‘You’re Beautiful’: The Story of James Blunt’s Signature Song

By Oliver Tearle

Songs about creepy blokes looking at girls on trains weren’t invented in 2004 with James Blunt’s ‘You’re Beautiful’, but his paean to unwanted male attention on British public transport has certainly become the most famous exemplum of this rarefied (and thankfully fairly rare) subgenre. Before Blunt came along, there was Hue and Cry’s 1988 hit ‘Looking for Linda’, which began with the smitten singer looking at Linda before engaging her in conversation about the price of cigarettes until she ended up telling him what an arrogant shit he is. At least, I think that’s how it went.

Hue and Cry’s song was actually an annoyingly catchy (and lyrically witty) number, so how does ‘You’re Beautiful’ compare against that infectious late-80s classic?

Once he’d finished having a walk-on part in Shakespeare’s Richard III in the 1590s and guarding the coffin of the late Queen Mother as she lay in state at Westminster in 2002, the soldier-turned-warbler James Blunt took to ogling angels and women on subways, at least if the lyrics to ‘You’re Beautiful’ are anything to go by.

Blunt himself has acknowledged how ‘creepy’ the song actually is, and therein lies the biggest problem with critiquing this song or the rest of the Blunt oeuvre: however biting or scathing you want to be about his musical corpus, the chances are the man has already said it himself, and more wittily than any mere music critic could. Nobody can accuse him of taking himself too seriously, although this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take him seriously when he tells us ‘You’re Beautiful’ is really about ‘a guy (me) who’s high and stalking someone else’s girlfriend on the subway’.

So, not a love song but a drug song? No wonder the poor chap’s seeing angels all over the place (though I suspect he’s only fooling himself when he declares he won’t lose any sleep that night). As for the downbeat ending of the song, Blunt himself once again wades in to give one last twist of the hermeneutic knife: ‘And then the stalker kills himself.’ Oh.

As if that wasn’t enough, Blunt told the Huffington Post that the man singing the song (who, we must assume, should not be conflated with Mr Blunt himself) should be ‘locked up or put in prison for being some kind of perv.’ How many young lovers choosing ‘You’re Beautiful’ as their ‘first dance’ song at their wedding have actually realised it’s about a man getting himself hopped up on giggle smoke, eyeballing his ex on the Tube through a fug of weed-induced delirium, and then doing himself in?

There really is no excuse for not picking up on some of this from the (internal) clues alone. The lyrics even have the singer (again, not to be confused with James Blunt the singer, but merely the persona in the song … we hope) acknowledging that he’s ‘flying high’ (though a stronger f-word appeared on the album version of the track, prompting a ‘Parental Guidance’ sticker to be roundly slapped on the CD). Indeed, he’s so doped up on skunk that even the unhappy female object of his male gaze can see it in his unblinking eyes when hers meet his for a brief moment.

I have more sympathy for those hapless couples tying the knot who fail to realise from the song itself that it’s about a relationship that’s over. There’s little in the song to suggest the girl on the platform is previously known to the singer: after all, he himself tells us he’ll never be with the girl, not that he’ll never be back with her. And just because the song was (according to Blunt himself) inspired by catching sight of his former girlfriend on a subway platform with her new squeeze, that doesn’t necessarily mean that this very personal (and real-life) experience was merely imported wholesale into the final version of the song.

Artists take what they borrow from the world and transmute it into something else, chipping off the bits of the marble they don’t need, cutting out extraneous words, and knocking boring, sordid, uneventful and monotonous reality into something sharper and more meaningful. As J. G. Ballard said, art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

Which is not to say that ‘You’re Beautiful’ is great art. But it’s catchy (if not as catchy as ‘Looking for Linda’, according to the present author at any rate), and in many ways it’s quite a feat to write a song with a commonly (mis)interpreted meaning that’s so at odds with the one that was intended. Or is it a mark of poor songwriting? Genius or incompetence? I’m not sure …

Perhaps the real genius of the song is not that its meaning is misunderstood, but that it doesn’t actually have much of a meaning at all. Blunt himself declared that it’s ‘probably one of the least meaningful songs on the album’ (Back to Bedlam being the album in question), and so perhaps it doesn’t matter if we think it’s a touching ballad about love at first sight or a warning about the worst that could happen if you take a long drag of Mary Jane’s special medicine before heading for Tottenham Court Road, Oyster card in hand.

The video has become almost as famous (infamous?) as the song. It shows our hero leaving the soot-spattered platforms of the Northern Line in favour of the snow-spattered landscape of some far-flung Cold Place (in reality, it was sun-kissed Mallorca one balmy March). When the angel-botherer plunges into the icy cold water at the video’s end, many viewers have interpreted this as a sign that the man in the song really does take arms against his own sea of troubles and thus ends the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh – especially flesh exposed to a sudden snowfall – is heir to.

Alternatively, according to the director of the video, Sam Brown (not to be confused with the Sam Brown who sang ‘Stop’), this watery finale simply means that the singer is putting the past behind him and cleansing himself in these freezing cold, healing waters ready for a new start. His watery grave is actually a kind of birthing pool in which our hero will himself be reborn. Or something.

It’s been claimed by numerous media sources that ‘You’re Beautiful’ is about a particular ex-girlfriend of Blunt’s, Dixie Chassay, who was a casting assistant for the Harry Potter films. Blunt refuses either to confirm or deny this, which perhaps means it is, but then it’s worth remembering that Noel Gallagher said ‘Wonderwall’ was about his girlfriend, and then when they split up he said it wasn’t, so you never know what to believe anyway and a Blunt word on the subject either way probably wouldn’t make much difference.