James Blunt - I Really Want You

The use of ‘really’ in song lyrics is almost always redundant. Ray Davies pulled it off in You Really Got Me, because the next line is ‘you got me so I don’t know what I’m doing’ – on hearing that we know that ‘really’, well, really means something for Ray. Others are much worse: ‘the joy of repetition really is in you’ (Hot Chip) is clearly just filling in syllables; and while Spiritualized’s new single Soul On Fire has some great lyrics (‘freedom’s just a word when there’s no-one left to hurt’) the entirely banal ‘you never really should say never’ is pure flab. James Blunt’s new single, I Really Want You, is, quite apart from its lazy chorus line, pure flab. You don’t want it, at all. [RJ Thomson]