There are those who claim that pop music has lost its power to shock. Perhaps they should cast a glance in the direction of the recent headline James Blunt: How I Prevented World War III and then try to say they saw that one coming. Beneath it lurked the tale of how, while serving as a cavalry officer in Kosovo, the man behind You're Beautiful declined an order to attack Russian troops at Pristina airport, thus averting an international incident. Lost in Showbiz is not of a mind to question this. It is resolutely not the rock critic who, after seeing James Blunt live, asked, "Was this man really put in charge of leading 30,000 troops into Pristina? On the evidence of this show, he would struggle to lead a dog into a butcher's shop." It merely notes that the bar for promoting MOR singer-songwriter albums has very much been raised at a stroke, and hopes, for their sake, that James Morrison has a story in the bag about single-handedly diverting an asteroid from hitting the earth and Katie Melua finds that cure for ebola before her next opus hits the shelves.
