SANDS CRIES FOR BLUNT

Since she was dumped from the editor's chair at the Sunday Telegraph after about four hours in charge, time has obviously been weighing heavily on Sarah Sands' hands. Once worrying about front page splashes and rearranging the political team, now she's reduced to writing pieces in defeence of James Blunt for the Daily Mail:

He writes songs you can actually sing, doesn't do drugs and has fought for his country. So why am I the only person who doesn't hate James Blunt?

It's a bizarre question, especially as Sands then points out that You're Beautiful was "played in every car and cafè and on every beach in Europe", chosen by Elton John and David Furnish for their wedding, spent thirty weeks in the charts, and helped Blunt to win Q and Novello awards. Yeah, that's a whole city of hatred you're standing against there, Sands. Next week, you can perhaps try going out on a limb to stand up for Wayne Rooney.

Sands is annoyed that Blunt did so well in that poll to find out what irritated people - she can't understand why he irritates more people than diarrhoea. But although diarrhoea is unpleasant, it passes quickly and you don't get it pumping out of the speakers in every shop you go into. Unless you're especially unlucky.

To be fair to Sands, the penny does seem to drop halfway through why so many people who love music have a problem with Blunt:

Perhaps Blunt's problem is that he is undeniably mainstream. I saw him perform at Shepherd's Bush and the evening appeared to attract an even more solidly middleclass audience than the last night of the Proms.

Exactly. The fact that Sands is even interested enough to churn out a page in defence of him sums up exactly why Blunt is an irritant: his constituency is precisely the sort of person who doesn't really like music, who complains if you can't hear all the words (and really moans if they don't make sense straight away when you do), and who thinks it's so much the better if the singer has "risked his life for his country". Blunt isn't just mainstream, he's Coldstream:

If James Blunt had been promoted as a kind of General Sir Mike Jackson with songs, I don't believe that he would be so unpopular with British men, who see him as too wet and weedy for their taste.

Good lord; we knew she was poor at editing newspapers, but compared to her marketing skills she's Citizen Kane: she thinks Blunt's white-bread-no-crust music should have been marketed as coming from some sort of acoustic Andy McNabb?

Of course, Sands blames the interweb for Blunt's unpopularity:

Self-appointed style tsars (ie the web chatboards that now control whether a pop star is officially 'cool' or not) claim that Blunt's songs are irritating, derivative and simplistic.

"Oh my God!" writes one contributor to the Coolteens website, "James Blunt is so annoying he makes me want to rip my eyeballs out just to have something to plug my ears with." Nice.

Another critic laments: "Once you scratch beneath the surface of his songs, there doesn't seem to be anything there."

These are pop songs, for goodness sake - what do you want to find underneath them? The Gettysburg Address?

Emotion. Ideas. A sense of wonder. A three-minute retelling of a rollercoaster romance. A political allegory. Something, Sarah, anything. Only someone who believes that pop can do nothing more than be a vaguely pleasant noise could find anything of value in Blunt.

Now that everyone officially hates James Blunt, wouldn't it be cool to decide to love him again?

Sarah, now that the woman who launched the mumsy Stella magazine officially loves Blunt, we doubt if even he could bring himself to like himself ever again.

music james blunt