When Michael Bublé was scrapping for a break, he performed in shopping malls
and at corporate beanfeasts, sang Christmas carols for kids and even, on one
fateful occasion, resigned himself to being that ultimate in North American
cabaret clichés, a wedding singer. Five years later and on the night before
we meet, he performed alongside Diana Ross at Celebrity Fight Night, an
annual Muhammad Ali-endorsed benefit in aid of Parkinson’s research. Looking
across the footlights towards the $165,000-per-table crowd, he saw gazing
back at him not shoppers, schoolchildren or even a bride and groom, but
Donald Trump, Sharon Stone and Mark Wahlberg. This is his world now.
Endorsed as a standard-bearer for all that they hold dear by connoisseurs of
vocal craftsmanship ranging from Tony Bennett to Michael Parkinson, and with
a career about to lift off to the next level, Bublé is a genuine contender
and star. And in Emily Blunt (scene-stealer in The Devil Wears Prada),
he’s even got the requisite media-hot girlfriend.
That it’s all turning out nicely for the ocean fisherman’s son from Burnaby,
British Columbia is very much down to graft and a prodigious talent, not
accident or design. When he first came to British attention three years ago,
it was alongside such peers as Jamie Cullum and Amy Winehouse as part of a
much-hyped jazz singing revival. But while his self-titled 2003 debut album
and 2005’s follow-up It’s Time cannily presented him as a
baby Sinatra, careful listening made it clear that here was someone who
could be more than just a crooning master of pastiche. Now, aged 31 and via
the release of a new CD, Call Me Irresponsible, he has fulfilled that
potential gloriously.
The voice, effortlessly smooth and muscular, is better than ever. The
phrasing, sense of timing and ability to swing have likewise matured. But
new is a sense of personal life experience being brought to bear on lyrics
old and new, some self-written. With sales to date of 12 million having won
him a degree of freedom, Bublé has at last emerged as his own man.
Hearing someone interpret songs as diverse as Me and Mrs Jones, Always
on My Mind or Comin’ Home Baby in a way different to yet
(amazingly) all but surpassing the familiar versions by, respectively, Billy
Paul, Elvis Presley and Mel Tormé, is unlikely enough. More impressive still
is that Bublé achieves this feat without once showing off or showboating.
And it’s this sense of restraint that seals it: Bublé is the best
traditional pop vocalist of his generation, and by a mile. “Yes, producers
and people at the record company are still trying to control what I do, in
some instances very heavily,” he says over pasta and coffee at an old-style
Italian restaurant in Universal City, Los Angeles. “I understand they’re
just trying to do what they think is right and I love that they give me
advice – I really do. I’m hungry for their wisdom and knowledge. But it’s my
face on the CD sleeve and me who wins or loses as a result of what I put
out. Having listened, watched and learnt, I now know exactly who I am and
what I want to do.”
Growing up on Canada’s north-west coast, he dreamt of being a hockey player.
“I loved the rough and tumble of the game, the fighting. And I was OK but
not good enough.” The eldest of three children, from 14 he spent the summers
as a crewman on Alaska-bound commercial salmon-fishing vessels alongside his
father: “The most deadly physical work I’ll ever know in my lifetime. We’d
be gone for two, sometimes three months at a time and the experience of
living and working among guys over twice my age taught me a lot about
responsibility and what it means to be a man.” It was his Italian immigrant
grandfather, a plumber, who had first introduced him to the music of his own
youth (the Mills Brothers, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and more) and
the young Bublé had responded enthusiastically.
Now, with endless hours in which to listen to his Walkman, he immersed himself
in the sounds of that era or traded cassettes with students from Montreal’s
McGill University, working abroad during their vacations and jazz-mad.
By 16, hockey was history. His grandfather schooled him further with the use
of karaoke discs and bribed nightclub owners to give his under-age charge a
chance with the irresistible offer, “Let him up there with the band and I’ll
fix your toilet for free”. And so began the long, long round of low-grade
gigs, stints in musicals, mall appearances, whatever. Yet by 25 and despite
a move from Vancouver to Toronto (“I thought a bigger city might finally
bring me a break”), nothing had happened or seemed likely to. “Mostly I was
playing the sort of places where people went to get drunk or to get laid.
They certainly didn’t come to hear me, and I’d had enough. I’d decided this
particular night would be my swansong, a business dinner that paid $1,000 –
enough to fly me and my girlfriend of the time home. So when this guy came
up to me afterwards and said very kindly, ‘You were really great!’, I
flipped him the last copy of a CD I’d self-financed to sell after shows and
told him, ‘I hope you like it, but if you don’t you’ll find it makes a great
coaster’.”
His fan of that night was an aide to former Canadian prime minister Brian
Mulroney and he called the next day to ask if Bublé would sing at a
reception following the marriage of the PM’s daughter, Caroline. He refused
because he felt that wedding singing, even on such a grand scale, would be
confirmation that he was an also-ran, but then was told that record producer
and label owner David Foster (instrumental in the launch of both Celine Dion
and the Corrs) would be among the guests. He made a volte-face yet, after
the event and a subsequent invitation to Foster’s home, the verdict was,
“Michael, you’re a lovely entertainer and have a nice voice, but there’s
nothing I can do for you.” We now know that wasn’t so: Foster went on to
produce Bublé’s first and second albums and was at the controls for most of
the forthcoming third. But the singer says he all but turned stalker before
the great man capitulated to him, and also accepted the Herculean labour of
personally raising $500,000 from banks towards the cost of demos as proof of
his own commitment.
Of course, all ended happily on the professional front and looks like only
getting happier. Personally, too, Bublé would appear finally to be in
clover. An eight-year relationship with (and eventual engagement to)
actor-dancer Debbie Timuss ended shortly after his recording career took
off. They’d met in 1996 when cast together in a musical revue, but two work
schedules and Bublé’s self-confessed bouts of infidelity took a toll. “I was
working. She was working. It got to be that we were never together and so we
grew apart. Facing up to that was pretty crushing for both of us. And the
fact is I love her still, as much as I ever did. You don’t just write
someone out of your life when they’ve meant so much to you. There’ll always
be a loyalty there. Yes, I’m in love again and have this beautiful girl who
I’m mad for. But there remains a place in my heart for Debbie and I’d be
there for her if ever the chips were down. Emily understands that luckily
and cares similarly about guys with whom she has been involved in the past.”
He and Blunt were introduced at a movie awards show in Australia two years
ago. He was on tour. She was there making a thriller, Irresistible,
with Susan Sarandon and Sam Neill. “As we shook hands I thought how cute she
was, but I was in my relationship and she was in one too.” But by the time
the actress came backstage at one of his concerts some months later, both
were free agents. “I had it in my head that she was a producer for the BBC
and so asked what kind of programmes she made. And I admit that when she
replied that, no, she was an actor, I thought, ‘Right, like every other
person waiting on table…’ So when in time I saw My Summer of
Love [2004’s warmly-reviewed depiction of an ill-starred teenage lesbian
love affair], to say that I was blown away would be an understatement. I was
like, ‘But you’re f****** brilliant!’ Then came Gideon’s
Daughter and then The Devil… After the premiere of that I
remember turning and saying to her, ‘Kiddo, you stole the entire movie. Your
life is never going to be the same again’.”
When their respective work commitments allow (it was recently announced that
the 24-year-old Blunt will star as the young Queen Victoria in Martin
Scorsese’s next film), the two now divide their time between his home in
Vancouver and hers in London. “Which isn’t ideal, obviously, but we just do
our best with the geography of the situation and are together whenever we
can be.” Her affluent Home Counties background (barrister father, teacher
mother, boarding-school education) may be in contrast to his own, but Bublé
declares himself to be almost as smitten with the entire Blunt family as he
is with their soon-to-be-A-list elder daughter. “I tried to move slow
because we’d both just come through break-ups but the truth is I was pretty
much instantly infatuated,” he says of their early courtship. “I mean,
forgetting for a moment how beautiful she is, she’s got this wonderful
personality and… Anyway! Because I was very quickly so crazy about Emily it
felt like there was a lot riding on how it went when I first met her
parents.”
He was, he says, very nervous when invited to their home for dinner. “But the
door is opened to me by this big, lanky kid, her 15-year-old brother, who
straight off gave me a hug. How’s about that for a welcome? Then she has
these two beautiful younger sisters. Her dad is just great (he’s teaching me
cricket). And her mom? We sat down to eat, and talking to me she was so dry,
so British and just so f****** great that, had we been standing up, I’d’ve
had to squeeze her. As it was I thought, ‘That’s it. I’m gonna have to bite
your arm!’ and so I did, like this [he mimics taking a big, friendly
mouthful out of my shirt sleeve]. The great thing is I can be myself with
them – be rude, swear, whatever – and they just laugh. My ex’s parents are
sweet and lovely but also very proper. I had to be on my best behaviour and
couldn’t always manage it. Emily’s just accept me as the person I am and
seem to like me for it. It’s such a big, big relief.” His own family’s
reaction to the Blunts’ daughter? “They’re in love, like me.”
