James Blunt
w/ Go-Jo
RAC Arena
Thursday, October 30 2025
It takes a certain kind of crazy-brave self-assuredness for a concert to begin with vision of the World Trade Center ablaze on 9/11. Especially when said concert was nominally to celebrate a milestone anniversary for an artist’s career. Most others would imbue any historical context only inasmuch as to where their peers or rivals were in the charts or which Hollywood movies were big at the time. James Blunt is not most others.
Blunt was everywhere in 2005. His album Back to Bedlam was one of that decade’s biggest sellers, dissected in minutiae at the time and ever since. The accompanying tour was gargantuan in scope, and if that level of exposure had happened today, the kids would say he had gone viral.
Locally, it was the back end of John Howard’s relaxed and comfortable Australia, as our politicians kowtowed to a vengeful, militaristic, and very wrong-headed White House. Which is another way to say, none of us are who we were twenty years ago. To only assess Blunt for his youthful and earnest enthusiasm on Bedlam, and specifically its four absolutely massive singles, does a disservice to where he is as a performer and musician now.
But firstly, a diversion to cutting-edge contemporary camp and a magical sprinkling of Eurovision glamour, with Manjimup’s Milkshake Man himself, Go-Jo. Energetic, electric, and daringly in double denim, Go-Jo displayed charisma by the bucketload, with acres of talent to burn, during this raucously fun eight-song set.
Making the absolute most of the opportunity afforded to support Blunt, this was a homecoming of sorts, Go-Jo’s first arena performance in Perth, having toured New Zealand and the east coast the previous weeks. Only last year, he had watched tonight’s headliner from the audience, yet now he was the chosen support act, and for this there was very genuine appreciation.
Almost as soon as he had finished on stage, Go-Jo darted out to the merch desk to meet fans and sell shirts. Dreams can come true, in combination with the requisite amount of actual effort, and, based on the strong evidence tonight, RAC Arena will be graced by Go-Jo again, sooner rather than later.
James Blunt himself came to Western Australia after twenty-one months on the road, made up of two back-to-back global tours, last year promoting his new album, Who We Used to Be, and this year the anniversary of his breakthrough, debut, and highest seller. Perth was the final stop on this epic odyssey, and, as much as he and the band loved performing for the audience tonight, they also looked forward eagerly to extended time back with family.
Blunt acknowledged the three types of fans in the arena—those that had been with him since the beginning, those who had their parents play his music constantly, and those that had been brought along, perhaps reluctantly, by their partners. All were thanked for funding the upkeep of the family home in Ibiza.
Once the music began, after the initial video montage of the 2000s had ended, Back to Bedlam took centre stage itself. As an anniversary tour, the album was played through in order as originally listed, meaning that Blunt’s biggest hit, You’re Beautiful, was locked in already as only the second song of the evening.
The aching falsetto is still there, after all these years. The audience was rapt—Blunt gave one of the latter choruses to the crowd to sing alone, and he cheered them on, like a Premier League manager from the sideline.
Afterwards Blunt stated, “That was the hit. It’s all downhill from here.” But that was only his well-adjusted self-deprecation speaking—even though the signature song was in the rearview, the evening itself continued to power, strength to strength.
Goodbye My Lover was played as a straight piano solo, whilst also giving appropriate space for the fans to roar the lyrics and their appreciation back to Blunt—with most of the near sell-out crowd hanging on every note, songs that had seemed absolutely overplayed when first released suddenly took on new lives in the concert setting.
Almost too quickly, the singles from Bedlam were done and dusted. At this point, there seemed a lifting of weighted expectation across the arena. Blunt said that for eighteen years, he and his band had played those four constantly, and that touring the entire album this year had allowed the other songs to breathe. The audience was fully on board and committed, wherever the evening was about to take them.
So Long Jimmy became almost a blues barnstormer in the live environment, while both Blunt’s pre-music career in the British Army and the NATO intervention in Kosovo were brought to the fore with the solemn yet glorious No Bravery. War crimes are nothing new under the sun.
Blunt began to tell some of the stories behind the songs—while he himself had thought this was a very poor idea, it was his wife’s suggestion, and therefore it was now spectacular. With Billy, the tale was of a somewhat unreliable friend during his youth. When Blunt first played the song at a pub gig with the protagonist in attendance, when the lines about cheating had come around, Billy had been punched and then left by his at-the-time girlfriend.
The first draft of Wisemen had been started by Blunt when he was only fifteen years old, and as he mused on the song’s lyrics here in 2025, he admitted they were probably a cry for help, possibly even at a child services level. Blunt also readily acknowledged the lyrical problems of his most famous song, written high as a kite, as he remembered the woman on the London Underground.
Back to Bedlam ended, and Blunt asked the audience whether they wanted two hours of experimentation or, just maybe, some other songs that they actually knew. With such wit and delivery, even if he never makes another album, Blunt could easily segue into comedy. Indeed, his dry self-awareness is as much of his public persona now as his music, and all of it comes across so authentically.
On Postcards, the question of what could be better than one ukulele was emphatically answered with two ukuleles. A rollicking version of Slade’s Coz I Luv You, which turned into an extended jam session for his band, allowed Blunt to complete a circuit of the arena floor and gave his adoring fans more of what they wanted—him.
The encore began, as Blunt joked, with the perfect way to end miserably, one of his latter masterpieces, Monsters, written in 2019 about his father’s chronic kidney disease. He then turned to two songs far more upbeat, Bonfire Heart and 1973—for this final stanza, the crowd joyously danced and sang to each other in the aisles, in their seats, wherever they could.
The concert ended, and, after all these months, Blunt, his band, and his team could rest. As the audience slowly exited, quiet, happy, and sated, it was perhaps no coincidence that the lead-out song was John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads.
Even though Back to Bedlam was and remains a towering achievement, the biggest-selling debut by any British artist, Blunt is far more accomplished at what he does today than he was twenty years ago. He had an ease and authenticity about him that effortlessly lit up the entire arena, even to those few who weren’t fully sold on him when they first arrived. Tonight, Blunt’s biggest hits may all have been over in the first twenty minutes, but, moving deeper into his catalogue, the quality of the evening did not diminish in the slightest.
We can only hope Blunt doesn’t wait until 2045 to return.