Birthday Number 1s: 2005 - You're Beautiful

Once more into South London, with

You're Beautiful - James Blunt

Where to start?

My journey with Captain Blunt started a year earlier, at the legendary -  now long gone - small venue the Borderline off Charing Cross, where I was one of the pricks chatting at the bar while JB played a support slot for Irish troubadour Damien Dempsey, who we'd gone to see.

I don't remember anything Blunt played, not that I had heard anything by him before that, but I feel I do remember, when he finished, that the ovation was more fulsome than one might expect from third on the bill at the Borderline on a week night.

And a friend of mine went to see him a few months after that, bigger venue, top of the bill, and said he was good. Really? I said. That guy? Because by then I'd heard some of the music.

And a woman on my PGCE at Roehampton was a massive fan, and not only that, it turned out he lived near her on the Fulham Palace Road, and she'd see him in the Tesco Metro.

There was an ad for him on billboards and he was on the platform on Clapham Common, or North, I can't remember which - one of the incredibly unsafe ones packed with commuters with tracks on either side.

And in his interviews, he talked about hanging out in the afternoons in the tacky nightclubs of Putney and Clapham. He was just a standard south-west London early 2000s guy, James Blunt, of a certain type, a different type from Mike Skinner, from Roots Manuva.

We were slightly obsessed with James Blunt in my flat ... in a weird, ironic, hateful, way. I think we had a picture of him on a fridge or something. He really bothered me. Because that was the style of music I was into. I'd have stood up for reedy-voiced, oversharing, acoustic-wielding well-off white boys against anyone, yet this one ... fuck no. Come back, it's usually better than this. He was ruining the genre.

A few years ago, you may recall, I listened back to Back to Bedlam and David Gray's White Ladder, I think with the intention of giving them a fair re-evaluation, and I quite liked White Ladder after all, but Back to Bedlam - hoo boy. Time had not healed. On the contrary.

So, saying all that, You're Beautiful - Number 1 for five whole weeks in the summer of 2005. A slow burning hit, a feel good story. The summer of the tube bombs, of the greatest Ashes, the summer my teaching ambitions fell apart and I lost my wallet at Benicassim. The summer of James Blunt taking his clothes off in the ice and snow. 

I'm afraid I've developed a fondness for the song. Purely a comical fondness but a fondness nevertheless. It is certainly not the worst song from that album, or the worst song to get to Number 1. Some of James Blunt's later songs were ok, and his tweets are excellent. 

At that point in time, Mr Brightside is already in the charts, and Top of the Pops is in its final year. There are some quite interesting Number 1s in 2005 - rock has quite a strong showing: U2, Stereophonics' best song Dakota, the last two tolerable Oasis hits Lyla and the Importance of Being Idle (back to back with Dare by Gorillaz, Battle of Britpop fans), Arctic Monkeys, not to mention pop classics like Push the Button and Hung Up.

I'm almost a grown-up by now, but still, not quite.