James Blunt beautiful to his legion of female fans

James Blunt beautiful to his legion of female fans
St. Petersburg Times - St. Petersburg,FL,USA
By Dalia Wheatt. When I told people I'd be covering James Blunt's show on Friday at Ruth Eckerd Hall, I got two general responses: "No way? ...
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When I told people I'd be covering James Blunt's show on Friday at Ruth Eckerd Hall, I got two general responses: "No way? How'd you get tickets?" and "James who?"

Despite the success of his debut album, Back to Bedlam, James Blunt, it seems, is not entirely a household name. For those who don't recognize him as the author of the saccharine song You're Beautiful, Blunt apparently would like to introduce himself as a versatile rocker.

For Friday's soldout show to a crowd of 2,180, Blunt skipped onto the stage and kicked things off with a few upbeat numbers. Dressed in jeans and a skull-and-crossbones T-shirt, Blunt treated fans to 75 minutes of jolly-good guitar and piano, with a few ballads mixed in.

"In case you think you're here to have any kind of fun at all, I'm going to ruin that now with a really miserable song," he said halfway through the show.

Women shrieked and readied their camera phones, presumably because they thought the song they had waited for all night had arrived. Instead Blunt scooted behind the piano for a spotlighted rendition of his other miserable love song, Goodbye My Lover. Teenage girls crooned the melody word for word with Blunt, grown women swayed in their seats, and every guy in the audience scored points just for sitting through the show.

The guys' time would've been better spent with a pen and paper in hand, taking notes on how Blunt keeps women wrapped around his little finger. For example, he kept his fans lingering to the very end of the show after the encore to play his most popular song, You're Beautiful. For a guy whose biggest hit is about losing the girl of his dreams, Blunt sure knows how to manipulate the fairer sex.

If Blunt shared a tour bus with his opening act, songstress Toby Lightman, they'd probably have a lot to talk about. From their lyrics, it seems both have had Cupid's arrow twisted into their hearts a time or two.

The barefooted, Thumbelina-sized Lightman held her own with a 45-minute opening set of soulful, folky numbers. As Blunt's fans trickled in during her act, she won them over with her brassy voice and heart-on-her-sleeve lyrics. She'll likely have her own set of shrieking fans when her second album, Bird on a Wire, is released in July.