How lad next door Ed Sheeran has remained grounded throughout his career
Ed Sheeran has somehow remained grounded even as his profile has gone through the stratosphere. charts the singer-songwriter’s amazing rise ahead of his Irish tour.
Early in 2016, Forbes magazine published its annual countdown of music’s highest earners. Squeezed between The Rolling Stones and Jay Z was English singer Ed Sheeran, who’d banked $57m across the previous 12 months.
The morning the list came out his phone began chiming. It didn’t stop all day.
“The Forbes list actually fucked it up,” said Sheeran, who kicks off an extraordinary nine-date stadium tour of Ireland at Páirc Uí Chaoimh this Friday .
“I was getting texts from people with pictures of cars going, ‘I’d like this for my birthday, please. This one’s only 0.06% of your annual income.’”
Fame and wealth are disorienting in any circumstances. For Sheeran, a humble young man from small town two and a half hours from London, the transition from jobbing musician to global star must have been especially strange.
As his career took off relationships he had regarded as rock solid were revealed as exceedingly flaky. Celebrity and riches may not have changed Sheeran — but they certainly changed those around him.
“Money’s such a weird thing,” he would tell the Guardian when publicising third album, ÷, in 2017. “The way it changes certain people around you, the attitude they have towards you, and it changes the people you think it wouldn’t change. Just small things.
“I remember being in a club with a couple of friends that I was close to, we ran up this hefty bar bill — it was 700 quid or something — and I sorted it at the end of the night, then left. I got a call the next morning from the bar: ‘Oh, your mates came back later and they ran up another 600-quid bill and they just said to charge it to you’.”
Musicians with 26m album sales to their name rarely grumble in public about the trivial irritations of fame. But Sheeran, who recently announced his engagement to childhood sweetheart Cherry Seaborn, has somehow remained grounded —and thoroughly gobsmacked — as his profile has gone through the stratosphere.
As he steps in front of tens of thousands of fans at Páirc Uí Chaoimh next weekend (he has sold out three dates at the venue), expect a little bit of him to be still astonished at how far he’s come.
It’s a quality that has ensured his music has retained the earthy, lad-next-door component that first attracted fans. And it means that he is as arguably determined to prove himself now, on the eve of his block-busting Irish tour, as when he first broke through in 2011 with debut single The A Team.
“His ambition never [diminished] despite plenty of rejection and criticism over the years,” his cousin Laura Sheeran, herself an accomplished songwriter from Galway, told me once.
“Instead, he used that criticism and rejection to fuel his [desire to succeed] and to prove those people wrong. When he started to get big, we all knew it was coming for a long long time. It was no surprise to us. We were all so so proud to see all his hard work paying off, and still are. He’s the most hard working person I know. He deserves every ounce of his success.”
Sheeran would be a phenomenon in any era. Today, especially, his rise is remarkable. In an age when image is arguably as important as music — where would the any self-respecting pop star be without their Instagram feed? — he doesn’t look remotely glamorous or enigmatic. Far from it, in fact.
With his plaids shirts and naff tattoos, Sheeran has a loveably schlubby quality. The 27-year-old enjoys a beer (when the money came pouring in one of his first indulgences was to install a pub in his apartment) and, if understandably a little nervy of venturing out in public, appreciates the support of his fans. He’s that rarest of things: a superstar you can relate to.
This was made clear when he began his April 2017 tour with an “intimate” concert at Dublin’s 3Arena. In a cinema across the road from the venue, fans who had been unable to procure tickets for the gig — which sold out in a heartbeat — were taking their seats for a live stream of the performance when in walked Sheeran with his guitar. He played a few tunes — then invited the speechless punters over to the gig.
Along with the mateyness, however, is a determined streak that has propelled him from the obscurity of provincial England to the top of the charts. As a shy Suffolk teenager, his ultimate dream was to be a guitar hero in the mould of his early idol, guitarist John Mayer.
However, after seeing a concert by Damien Rice in Whelan’s in Dublin at age 11, he realised he could be a storyteller rather than a rock god — a concept that appealed to him immensely.
“It was the first time I thought, ‘right, I’m going to pick up a guitar and do it on my own,’” he told me, reflecting on the Whelan’s concert.
It's only 2 weeks until Ed Sheeran kicks off his tour in Cork!
— SuperValu Páirc Uí Chaoimh (@PaircUiCha0imh) April 20, 2018
Make sure you have planned your journey to and from Páirc Uí Chaoimh - https://t.co/DXsxEDMZSv#EdCork pic.twitter.com/HIKd463Pna
“That was the first spark of inspiration. I met [Rice] in the pub afterwards. He was a nice guy. That’s all I needed.” With Rice as a role model he played where and whenever he could. No venue was too small, no TV show too naff (when he met Paul McCartney for the first time,The Beatle told Sheeran that he’d seen him performing on Channel 4 teen soap Hollyoaks).
The goal was to do whatever it took to build a following — by one fan at a time if necessary.
“I’m not afraid of hard work,” he said in 2011, as his career was going supernova.
“I’m not ashamed to say I’m hugely ambitious, and I dream of Coldplay-sized fame. Their music has grown to fill the venues they’re playing — from rooms to arenas to stadiums, and that’s where I want to be one day.
“I know it’s all about the songs, though, and the amount of work you’re prepared to put in. And I’m fully prepared to put the effort in.”
Things didn’t happen immediately when he moved to London in 2008, intent on making a career in music. Indeed, for a long time nothing was happening at all. It got to the point where he gave serious thought to changing his name, fearing “Ed” was too mundane. Instead, he considered “Redward”.
Had he proceeded with his plan, it’s safe to say pop history would have been very different.
These were dark days for Sheeran. He had gone to London aged 16 without any money and nothing on which to fall back (his parents, who had expected he would go to university, worried he’d thrown away his future).
Still, he never quite chucked in the towel and played every opportunity he got. Such was his focus he would sleep rough if the occasion demanded. In one instance, he dozed off on a bench near Buckingham Palace (inspiring the song ‘Homeless’).
‘I wasn’t really homeless,” he would clarify. “Not proper cardboard box stuff. But yeah, I would gig at night and if I didn’t have a sofa to crash on I’d sleep on the Circle Line all day. Then I’d gig the following night, and do it all again.”
On his way to the top he also had a bizarre run-in with movie star and musician Jamie Foxx. Having gone to Los Angeles at his own expense to perform, Sheeran bumped randomly into Foxx, who invited the singer to stay at his house.
“I headed off with guitar under arm to escape England,” he told me when we chatted.
“I wasn’t expecting anything. It all worked out, which is nice. I played a lot of shows over there. Little by little I made a name for myself, for being this white boy English kid. Jamie’s manager said, ‘come and be on his radio show.’ So I did. And Jamie says, ‘come stay at my house...’ It was essentially ludicrous.”
He understood that he didn’t look like a pop star but sensed that his honesty and forthrightness would allow him forge a connection with listeners. Far from a drawback, being normal was one of the ways he could chime a chord with the public.
“I feel like the kids who look very styled, there’s a disconnect from the regular high-street guy who doesn’t know about designer stuff,” he said in 2014.
“Do you remember when Girls Aloud came out and they were just in Topshop? That was perfect because all girls felt they could go to Topshop. That’s how to break it down. Not to overstate things. If you make someone look too like a star, no one’s going to have any connection with them.
“When I came out, I got stick for wearing baggy jeans, a T-shirt and a hoodie. I had all those men’s fashion magazines telling me how unstylish I was but then I went home and all my mates were wearing the same thing.”
Indeed, it was only after he had achieved global fame that he became self-conscious about his appearance, as he told singer George Ezra when appearing on the latter’s podcast recently. “I had zero insecurities before I became a singer — and I was born with ginger hair. I didn’t care. I’d have a beer belly, ginger hair, wouldn’t wash and wear scraggly clothes.”
The trigger was a red carpet appearance when he found himself standing next to the members of One Direction.
“I was like, ‘they’re so photogenic and they’ve got six packs... and I should look like that,’” he said.“But should I actually care if I’m fat or not? No one’s bought my records based on me looking a certain way.”
He added: “But as soon as you become in the public eye and people start picking holes in you, you start thinking things are bad for you. Like, ‘Am I fat?’”
Even when success came he never stopped pushing. The first time he played Dublin it was at mid-capacity Vicar Street. He returned to play 3Arena. After that he set his sights on Croke Park, which he duly headlined in 2015 — a few days after performing at the equally expansive Wembley in London.
[qouote]“People were saying: ‘Do you think you can do it?’. And I started to think: ‘Well…I don’t really know’. “
the Irish crowd has always been the best. At Wembley people came to see if I could do it — in Ireland they come to have a good time.”
Despite his youth, Sheeran had understood that the music industry had changed fundamentally through the 2000s. Record companies were no longer all-powerful. There was a time when labels could, with enough money and time, create stars. Those days were gone — now stars had to make themselves.
He said as much to me when I spoke to him in 2011, explaining that he had decided to sign a major label deal after becoming a phenomenon — rather than waiting for them to work miracles on his behalf.
“I can distribute my music independently. I can make a video for no money, put it on YouTube, tell fans about it on Twitter and Facebook. It’s all good! That’s the best way to be. You have longevity. If you find success from building your own foundation, you don’t need the record company. Atlantic could drop me tomorrow – I’ve still got the fan-base that got me here. They got me into the charts before I was signed. It’s a better position to be in.”
Seven years later, as he prepares to take to the Páirc Uí Chaoimh stage this Friday, he will conclude that this plan has gone better than he could have ever predicted.
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