J.

Jamie Oliver

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As he rises from the BBC Breakfast News sofa and disconnects his mike, Jamie Oliver looks suddenly tired. It’s partly to do with the bags under his eyes, partly with his tousled hair and unshaven chin. They give the impression that he left the house in a hurry, that he doesn’t have enough time, that he is running on empty.

He was talking about his latest campaign – to persuade the public to buy British pork, because our welfare standards are so much higher than those in the rest of the EU – and now, as I walk with him back to his dressing room, he slips back into character: becomes more animated, bantering, blokey. Bish, bash, bosh.

It is 10 years since he first appeared on our screens as The Naked Chef and now, at the still tender age of 33, he is the head of a multi-million pound business empire: the Jamie restaurant chains, the Jamie TV shows, the Jamie books, the new magazine (called Jamie), the Jamie cookery schools, even the Jamie video game. And the Jamie brand is global, with his shows being broadcast in 106 countries. He had to turn down a request to cook for Obama’s inauguration because of an earlier commitment.

As if all this wasn’t enough, he has an image to protect – Vespa-riding, organic veg-box buying, and a father of two (with a third on the way). It must be exhausting being him, I say. Does he ever have duvet days? “Not during the week, they come at the weekends. But even then Jools forces me out. She runs a pretty tight ship and doesn’t like looking at her husband in bed. And if she can’t wake me up, it will be the kids sent in to jump on my goolies – that quick jump with the knee pointed down. That usually wakes me up.”

As well as being a global brand, Jamie Oliver is also a formidable political lobbyist, his most dramatic and successful campaign being that to improve the quality of school meals. Not only did he raise public awareness, he persuaded the Government to pledge to spend £280 million on his scheme – out with the Turkey Twizzlers, in with the fruit and veg. Tony Blair acknowledged the change in policy was Oliver’s doing.

Since then, animal welfare has become his main cause. After his programme last year, which exposed the conditions in which battery hens were kept, chicken welfare improved almost overnight. And sales of free-range chickens trebled.

Now, he has turned his attention to pork. With a programme to be broadcast this Thursday, the supermarkets are in a panic, worried that they won’t be able to meet the extra demand for British pork. The power of brand Jamie, eh?

“I know, I know,” he says. “It’s bizarre. I’ve become a professional s—stirrer. But I think if you credit audiences with being able to take the truth, then they will change their shopping habits. I know we’re in a recession, but it only costs an extra 3p per rasher of bacon to buy British. At the moment, 80 per cent of the bacon we eat in this country comes from Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany where they still keep sows in these inhumane stalls. The welfare standards on British farms are so much higher. Our pigs get treated decently. It’s something to be proud of. For Christ’s sake, look for the Union Jack when you buy pork or bacon.”

As the face of Sainsbury’s, Jamie Oliver experienced a conflict of interest last year. When he criticised the supermarket for failing to appear at a public debate about chicken farming, they were not amused. He later wrote an open letter apologising to its staff. Yet with this programme, he is at it again. You almost feel sorry for Sainsbury’s having such a rogue ambassador.

“I know,” he says with his lopsided grin. “But I try to avoid doing what I’m told or what is suggested. Sainsbury’s probably do worry about what I’m going to do next. They get a bit of a bing in this new programme because I think even the good supermarkets are guilty of some misleading labelling. Sainsbury’s was way less guilty than others. Some were guilty of really naughty labelling, using images that were provocative [he means evocative] of the English countryside. The interesting thing is that the day after these programmes go out, the supermarkets see a big difference in sales. So they sit up and take notice. Cash is king.”

Not that the British public always does his bidding straight away. After his school dinners campaign, a group of mothers in Rotherham were filmed passing burgers through the school railings to their children. Those pictures, I ask, did he take them personally? “Well, that happened about six months later, and it was certainly made to look as if it were a response to me. But Julie, one of the mothers, told me later that she didn’t even know who I was, so that couldn’t have been it. Still, it was good in a way, that image, because it did sum up everything I was trying to say. It helped my cause.” It emerged that some of the mothers had never boiled a pan of water or peeled a carrot; that they lived on kebabs and crisps.

So what did Jamie Oliver do for his next campaign? He made a programme called Jamie’s Ministry of Food and featured those same Rotherham mothers, with him heading north to try to teach them how to cook. “Obesity caused by unhealthy eating has become a health epidemic,” he says. “And what we saw in Rotherham was a snapshot of England today. It was a metaphor for every town in this country. You could say I live in a bubble in London, so Ministry of Food was really about me saying that, after 10 years, I felt I was largely preaching to the converted. Rotherham was about persuading people who would never watch a food show to change their eating habits and learn a new life skill.”

Even so, his stock fell last autumn when Ministry of Food was broadcast. “All the coverage in the papers was about me swearing. I even had my mother telling me off. But I don’t think I swore more than on School Dinners. And no one complained on the night of the broadcast. It was because it was the same week as the Jonathan Ross thing. There will always be a number of people who are offended by swearing, but I do think people get a bit holier-than-thou about it. I guess every three years or so, the press feels it has to kick my a—.”

Why does he suppose that is? “I must be Marmite to them. Even if you breathe you offend them.”

As one journalist noted recently, it’s not that you love Jamie Oliver or hate him – it’s that you love him and hate him at the same time. You can hate his mockney banter, yet love his recipes; hate his matey Sainsbury’s ads, yet love his school-meals crusade, and so on.

“I get a bit of stick about the magazine,” he says, “about how egotistical it is.” (There are 27 pictures of him in the launch edition.) “But it is providing a lot of much-needed work for writers and photographers.”

He began diversifying because, he says, he was feeling frustrated with his life. “The frustration was to do with being brought up in a family where money was a private thing. You didn’t talk about it. We were embarrassed about money and then my life had become very public and everyone knew exactly how much money I was making through publishing. You know, when you sell 20 million books, people notice. Even the two times when the media hated me and tried to get the public to hate me, the books went on selling.”

It is usually reported that he is worth £25 million, but he claims that he doesn’t know how much he is worth. “Do you know, I haven’t a clue. You could probably find out from your economics expert on the Telegraph better than I could. There’s certainly not a lot of dough sitting in the bank.

“This recession feels a bit like when my Dad advised me not to do Fifteen [his chain of restaurants staffed by local underprivileged youths]. You see, he has never earned an easy pound in the industry [Oliver’s father, Trevor, is an Essex pub landlord], and he thought I was doing this soft, cuddly, do-gooding thing. But I was on a different journey. I was feeling guilty about my sudden wealth. There are now four Fifteens.

“It’s the same now with the recession. Everyone is advising me to slow down and pull in the reins, but I’m not listening to them. We’re opening five restaurants this year. We’ve got people queuing up every night. You just have to get your pricing structure right. I don’t think it all has to be doom and gloom.”

So he’s going to spend his way out of this recession? “When I’ve earned cash, I’ve never put it in the bank or sat there looking at it. I’ve always invested it. Invested in people. Ten years ago, I had no one. Now I have 100 people in my office and 500 across the restaurants. And by the end of this year, it will be 5,500. We want to make a dent in some of those people made redundant by Woolworths.”

Blimey. Jamie saves our bacon again. Is he difficult to work with? “I think the people I work with think I’m a bit of a lunatic. They can’t read me. I keep getting approached by think tanks wanting advice because they think I’m strategically driven or that I really know about marketing, but I only do things that feel right. You can’t bottle that.”

Hitler said he made his strategic decisions as if sleepwalking – can he relate to that? Oliver laughs. ‘That’s a f—ing tough comparison! When I’ve done stuff wrong, I’ve always known it was going to be wrong, and when I’ve done it right I’ve always known it was right. I’m not academically bright, so the things I do are based on touch, smell, and what feels right. Gut feelings.”

He clicks his fingers in three directions; left, right and straight up. “I’m like that.”

J.

James Blunt

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It could be the homes around the world; his military bearing; or that he’s our biggest musical export since Elton. For whatever reason, being called annoying, a philanderer or – worse – middle class doesn’t exactly keep James Hillier Blount awake at night. Nigel Farndale met him

It’s not the sight of the groupies that haunts me, but the sound, or rather the absence of sound, as they ghost past us on their way up the stairs to the dressing-room. It takes me a moment to figure out that the reason they aren’t talking to each other is that they don’t know each other. One of the band members, the keyboard player, I think, has picked them from the audience on the basis of their looks. Half-a-dozen of them, all in their late teens and early twenties, and all, surprisingly, in pretty frocks, as if they were going to a Sunday school meeting. They have been separated from their friends like lambs weaned from their mothers. The silence of the lambs.

The ‘us’ they are filing past is James Blunt and me. He has a bottle of beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and not a hair in place – tousled just so, like a Renaissance painting of John the Baptist – but they don’t realise it’s him because he has changed out of the suit he was wearing on stage and is now in jeans, T-shirt and leather jacket, as well as a pink feather boa and star-shaped novelty sunglasses. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is the end of the day; we need to go back to the start, well, to the middle, when the seats are empty and the Texan sun is at its most unforgiving.

A barefoot and unshaven Blunt is wearing normal sunglasses and shorts as he plays his piano, strums his guitar and sings his plaintive songs into the microphone for the sound check, all the while looking out with his soulful eyes over an empty, open-air arena in Houston. At 5ft 7in, he’s not a tall man, but he has presence and an unaffected manner – a certain maturity, too, one that you wouldn’t normally associate with a pop star in the ascendant.

But then he is 34 and this is his second career, his first being as an officer in the Household Cavalry. He joined after graduating from Bristol University with a degree in sociology. He became a champion skier for the Army and not only saw active service in Kosovo, but also guarded the Queen Mother’s coffin when she was lying in state.

Tonight he will be supporting Sheryl Crow, though, since his second album ‘All the Lost Souls’ and the single from it, ‘1973’, went straight to number one in America, he is arguably the bigger act these days. Indeed, not since Elton John has there been a more successful British singer-songwriter in the States.

His first album, ‘Back to Bedlam’, also went to number one over here, as it did in 18 other countries, making it the biggest-selling album of the millennium. It even entered the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest-selling album in one year. But it was his first single that really put him on the map. You’re Beautiful became the sound of that summer. It was everywhere, and still is – having become a favourite at weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs. I even heard a brass band playing it at an agricultural show in the Yorkshire Dales this summer.

As well as millions of sales, James Blunt has won Brit awards, Ivor Novello awards, MTV awards and various Grammy nominations. In terms of credibility, he’s headlined at Glastonbury and won the respect of the world-weary music press. Yet not everyone loves him, as he points out when we get something to eat in the canteen area back stage.

‘After Back to Bedlam really started selling,’ he says, ‘there was this sudden aggression towards me in the UK, for whatever reason, and that focused my mind, made it clear to me what I was doing and why I wanted to do it. I write songs for myself. I don’t write them for you, or for anyone else, I write them because I have experiences that I need to process. I don’t have the answers all the time, but I do have lots of questions, and I express them in the songs I write.’

He is, I think, alluding to a poll last year of ‘the most annoying things in life’, which put him at number four, just behind cold-callers and queue-jumpers. ‘I haven’t met anyone who voted in the poll, have you?’ he says when I mention this. ‘That poll probably came from a website that was after some publicity. You and I could do the same poll very quickly right now and it would count as a poll. We could do one about annoying newspapers, for example. I promise the Sunday Telegraph wouldn’t be in my list. My parents take it.’

His father, a retired colonel in the Army Air Corps, manages his son’s finances. His mother arranged the purchase of his six-bedroom villa in Ibiza (he also has a chalet in Verbier and recently bought a place in Chelsea). ‘I’m not married,’ he says, ‘and so the support structure in my life is my parents. I’m closer to them now than I have ever been.’

He certainly isn’t married, as the photographs of him emerging from nightclubs with various high-profile women on his arm attest. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was probably the best known socialite, Jessica Sutta, of the Pussycat Dolls, the most glamorous. He also seems to be photographed regularly cavorting on beaches with bikini-clad models such as Petra Nemcova, whom he dated and then dumped – unceremonious dumping being his way of ending relationships, according to the tabloids. He once said he found himself in a swimming pool in LA with nine naked women. ‘I was the only bloke. It was the only time I wished my mates were there, purely to spectate. I had arrived. It was a moment.’

Now he says of the tabloid interest in his peripatetic love life: ‘Last week I went to my home in Ibiza and was photographed by the paparazzi in my swimming trunks with girls. What is the point of that? I’m not that bothered, but maybe the media should be concentrating more on global warming or the Russian invasion of Georgia.

‘Looking at me in my swimming trunks is not a great sight. It’s a waste of time. There generally is a long lens pointing at me wherever I go, these days. I’m comfortable with it. I appreciate how things work. But my record label said something about my always being photographed coming out of nightclubs and I thought, “But this is what I do. I was doing it before the second album came out, so what is different now? You didn’t tell me to stop then.” I’m not going to change my life because of these people. I don’t see why I should.’

His label also gets him to dye his grey hairs and be enigmatic about his love life, which is an old tactic dating back to the Beatles – they had to pretend they didn’t have wives and girlfriends so that fans could fantasise they were in with a chance.

Actually, at the time of going to press, Blunt seems to be going out again with one of his old flames, Verity Evetts, an Oxford-educated barrister. He has also stayed friendly with some of his other exes, the socialites at least. He told one – an ex who got married not long ago – that he doesn’t feel ‘centred’ at the moment and would like to get married as well. Then again, he also said that he never tires of singing You’re Beautiful night after night because it gets him laid night after night.

Either way, he tells me he has grown used to the idea that his mother will probably find out from the papers what he has been up to, and with whom, before he has had a chance to tell her. ‘And my [two] sisters are quick to email me about things in the papers, laughing their heads off. I get healthy, ritual abuse from them, and give it back myself.’

As we are talking, I can’t decide whether the way Blunt smiles all the time is disarming or disturbing. He’s like a victim of a religious cult, smiling at the beginning of the sentence and at the end. I guess he has a lot to smile about, but also I sense a great deal of insecurity to disguise.

Then, I’m distracted by the sight of Sheryl Crow playing table tennis across the room. She has been holding her adopted son in one arm as she bats with the other, and now, even more distractingly, she is heading straight for us. ‘Are we going to have one of our little conversations on stage again tonight, James?’ she says. ‘That flirting thing. I think it worked well last night.’

They discuss the duet they will sing – a cover of Cat Stevens’s The First Cut is the Deepest – then we both watch her shimmy away, her blonde curls bobbing. ‘She’s very down to earth,’ he says. ‘I’d met her a couple of times, which was why she asked me on this tour. We do end up playing a lot of table tennis on the road. We’ve done 117 shows so far this year, in 117 cities, and there are a lot of hours to fill in the day.’

As he sleeps on his tour bus with his band, one city tends to blur into another. When I joke that he is in Cincinnati now, he looks genuinely confused. ‘No, this is?… Oh, right. Actually, I always get the tour manager to say where we are just as I’m going on stage. I still managed to get it wrong the other night, saying “Hello Dallas” when I meant Austin. I’m surprised I got out alive.’

He is funny on the subjects of things that go wrong. ‘People are normally surprised by my show, which is more energetic than you might think. Jumping on the piano. Jumping out into the audience and running up and down the aisle high-fiving them. But going off the stage can be quite dangerous. I broke my finger once. My legs carried on when I jumped off, and I smacked down on the ground. The spotlight was on me, and when I got back to the piano I hit the wrong note and thought, “Why did I do that?” And I looked down and saw it was because my finger was broken, sticking out an angle. Look,’ he says holding it up. ‘It’s still crooked.’

On another occasion, in Chicago, he jumped 8ft off the stage. ‘When I began running to the audience, a security guard stuck his arm out and I thought, “Does he want a hug?” Then next thing I know he’s rugby-tackled me. He wouldn’t release me and I was screaming in his ear, “I’m the f—ing singer.” I had to wait for the other guards to pull him off.’

I would have thought Blunt’s training in unarmed combat would have helped. I presume he still works out. ‘No, never. Couldn’t handle it. Too boring. I am a hyperactive person though.’ He likes an adrenaline rush, as well, having recently bought an 1100cc Moto Guzzi V11 Sport motorbike. There’s also the skiing, which he still does, and the riding. Actually, he tells me, he never really liked horses before joining the Life Guards. So why did he join that particular regiment?

‘Well, it is a reconnaissance regiment.’ But they are all so tall in the Life Guards, did that not make him self-conscious? ‘Some are. The Foot Guards tend to be taller regiments, though. The Life Guards take a few shrimps, as well. Besides, they are on horses, so height isn’t so important. Also being in that regiment had the benefit of being in Knightsbridge. I got a chance to be in London and meet people in the music scene.’ And groupies, as it happens.

As he paraded up and down the Mall in plumed helmet and shiny breastplate, girls would stick their phone numbers down his knee-length boots. But it was his time in Kosovo that really made girls swoon. He used to strap his guitar to the outside of his tank, because there wasn’t room for it inside. He had learnt to play the violin at five, the piano at seven and the guitar at 14, while a pupil at Harrow.

He writes his songs on piano and guitar. ‘But mainly guitar because it is easier to carry around. It’s like a child messing around with a toy. If a tune comes to me I don’t record it instantly. I think if I remember it, then it must be worth remembering, and if I forget it, then it was forgettable.’

Does he have any anxiety dreams about forgetting lines or chords? ‘Not yet. Perhaps I will tonight. Perhaps you’ve jinxed me. But audiences aren’t judgmental, and if things go wrong and you can look them in the eye, that is fine. The only people who are judgmental are the journalists. I will be conscious of you being there in the audience judging me.’

Blimey. Sorry about that. Is it true he signs breasts? ‘Not that I remember. Not that I’m fussy what I sign. A lot of men started coming to the shows after I appeared on Top Gear last year. That was such fun. I spun the car five times. I thought I might as well make the most of it. I am competitive.’

He recorded one of the fastest laps, but I’m surprised blokes didn’t think him manly before that, given his tour of duty in Kosovo. ‘It’s because I sing songs that are heart-on-your-sleeve and therefore I must be overly emotional. Nothing I can do about it. I could pose more, but I am comfortable with my masculinity.’

He has said that his lyrics are autobiographical, in which case, are we to assume that the lyric on his new album, ‘I killed a man in a far away land’, means he killed a man in a far away land? I only ask because in the past he has said that he would never try to exploit what he went through, what he saw. ‘You should ask any soldier how many lives he has saved. How they do it is no one else’s business. What I took from my experience in Kosovo is that you are told from one day to the next who your enemy is and it keeps changing. That’s what is happening in Iraq, too. I believe in looking people in the eye, looking for the common humanity.’

He is a great believer in looking people in the eye. He will use the phrase again later and it seems to reveal a Christ complex, or a John the Baptist one. That direct and challenging stare of his. It would also explain the hair.

It is time for him do some photographs before he goes on stage and, endearingly, he says he is ‘not fussed’ about the grooming he is offered before they are taken.

On stage his features contort with passion when he sings. The big video screen goes in tight on his face. His voice is by turns soft and tremulous and forceful, but always high. Having seen him in concert once before, a couple of years ago, I notice the tone of his banter has changed.

‘Wow it’s hot tonight,’ he says now. ‘I’m surprised any of you are wearing any clothes. We could all take them off and get friendly.’ It is suggestive, designed to get the teenage girls in the audience screaming. Before he used to joke about his ‘girlie voice’ and taking helium to get it that way, and being ‘a bit wet’ and the ‘housewives’ favourite’. I think now he has realised that, actually, he is a proper musician, a popular one, too, and that he doesn’t need to apologise for it.

Afterwards, back in the dressing-room, he strips to the waist as he talks because he wants to take a shower before going back on to do his duet with Sheryl Crow. ‘Things got a bit hairy out there when I jumped into the crowd,’ he says. ‘Did you see that? Some thought it was some kind of sport to grab me.’

I watch his duet from the side of the stage and notice he whispers something in Sheryl Crow’s ear and then she starts running her hands over his trousers suggestively, patting them. Afterwards, I ask what he said. ‘”Is now a good time to ask for your phone number?” She was checking my pockets, pretending to look for a pen.’

He shows me round the gold-coloured tour bus where he will be sleeping tonight as they drive to their next gig in Dallas. It is full of hi-tech equipment and is nicely air-conditioned but there isn’t much space in the bunks. ‘We do live in close proximity,’ he says. ‘Some of us stay up late. This is the crew end, they have to get up early.’

Where do the groupies go? ‘Never have groupies on here. Never. They’d only get in if we invited them in. But we’d only ever invite friends in.’

Does he sleep OK? I heard he has to take sleeping pills. ‘It is a bit of a rough sleep, but better than a hotel and taking planes all the time because you have to get to the airport two hours early, which is miserable. Then your flight gets delayed.’

He is drinking champagne from a plastic cup. ‘This is for your benefit,’ he says. ‘The tour management went out and bought a bottle of champagne because he thought I should be seen drinking it. Better for my image. Isn’t that sweet? Normally, we drink vodka and beer. In fact, I think I’d rather have a beer, now. Want one?’ He opens a well-stocked fridge then takes me to the back of the bus where there is some seating space. He has one small case which he pulls out from a cupboard. It continues a few pairs of socks, T-shirts and a spare pair of jeans. No photographs or mementos. ‘This is all I have for 14 months on the road,’ he says. ‘I’m not known for style.’

Does he know how much he is worth? ‘No I don’t, not very interested in it to be honest. I travel with hand luggage only. That is why I always seem to be wearing the same clothes in photographs. If a tabloid says my clothes aren’t fashionable or my hair looks stupid, I really don’t worry about it. Don’t have any hair gel.’

In London, he takes the Tube or the bus. He prefers pubs to restaurants. When he goes to Ibiza, he flies easyJet. Still, that’s at home. Presumably on the road he can afford to be more self-indulgent.

Another lyric that we can only assume is autobiographical is ‘I’ve taken a s—load of drugs’. It is. Though his only comment on the subject is that he has ‘a comfortable relationship with drugs’. His relationship with fame is less comfortable. Oscar Wilde said there were two forms of tragedy: not getting what you want, and getting it. Is that how it felt for him when he went to number one? ‘Actually, I don’t think I had been dreaming about it. Certainly, I hadn’t anticipated being so recognisable so quickly.

‘I do remember getting a phone call from the record company, who said both the single and the album have gone to number one, and thinking, “S—, this is not what I expected.” I hadn’t prepared myself for it. Number two is great. Number two is nice. I sensed then it would mean having to change from being a musician to being a celebrity and that that would be a change for the worse. Fame doesn’t affect me, but it does affect everyone else around me. As for celebrity, it is the worst invention of the modern world. Gossip columns treat your life as if it were a cartoon. Relationships reduced to cartoons.’

Although there are other public-school bands around at the moment – Radiohead, Coldplay – Blunt seems to have suffered more than most from a perception that he is too posh to be credible. His family name is Blount (and his middle name Hillier), but he changed it to Blunt to sound, well, blunter and more proletarian.

When he tells me he would nevertheless still send a son of his to Harrow – ‘I think I would. I think I would. Public schools make individuals rather than sheep’ – I ask what he makes of the mood change now that the old Etonian David Cameron has made it OK to be posh. ‘Is it? I must come back to Britain immediately. Is it really safe to come back?

‘It’s not a dirty word to be posh, people come up to me and no one gives a damn if I’m posh. It’s about having a normal conversation and looking people in the eye.’

We head back to the dressing-room where he puts on his feather boa and novelty sunglasses then we wander back downstairs to have a word with Sheryl Crow, who is signing autographs. This is the moment at which the keyboard player says: ‘This way to the good-time room girls’ and the silent groupies dutifully appear.