James Blunt Has A Black Belt In Shutting Down Twitter Trolls

By Greg Moskovitch

Being a former army captain in Kosovo, UK singer James Blunt — best known as the lame music yardstick for record snobs tired of using Nickelback — doesn’t need to be quick with the one-liners, but while it may surprise you, the You’re Beautiful singer has destroying trolls down to an art form.

“It’s not that complicated,” the singer tells The Telegraph. “I had a song that was overplayed on the radio and that gets annoying. As time goes on, people associate being annoyed with not just the song but the artist. If I had to hear the same song on the radio all the time I’d feel the same way.”

“Fortunately I don’t have to, I’m the one singing it,” he adds. And his rapier-like wit doesn’t stop there. Though he understands perfectly where the hate is coming from, Blunt’s official Twitter page is a veritable gallery of often hilarious one-two-punches that stop Twitter trolls in their tracks.

To one user who wrote “James Blunt just has an annoying face and a highly irritating voice,” the singer replied, “and no mortgage.” To another who begged the question, “When did James Blunt get funny?” Blunt explained that “the moment I put out that song I was knee deep in funny.” Get it?

Since his label made him change his profile name from Dirty ‘Lil Blunt to James Blunt for “visibility,” the singer has amassed 768,000 followers on the social media platform, which he compares to “a school noticeboard you can walk past,” adding, “We shouldn’t take it so f-cking seriously.”

He says he doesn’t believe in blocking trolls and instead chooses to engage them. “It totally defuses them. It is a cycle of people being horrid to each other, then someone’s horrid to them back… What I try and do is say things with humour. I mock myself as much as I mock anyone I write to.”

“I’ve just been doing concerts all around Europe to 10,000 people a night who know all the words to the songs, they queued up for hours, spent time, effort, energy and money. No one focuses on them, we focus on the guy who wrote five words on Twitter with his trousers around his ankles,” he says.

Greg Moskovitch
Greg Moskovitch

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