James Blunt blasts off

James Blunt, who has toured China twice, brings romantic and old-school styles with his coming performance. Photo provided to China Daily

The captain poet launches his 2014 Moon Landing tour, saying the new album is about 'dreams, longing, first love'. Zhang Kun reports.

You're Beautiful hit-maker James Blunt will be the first Western star to tour China in 2014.

The Moon Landing tour will take the English singer-songwriter to Shanghai, Beijing, Guangdong province's Shenzhen, Sichuan province's Chengdu, and then Hong Kong.

This will be Blunt's third time performing in China. The former British army captain is often called "the captain poet" in Chinese media.

Blunt rose to worldwide fame in 2005, with hit singles You're Beautiful and Goodbye My Lover. His debut album Back to Bedlam won him five Grammy award nominations.

His first China tour took place in 2008 in Beijing and Shanghai.

"That was in a small theater," Blunt tells China Daily in an e-mail message. Shanghai's Yunfeng Theater has a capacity of no more than 800 people. But on his 2011 China tour, his second performance in Shanghai happened in the city's largest indoor stadium, the Mercedes-Benz Arena, which hosts 18,000 people.

"I'm thrilled to be back," he says.

Moon Landing is his fourth studio album and came out in Oct, 2013. "Possibly my last. Definitely my best," Blunt says on his Facebook. The music video of the first single from it, Bonfire Heart, has been played more than 450,000 times on Yinyuetai.com, a major music video site in China.

"There's just something romantic, old-school and lonely about the moon landings," he explains about the title. "A nostalgic memory of something huge that we can hardly believe we once achieved, and for some sad reason, can't achieve again like first love."

Blunt says the new album is about "dreams, longing, first love". 

"My writing and experience are inseparably intertwined. Few people can copy it. I write songs about life. I don't want to spend too much time to explain the story of every song, I just hope to make someone experience the traumatic emotions of the event itself," he says.

"It's actually been 10 years since I recorded Back To Bedlam. And that journey has taken me in several different directions, the band that came in for the second album; the excitement that the third album brought, as I put up the electric guitar onstage."