James Blunt is set to play at The National Museum of Ireland, Collin Barracks, Dublin on Saturday, August 24, 2024. He has also announced a gig in Limerick, Live at the Docklands on August 25.

Blunt, who shot to global stardom with his 2005 single ‘You’re Beautiful’, joins THE THE and Deacon Blue as the third headliner to be announced for Wider Than Pictures 2024 - Singular Artists’ series of summer shows in Dublin.

 

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At the end of 2021, James Blunt released a greatest hits album. “Or as I like to call it – The Greatest Hit And Songs I Wish You’d Heard,” he says.

The greatest hits album called The Stars Beneath My Feet, rounded up the first 17 years of an extraordinary career by anyone’s standards. Shortly after leaving the army in 2002, Blunt released the biggest-selling album of the decade in the UK: Back To Bedlam sold over 12 million copies. He also released a further succession of hit albums, every one of them a Top Ten hit, and a brace of huge singles including ‘1973’, ‘Stay The Night’, ‘Bonfire Heart’ and ‘OK’.

He has also gained quite a bit of traction on social media – his pithiest tweets were even published as a book, 2020’s How To Be A Complete And Utter Blunt: The Diary Of A Reluctant Social Media Sensation – which seemed to have transformed him into somewhat of a national treasure.

In October 2023, James Blunt released a new album, Who We Used To Be. The first single, 'Beside You', is, as Blunt puts it, “pop, very, very easy on the ear, sweet, incredibly simple”: it’s also the latest in a series of James Blunt songs that seem gently infected with the spirit of the dancefloors in his adopted home of Ibiza.

But, as Blunt also points out, the rest of the album is markedly different in tone: a collection of songs that address some very grown-up concerns: the pleasures and difficulties of long-term relationships, ageing, fatherhood, death.

“Some albums are a struggle to write, because I’ve got less to write about, and I think you can probably spot that with the quality of the album,” says Blunt, “and some of them just come naturally. I wrote this album very quickly, with great ease. I feel this album is one that I’ve nailed, lyrically – it’s just come at the right time, for my time of life.”

Tickets for the Irish dates can be found here.