George Ezra quietly becoming a superstar

George Ezra doesn’t party and is unlikely to smash up hotel rooms, but he still does a fine line in heartfelt ballads, writes Ed Power.

THE day before he flew to Dublin to headline the Trinity Ball, George Ezra paid a house-call to one of his musical heroes.

“I sat down in front of Elton John,” says the chart-topping singer-songwriter, “and thought, ‘how the f**k’ has this happened’?”

Ezra (24) had popped around to Elton’s to record an interview for his podcast, George Ezra and Friends.

He’d started taping conversations with fellow musicians to fill time ahead of the release of his second LP, Staying at Tamara’s (it recently debuted at number one in the UK and number two in Ireland).

The series, which kicked off with a revealing back-and-forth with Ed Sheeran, has become a phenomenon.

“My guests like to talk about themselves,” says Ezra, in a hotel suite overlooking Dublin’s Grand Canal.

“So do I. Not in the sense of, ‘oh, this morning I did this or that’. Anyone can write and record music and let it exist in a corner of the internet. It takes a certain type of individual to want to promote something — making the podcast has helped me understand why I’m doing this and what I want to achieve.”

What he’s doing is quietly becoming a superstar. Ezra’s 2014 debut, Wanted On Voyage, was the third-highest-selling record in the UK that year, trailing only Sam Smith and Ed Sheeran.

The single ‘Budapest’ topped charts across Europe and was embraced in Hungary as an unofficial anthem.

Both it and the LP have, moreover, had an extraordinary afterlife, with ‘Budapest’ receiving airplay for months on end and Wanted On Voyage returning to the summit of the top-10 six months after its release, in January 2015.

This all came as a shock to Ezra, who’d written the album while inter-railing around Europe.

He’d grown up in a small town, just north of London, and signed a record deal aged 18.

Wide-eyed in an undergraduate way, he hadn’t thought his career through.

All of a sudden, he was up there with Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith. It was, he says now, a huge adjustment. Not an ordeal — he’s eager not to be perceived as whiny — but a thrilling, confusing, never-to-be-repeated whirlwind.

“It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it. But I did sort of hold my breath the entire time. Nobody on the team anticipated the record doing as well as it did. Which meant we were constantly putting on new tours. It sprawled and went on and on. At any point, you can, of course, say, ‘f**k it, I’ve had enough’. But that’s not my style.”

When he finally finished touring and moved back home with his parents, he became a bit unhinged. After years of constant activity, the silence — all that time to himself — did his head in slightly.

“I’ve always been an extremely relaxed person. All of a sudden, I became panicked by the mundane stuff. ‘Why isn’t this or that working?’ And this would be at home. I had to stop beating myself up for taking two months to not do anything, after two years doing everything. But it was impossible to decompress.”

He’s not one of those artists who can wake up, reach for a guitar, and bash out a tune. Ezra requires stimulation and benefits from stepping outside his zone of comfort.

That’s why he inter-railed going into the first album, and why, for the second, he moved to a random Airbnb outside Barcelona (owned by a woman named Tamara: hence the title).

“I have friends I went to college with, who could write a song a day without leaving their bed. That’s not me. That’s why the first one had the inter-railing. That’s very studenty, and fitted me at the time. I’d be lying if I said a month in Barcelona wasn’t appealing. That said, there was an element of jeopardy: not knowing who Tamara was going to be, or what to expect.”

In the event, they got on famously and Ezra wrote some of his best songs to date — charming, chirruping singalongs, such as ‘Don’t Matter Now’ and ‘Paradise’.

He was understandably confident in the material. Yet returning with his first record in four years was a leap in the dark all over again. Would his audience still be there?

“I still feel like a bit of a chancer… maybe I always will,” he says.

“I’ve met people along the way that have an air of entitlement. I don’t think they’re doing it necessarily in a negative way, of course. To them, it makes complete sense. I don’t think that’s something you develop. Either it’s in you or it isn’t.” Ezra is down-to-earth and rather sensible. He’s not one for partying — rather than trash his hotel room, he’s more likely to arrange the complimentary magazines in alphabetical order and turn down the bedsheets.

There was a time when being a bit square, in this fashion, would have rang a death knell.

In the heyday of the defunct magazine, NME, musicians often built their careers by being outrageous in print and on stage, to the point where their music felt an afterthought.

Ezra is the opposite of all that. He’s friendly, but low-key in that Chris Martin way. He considers himself fortunate in that, thanks to the internet, the public can listen to his music and make up their own mind. He doesn’t have to sell himself.

It’s a cliche, but he’s happy for his heartfelt, occasionally loud and raw, songs to do the talking.

“It wouldn’t work for me,” he says.

“There was a point on the first record where it started to do well. I thought, ‘shit — I haven’t thought about who I’m being… maybe I will have to [adopt a persona]’. In fact, I’ve never had to. Twenty years ago, very few people were living the life they were saying, I think. I have the luxury to admit ‘I don’t party… but here’s my record’.

“Twenty years ago, I would have either been ironically cool for admitting that, or you wouldn’t have gone near me.”

Staying at Tamara’s is out now.