OTTAWA - Listen up, dudes, here's how to get a woman to turn to mush.

First, get yourself a charming British accent. No need to cut your hair, or even comb it. But learn to play the piano, or at least the acoustic guitar, and play it well. Then look directly into their eyes and, in a sweet, soft voice, sing these words: "You're beautiful. You're beautiful, it's true."

They'll melt right in front you, I swear.

At least, it worked for James Blunt last night at Scotiabank Place. Starry-eyed women gazing at him, heads tilted slightly, hands clasped over their hearts, swaying to his music.

"It's very nice to see your smiling faces," said Blunt, the handsome Englishman who shot to stardom in 2005 with that chart-topping single, You're Beautiful.

He sang it again last night to 4,500 adoring fans, many of whom would have made him breakfast in bed had he only asked.

After all, poor guy's got to be tired. He's been touring the world in a bus with his five-piece band ever since he released his second album, All the Lost Souls, in September 2007. Playing to thousands of women fawning over you every night can't be easy.

But if he is road-weary, he didn't show it.

Dressed in a grey suit and tie with a white shirt -- he lost the jacket after song No. 5 -- he strutted around the stage like that other British ladies' man, Mick Jagger, and flirted right back with the women who professed their love for him after every song.

"I like it when I have you all to myself, too," he said as his band left him alone at the piano to play No Bravery.

Midway through his nearly two-hour set he jumped off the stage and hugged and kissed several women as he skipped his way to the opposite end of the auditorium, where he sat at another piano for a few more songs and gave the people at the back a chance to see him up close.

Unlike more stubborn musicians, he played all the songs his appreciative audience wanted to hear. Among them: Wise Men, Carry You Home, Goodbye My Lover, I Really Want You and, of course, his newest hit, 1973, which he sang to close out the show.

He did try out a new one, Love Love Love, that -- guess what -- the ladies loved.

Bet let's be fair. His music appeals to more than just women. Sensitive men can appreciate You're Beautiful, which is actually about a man who longs for a woman he can't have, and contains that emphatic curse word that he so graciously paused and let the audience sing for him last night.

Macho men can beat their chests to No Bravery, a song about his time serving for the British army in Kosovo. And any man who is fallible --name one who isn't -- can relate to Same Mistake, which Blunt has called one of his favourite songs to sing.

"Same Mistake is one of my most musically accomplished songs and is really sweet to play and hear," Blunt told me earlier this month. "It is really powerful and sweeps the audience along."

This crowd was swept away long before he played that song.