James Blunt, who embarks on a UK tour in January and features in a Planet Rock Profile documentary now available on BT Vision Music, continues to divide opinion both as a songwriter and performer.

Even Blunt’s critical plaudits tend to come as back-handed compliments. When his second album, All The Lost Souls, was released in September, the NME – hardly his natural audience – was forced to admit, “He’s only gone and come back. And improved, actually: we counted two more hits than Back To Bedlam. Be very afraid.”

Blunt’s music – you can watch videos for Goodbye My Lover and You’re Beautiful on BT Vision Music now – is firmly rooted in the 70s singer-songwriter tradition of Cat Stevens and James Taylor. He sampled both artists on the song 1973, and covered the former’s Wild World at the Live Earth concert.

The result? Mojo magazine declared All The Lost Souls “far more icky-yucky than its predecessor”, while the performer himself was voted the nation’s fourth greatest irritant in a 2007 survey.

But Blunt has a knack of rattling off the sort of radio-friendly tunes that lodge themselves firmly in the memory. You’re Beautiful propelled debut album Back To Bedlam to sales of 14 million, which paid for a villa in Ibiza. Goodbye My Lover has earned the distinction of the most requested song at funerals.

Liz Hoggard became besotted, too. “It’s impossible to resist Blunt’s troubadour yearning,” she wrote in The Observer of All The Lost Souls. “Blunt-baiters are never going to be convinced, of course… but snobbery apart, this is a terrific album.”