Click her to watch an exclusive clip of James Blunt performing an acoustic version of I Really Want You

How do you cope with being the most vilified man in pop? Well, James Blunt, megastar, isn’t sure what time of day he normally hits the booze, but once he has started, he says he doesn’t stop until “about 4 or 5 in the morning”. He likes it when the ladies have a drop to drink as well, “because”, he claims, “I’m prettier when you’re drunk.” The other night, his bass player was sick during their concert in Dublin, though Blunt claims this had nothing to do with alcohol. “I think he was overwhelmed with emotion. So the next night we put a bin out for him on stage,” he explains, his thin lips halfway to a horsey grin; the words colliding into each other in his quick, quiet and, yes, very posh voice.

After speaking to me he will play a show to a venue full of screaming girls, including an excitable Reese Witherspoon, and introduce one song with the mind-boggling declaration: “This one’s about the most fun you can have in one night – drugs!” This being California, land of shiny teeth and power jogging, the girls stop screaming and look on with bewilderment at their foppish English hero.

Whatever his personal habits are – he is cagey and struggles to answer when I ask him why another album track is all about valium – it seems Blunt is already tired of being Mr Nice Guy. It’s less that Blunt is heading for a Winehouse-Doherty style meltdown, and more that, after selling a gazillion love songs as an officer and a gentleman, and having his mega-whopper hit You’re Beautiful voted more irritating than traffic wardens, the former army captain wants to be seen as rock’n’roll.

As he prepares to release his new single, Same Mistake, and gears up for a UK tour, we meet in an exquisite 1950s Beverly Hills hotel, where pink bougainvillea climbs the walls and movie stars snuggle in shaded corners. Sitting near the pool, Blunt, 33, is affable and in good humour, but he seems to wear a mask of frosted glass; his eyes flicker around but you can’t tell what goes on beneath the surface. He fills his sentences with an awful lot of PR speak about wanting his music to “take people on an emotional journey” and “connect through communication”. Talking to James Blunt feels a bit like being given a voucher that entitles you only to another voucher. What I do learn about him is the following: his debut album sold over 11 million copies but that is meaningless to him because “I don’t know what 11 million looks like”, and he says he doesn’t care if his follow-up, All the Lost Souls, sells only one copy. His earliest memory is of sitting on the beach in Cyprus as a little boy (while his colonel father was stationed there), with the hot sand burning his skin. There wasn’t much music in the house when he was a kid growing up in Wiltshire and he was never a fan of Smash Hits while a pupil at Harrow.

He has spent some of his pop megamillions on a house in Ibiza; he wrote a lot of his new album while holed up there with his guitar and a piano which looks out on to the sea and Formentera. When recording in LA, he stays at Carrie Fisher’s place in the Hollywood Hills – in fact he recorded the song Goodbye My Lover in her bathroom. “It’s crazy, so much creativity. She puts a cardboard cut-out of herself outside my bedroom to protect me at night, on which she has written her year of birth and her year of death. She’s predicted it.”

And yes, he was in the Army. Blunt quit the Forces for music because of “the need to actually do this thing that I feel really strongly about, so I didn’t reach old age and say, you know, I was too afraid to follow that dream.” Still, he is proud of his peace-keeping work in Belfast and Kosovo, and says it felt very right to be in those situations. “You’ve got the Kosovans and the Serbs, two groups of human beings murdering each other, and we were just a third party of humans stopping those other humans killing each other. I have memories about it but no, I don’t have sleepless nights over it.” So if Gordon Brown were to call him for advice about current conflicts? “Well, I would tell him there’s a great need for an army and it should be funded appropriately. If I told you that there’s body armour for me but not for you, you’d be a little bit upset.”

He struggles to understand why this regimental training might be seen as bad prep for pop stardom. “I don’t know why people in the music industry get uptight about my background, because I worked in a job with people from all walks of life. Nobody gave a stuff what your background was. No one judges you.”

Judgment is something that seems to sit uncomfortably on Blunt’s shoulders, though he claims not to care that some critics have mauled his new album, “because I didn’t set out to please them”. He does want to know if I liked it though – I think he cares quite a bit. So does he care about being cool? “No!” But he has just been to Gisele’s Fashion Week party in NYC. “No I haven’t!” But the pictures were in the paper? “Oh, well I knew it was Gisele’s party but I didn’t realise it was Fashion Week.” He cares nothing for clothes, pointing to his jeans and T-shirt. “What does it mean when they say that flared jeans are ‘coming back’? Coming back from where?”

When I suggest that tabloid fascination with his busy lovelife (recently he has been linked to Lindsay Lohan and the holistic therapist/actress Mika Simmons) may have helped his success, he is annoyed. “Um, well I think I’d sold most copies of Back to Bedlam prior to that tabloid experience, so I disagree.”

As yet, All the Lost Souls has not done as well as his word-of-mouth debut, though it’s clearly something that will bounce back in the Christmas gift market. But it does need a killer single, and however annoying You’re Beautiful became in its ubiquity, it’s a damn tough act to follow. At his show, he plays it as his third song in, rather than save it for the finale.

It suggests that he is ready to move on. Yet after talking about the pressures of fame, of media intrusion and of getting a critical hammering, James Blunt looks horrified when I suggest that he does not enjoy being James Blunt. It’s the only time his facial expression really changes. “Whatever gave you that idea? I am a very happy person.” And, for the first time, I really believe him.

All the Lost Souls (Atlantic) is out now; the single Same Mistake is out on Monday; James Blunt’s UK tour begins on Jan 11 (www.jamesblunt.com )

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