ALL THE LOST SOULS TOUR 2008
James Blunt
Singapore Indoor Stadium/Tuesday

HERE'S the news: James Blunt, the king of mellow, sappy, soft pop, can actually rock live in concert.

While it's a stretch to call him a raving stage animal, the 34-year-old British singer was pretty animated throughout most of his 1 1/2-hour-long set at the Singapore Indoor Stadium two days ago.

Three quarters into the show, he jumped down from the stage, climbed over the barricades and ran into the audience, high-fiving stunned fans and pausing to hug and playfully plant a kiss on a middle-aged man before rushing back onstage.

The evening started out harmlessly enough. Openers Give Me Some Love and Billy were piano-driven, docile, mid-tempo affairs, with the singer backed by a nattily dressed four-man band.

His voice seemed shaky at first, with the falsetto bits disappearing at times.

But he soon lost his stiffness and started playing up to the 7,000-strong crowd.

Much to the crowd's delight, he leapt from podium to podium onstage, did leg splits, crouched around the stage slinging his acoustic guitar a la rock 'n' roll pioneer Chuck Berry, banged on a giant gong and even climbed up on his piano and struck goofy poses.

Made up of middle-class executive types, expats, well-dressed women, teenagers and families with young children, the audience didn't really care that music boffins love to deride Blunt for his consistently prosaic love songs with cliched lyrics.

They were more than game to offer sporadic shouts of 'I love you!' and sang heartily along to hits such as Goodbye My Lover, Carry You Home and Blunt's ubiquitous single, You're Beautiful, taken from his 14-million-selling debut album, Back To Bedlam.

Thankfully, not all his song subjects were over-simplified and middle-of-the-road.

A poignant moment came when he launched into No Bravery, written about his pre-singer experiences as an army officer serving in the British peacekeeping forces in Kosovo in 1999.

With the screen backdrop playing sombre videos of the war-torn country, he showed that he's not all about heartbreak and love ballads.

He has a sense of humour, too.

'The papers say that You're Beautiful is the No. 1 song played at weddings... then again Goodbye My Lover is the No. 1 song played at funerals,' he told the audience.

'I wrote this next song for couples to play when they want to get divorced. This one's called I'll Take Everything.'

Blunt may not be a critic's darling but he's a mass-appeal entertainer.

And, live in action, the man sure knows how to play it up for his fans.