I'm playing a particular song called No Bravery. But yeah, we can help people seem to understand the ups and downs at the concerts.

ANDREW MARR: All right, well to pigeon-hole you, James Blunt, balladeer and ex-soldier, thank you very much indeed for coming in.

JAMES BLUNT: It's a pleasure.

INTERVIEW ENDS

Please note "The Andrew Marr Show" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

NB: This transcript was typed from a recording and not copied from an original script.

Because of the possibility of mis-hearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, the BBC cannot vouch for its accuracy

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