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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

FIRST EDITION

Text © Sean Smith 2018

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Also by Sean Smith

George

Adele

Kim

Tom Jones: The Life

Kylie

Gary

Alesha

Tulisa

Kate

Robbie

Cheryl

Victoria

Justin: The Biography

Britney: The Biography

J.K. Rowling: A Biography

Jennifer: The Unauthorized Biography

Royal Racing

The Union Game

Sophie’s Kiss (with Garth Gibbs)

Stone Me! (with Dale Lawrence)

Dedication

For Hilaria

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Also by Sean Smith

Dedication

Introduction: Principality Stadium, Cardiff, 24 June 2018

PART ONE: FAMILY IS ALL

1 Painting the Picture

2 Pugilism not Vandalism

3 The Eminem Remedy

4 Spinning Man

5 The Loopmeister

6 Want Some Nizlopi

7 Ed Stage Left

8 Access All Areas

PART TWO: THE NEXT BIG THING

9 Singer–Songwriter

10 In the City

11 Loose Change

12 A Fine Example

13 A Big Deal

14 Wayfaring

15 Precious Moments

PART THREE: THE SHAPE OF THINGS

16 On Patrol

17 Moving Swiftly On

18 The Universal Shush

19 Thinking Out Loud

20 Home and Away

21 Perfect Symphony

Last Thoughts

Ed’s Stars

Life and Times

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

List of Searchable Terms

Picture Section

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION
Principality Stadium, Cardiff, 24 June 2018

He’s on time. There’s no messing about with Ed. He doesn’t need to build up the excitement artificially by being late onstage. Instead, at 8.45 p.m. precisely, the lights go down and the video screens show him making his way casually down a corridor towards the stage as if he’s strolling to the pub for a pint. The only giveaway that this is an extraordinary event is the deafening roar from 60,000 people.

And there’s the man himself. The pedals of his famous loop station are at his feet and a small guitar bearing the logo of his latest album ÷ (Divide) is in his hands. He cuts a solitary figure. If you didn’t know he was the biggest pop star in the world in 2018, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was the warm-up act who couldn’t afford a proper band.

Standing a couple of rows in front of me, a young girl has the symbol ÷ etched in glitter on her cheek. I’m surrounded by people wearing official T-shirts with the logo on the front and the cities he’s playing on the back. This will please Ed, who has always been switched on regarding the promotional and financial importance of official merchandise. As a schoolboy, he would try to flog a few of his self-financed CDs to his audience, even if it was just half a dozen people in a social club.

The first chords of ‘Castle on the Hill’ are all anybody needs to get up and dance. Ed Sheeran is only one man but he seems to create an enormous power and charisma. There’s nobody else quite like him. Not everyone was brought up in a small town with a view of a magnificent castle, but we can all identify with thoughts and feelings about home. There’s something reassuring about making your way back, perhaps at Christmas or just to see Mum and Dad or old friends who haven’t moved on.

While he’s getting his breath back, Ed announces, ‘Good evening, Cardiff! Howya doing?’, which is not especially original but meets with a very positive response. Ed’s very relaxed between songs. The night before, he had left the stage twice to go for a pee.

He didn’t need to do that tonight. Instead, he tells us this is the biggest tour that has ever come to Wales. More than 240,000 people have swarmed into the stadium to see him during the last four nights. Apparently, Friday night was the largest single audience, although, to loud cheers, Ed suggests that tonight’s crowd is even bigger.

It’s the last night of the UK leg of his 2018 world tour. I wonder idly if I’m the millionth person to see him since he played the Etihad Stadium in Manchester last month. It’s not just a million teenage girls either. This is truly a family event with mums and dads, nans, grandads and children under ten all eager to enjoy themselves.

I’m next to a young couple from Barry Island who have brought their seven-year-old son Theo with them. ‘Who’s the fan?’ I ask. They chorus that they all are, although Dad told me he usually preferred Iron Maiden and Def Leppard.

He would have enjoyed the start of ‘Eraser’, the opening track on the ÷ album that begins with a wall of sound, courtesy of the loop station. It’s the first number of the night to feature some trademark rapping. In Ed’s hands, rapping seems to be more poetic than aggressive. He has made the genre acceptable to millions who might not have appreciated it before.

He launches into ‘The A Team’, the song he wrote ten years ago that changed everything for him. ‘If you know the words, then sing along,’ he says. It seems as if 60,000 people do. ‘There’s no such thing as “Can’t sing”,’ he tells us, ‘only “Can’t sing in tune”.’ That is certainly the case of practically everyone near me, but nobody cares.

Cleverly, he merges ‘Don’t’ from his second album, × (Multiply), with ‘New Man’ from ÷, both harsh and slightly bitter break-up songs. Between numbers, Ed may not have the distinctive patter of Adele but he chats in a relaxed fashion that appears perfectly natural and friendly, not at all scripted.

Apparently, he last played in Cardiff in 2011 and vowed then that he wouldn’t come back until he could fill this great stadium. That ambition didn’t take long to achieve.

He asks for our biggest scream before changing pace to ‘Dive’ perhaps the most underrated song on ÷. It’s a romantic ballad but not a soppy one. ‘Don’t call me baby/unless you mean it’ is a chorus to sing at the top of your voice in the shower.

As each song passes, I’m more and more struck by how everyone knows the words. I suppose it’s an indication of the sheer scale of his popularity. Ed’s strategy is that it’s a participation show and he wants everyone to sing and dance, although he reminds us that he can’t dance – even if the famous video to ‘Thinking Out Loud’ gives the impression that he’s a natural.

Ed wants us all to dance whether we can or not. Amusingly, he points out that there is always two per cent of an audience that refuses to sing or dance. They’re either the grumpy reluctant boyfriend or the ‘superdad’ who’s being a hero acting as chaperone for their son or daughter. Ed’s own dad, John Sheeran, was exactly that, taking his boy along to countless gigs that gave him a vitally important musical education when he was young enough to absorb any influences.

Ed moves easily between different styles, often in the same song. They might build from a rap or a quiet verse into one of those anthemic choruses you can’t get out of your head. He sings three songs in a row that reflect the agony of love. ‘Bloodstream’, from the × album, starts quietly before transforming into one of his most dramatic crescendos and a powerful wall of sound.

‘Happier’ is, for me, his most melancholy song, a story of love lost, a recurring theme with Ed. The poignant lyric touches anyone who has ever taken a wrong turn in love – and that would be everyone. ‘I’m a Mess’ is another song that reflects Ed’s own intelligence and openness in his lyrics. I wish I had a fiver for every time someone’s told me that they like the autobiographical touches he includes in his songs.

It’s time to lighten the mood a little and ‘Galway Girl’ does exactly that. Some critics don’t like this song and I’ve heard it described as Marmite – you either love it or you hate it – but we’re all up, having a hooley in the aisles. Ed has always embraced his Irish heritage and my guess is that this will become a party classic in the years ahead.

Ed doesn’t do many covers so it’s a surprise when he slips ‘Feeling Good’ into the set list. Although many people know it as a Michael Bublé song from a decade ago, it’s actually a much older stage-musical number that became an instant classic when it was recorded by the matchless Nina Simone in 1965. The late George Michael also featured it on his last studio album, Symphonica, in 2014. I wonder if there are any similarities between Ed and George – arguably the two greatest solo male pop stars the UK has produced. Ed cleverly mashes his version into the haunting ‘I See Fire’, the song he wrote for the 2013 film, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

Ed changes guitars for practically every number. He is handed an electric guitar for the first time and mentions Amy Wadge, one of his original collaborators, who still lives locally in South Wales and is in the audience tonight. ‘If you don’t know the words to this one then you’re probably at the wrong show,’ he announces, then plays the opening chords of the sublime ‘Thinking Out Loud’, which he wrote with Amy.

Everyone goes into a huge romantic sigh. Instead of the thousand stars in the lyric, I can see a thousand and more torch lights from mobile phones shimmering in the darkened stands. Considering that he has only released three mainstream albums, Ed has already produced many classics – songs that will be first dances at weddings, reminders of first dates and kisses or just simply ‘our songs’.

This is the beginning of four peerless ballads. He follows ‘Thinking Out Loud’ with ‘One’ and ‘Photograph’, also from the × album. During the latter, the big screens behind him flash up images of Ed as a child. Could it get any more poignant? And then he plays ‘Perfect’.

Ed explains one of his secrets. This song is ‘super-personal to me’, he reveals. We know it’s written for Cherry but it doesn’t have the same emotion for everyone: ‘It’s my song before it comes out, but when it comes out, it becomes your song.’ This is a universal truth about music.

As if to prove that point, the grey-haired couple behind me put their arms around each other. The young mum next to me picks up her son and cuddles him, while a few rows down I can see a small boy standing between his mum and dad and they all have their arms around each other. It’s an ‘I was there’ moment that they will always remember. Perfect, indeed.

‘Nancy Mulligan’, the song he wrote about his Irish grandparents, wakes everyone from their romantic reverie and we all start dancing again – all except one superdad I spotted, who was determined to stay seated while his young daughter bopped away enthusiastically next to him. Even he got up for ‘Sing’, the closing number.

Ed pops offstage briefly to change his shirt. He’s back wearing a number-eleven jersey with Gareth Bale on the back, which gets a cheer. The reception for the first number of the encore, his biggest hit to date – ‘Shape of You’ – is the loudest of the night. He finishes with a frantic wall-of-noise version of ‘You Need Me, I Don’t Need You’, which is the song he traditionally performs as his last of the night.

Part of me thinks he should have ended with ‘Thinking Out Loud’ or ‘Perfect’, but that’s clearly not what he’s decided to do. He wants to leave with a dramatic climax, and that he achieves. This is the song that sums up his philosophy: be true to your own dreams and follow them. He wishes us a safe journey home and is gone – no fuss, no unnecessary milking of the applause, no insincere ‘I love you, Cardiff’ nonsense. He came, he played, he conquered.

On my way out with 60,000 other people, I thought about the end of the video for ‘Photograph’, perhaps my favourite. There’s a shot of Ed at the top of a hill and a voice asks, ‘Are you at the top of the mountain?’ His phenomenal success – in terms of record sales, downloads, streaming, audience figures – doesn’t lie. He is unarguably at the top of the mountain, looking down on the rest of the music business. My job, I thought, is to discover how on earth a scruffy, ginger-haired bloke climbed up there.

PART ONE

1
Painting the Picture

Undeniably, Edward Sheeran was a cute baby. The proof is in the many home movies his doting parents, John and Imogen, took of their second son as he crawled and gurgled, whooped and squealed around their first family home.

The footage was used charmingly in the nostalgia-packed video that accompanied his 2014 ballad ‘Photograph’. While the sweet film had little to do with a melancholic lyric that declared how much ‘loving can hurt’, it provided a fascinating window on to his world.

We see Ed grow from baby to small boy, with ginger hair, large blue NHS specs and a small port-wine stain near his left eye, to a teenager busking in the street while learning his craft and, finally, to the man acknowledging the applause of thousands at a pop festival.

The large late-Victorian stone house that is the setting for many of the clips is not, however, in his beloved Suffolk, the county so closely associated with Ed, but in West Yorkshire where he was born, and where he spent his early years in the cosmopolitan market town of Hebden Bridge.

John and Imogen Sheeran lived halfway up Birchcliffe Road, one of the steepest hills in the town and a lung-bursting trek from the centre for a young mum with a baby and a toddler. Their first child, Matthew Patrick, was born eight miles away in Halifax General Hospital not long after the couple had relocated from London. Edward Christopher followed just under two years later, on 17 February 1991.

Calderdale, the valley in which Hebden Bridge sits, is ideal for bringing up a young family if you want to be sure of fresh air, spectacular countryside and wonderful walks. The road the Sheerans settled in winds its way to the crest of the hill where the views over the town and its distinctive streets of stone-built cottages are breathtaking.

Everything about Hebden Bridge shouts character. The town, which takes its name from the old packhorse bridge across the River Hebden, has bundles of it – from the quirky craft shops, the organic restaurants and boutique cafés to the tall, narrow terraced houses that seem to cling to the hillside as if stuck there with glue. Recently, the town has featured as a location for the hit television series Last Tango in Halifax and Happy Valley.

When Ed was born, the place was a work in progress – more basic and much less touristy than it is today. It had thrived as a bustling mill town specialising in corduroy and moleskin goods, but that prosperity ended in the 1970s when the textile industry went into decline. Hebden Bridge began to flourish again towards the end of that decade when it was transformed into a destination for creative minds and free spirits. It became well known for its strong sense of community and tolerance, in particular becoming a welcoming haven for lesbians and gay men.

Local author Paul Barker explained, ‘It was a small mill town in steep decline. There were lots of squatters who had creative skills – writing, painting or music – so it started as an arts-based thing. It’s a tolerant place, which allowed this scene to develop. People came to visit friends and realised the freedom to be able to live how they wanted.’

A strong literary connection already existed, although not a particularly happy one. The controversial poet laureate Ted Hughes was born in the village of Mytholmroyd, two miles down the road towards Halifax. His former home at Lumb Bank, two miles in the other direction, is now a residential writing centre.

Of more interest to literary pilgrims is the grave of Hughes’s first wife, Sylvia Plath, in the village church in nearby Heptonstall, where his parents lived. She immortalised the location in her bleak poem ‘November Graveyard’ that spoke of ‘skinflint trees’. The revered American poet had tragically committed suicide in London in 1963 but Hughes arranged for her to be buried in this most picturesque of locations. Many devotees of her work wishing to pay their respects stay in Hebden Bridge.

John and Imogen were drawn to the artistic nature of the town when they decided to settle there. Hebden Bridge was perfectly situated for a young and ambitious couple forging strong reputations in the world of art. They had begun promising careers in London where they were brought up in neighbouring districts south of the river – John in South Norwood and Imogen, a vivacious blonde, in Forest Hill. They were married in May 1984 at the historic Christ’s Chapel of Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift in the aptly named Gallery Road, Dulwich. He was twenty-six and she was twenty-four.

John was always a man who grasped an opportunity, impatient to make something of his life. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he had been appointed keeper of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1980 at the age of twenty-three. He had been taken under the wing of the gallery’s charismatic first director, Giles Waterfield, and together they transformed its fortunes from a threadbare museum with a skeletal staff and no financial support into one respected throughout the world.

Giles took a chance on his protégé’s youthful talent – as so many would with Ed in the future. When he died unexpectedly in November 2016, John wrote in appreciation of his old friend: ‘You transformed a sleepy, forgotten capsule of late Georgian taste into a world-renowned art museum with its own dynamic exhibition and education programme.’

Giles and John were a formidable partnership. In 1983, they held a life-drawing class in the permanent collection to attract visits from schools and colleges, an initiative that proved to be the start of their acclaimed learning programme. Throughout the 1980s, John seized the chance to organise major new exhibitions, including a universally admired collection of Old Masters.

While the famous paintings of great artists would bring in the crowds, he also promoted a new generation of British artists – many of whom were based in the north of England – including the distinguished landscape painter David Blackburn, who was from Huddersfield. John curated an exhibition of his work in Dulwich in 1986 and wrote the catalogue that went with it.

John brought a refreshingly intelligent and critical eye to paintings. His goal, right from those early days at the Picture Gallery, was to encourage visitors to take the time to really look at a painting – not just to take a photograph and move swiftly on. He explained, ‘When you read paintings, you start to look at people and places differently. Once you can read art, you have a gift for life.’

After seven years’ working in the world of museums, John moved on from Dulwich. He had found other opportunities with galleries in Manchester and Bradford, and he and Imogen decided to base themselves in Yorkshire. They were ambitious to become independent and had an entrepreneurial spirit that rubbed off on their younger son at an early age.

In 1990, the year before Ed was born, they set up their own company, a fine-art consultancy called Sheeran Lock, with an office in Halifax. Their new direction meant lots of travelling, particularly the well-worn path down the motorway to London – long, tedious trips that provided Ed with some of his earliest memories as he listened over and over again to his dad’s distinctly mainstream musical preferences. John Sheeran seemed to be stuck in a time warp, listening to music from the sixties and early seventies.

Even as a very young boy, Ed was displaying some of the characteristics that would serve him so well as a professional musician. He picked up words and melodies very quickly.

He would learn all the songs on classic Beatles and Bob Dylan albums and be able to sing along happily, if a little tunelessly.

One of his father’s favourites was Elton John’s 1971 album Madman Across the Water, which contained the track ‘Tiny Dancer’. Ed would memorably reference it in his own classic song ‘Castle on the Hill’ when he reminisces about driving down the country lanes near home at ninety miles an hour. Many years later Elton would become an important figure in Ed’s own story.

Despite his connection to ‘Tiny Dancer’, Ed chose another song from that album as a Desert Island Disc. He went for ‘Indian Sunset’, the elegiac orchestral number that opened side two and told the story of an Iroquois warrior contemplating defeat and death at the hands of the white man. The sensitive lyric revealed Elton’s song-writing partner, Bernie Taupin, at his most poetic.

John and Imogen envisaged Sheeran Lock as a multi-faceted concern. They saw the company setting up exhibitions and educational projects not just in Yorkshire but also around the world. They acted as consultants to a growing band of artists, whom they felt deserved a wider audience.

One of their first steps was to set up a publishing arm to promote the work of their talented friends and clients, including northern painters Mary Lord, Marie Walker Last and Katharine Holmes, the Lancashire-based Anglo-Dutch sculptor Marjan Wouda and the printmaker Adrienne Craddock. A beautifully produced book would often accompany an exhibition of the artist’s work. It was an approach that would serve their son Ed well in the future: make use of every aspect of your work.

As well as sorting out the day-to-day administration and editing the books, Imogen was a creative force not to be underestimated. These days, she is given a postscript in biographies of her famous son as a mum who dabbles in jewellery design. That sells her very short. She graduated with an MA in art history from the University of St Andrews, the same degree Kate Middleton would later obtain. After completing her studies, she worked in the press office at the National Portrait Gallery in London before moving north with John and becoming the gallery services officer at the Manchester City Galleries.

She used her artistic flair to transform the somewhat austere interior of the house in Birchcliffe Road into a magical pot-pourri of beautiful paintings and sculptures. She ditched wallpaper and emulsion in favour of a patterned fabric that she hung on the walls, like tapestry. Her little touches made the rather cold house, which used to be the local doctor’s surgery, feel far warmer, especially in winter when a roaring fire was essential.

The boys shared the attic space as a bedroom and, looking out through the window, they could see across the valley to the spire of Heptonstall Church, where Sylvia Plath is buried. Imogen knocked through the wall into the next room to create an opening with a private play area they could crawl through. It was like a giant Wendy house for boys.

Lock is Imogen’s maiden name and her family was well connected and high-achieving – particularly in the contrasting worlds of music and medicine. She was named after Imogen Holst, a family friend and the daughter of Gustav Holst, composer of the classical favourite The Planets Suite. Imogen Holst was a gifted composer in her own right. Significantly, she was the personal assistant of Benjamin Britten, one of the most famous of all British composers, who co-founded the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk in 1948.

Ed’s grandmother, Shirley Lock, sang for Britten and for many years she and her husband, Stephen, would spend their summers on the Suffolk coast to be part of the annual musical celebration. Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, were both godfathers to their eldest son, Adam. On one memorable occasion the little boy spotted one of the famous men walking along the seafront at Aldeburgh. ‘Look!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s Uncle Ben-Peter!’

Shirley had an impressive musical CV as a founder second violinist with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain in 1948. She was also a member of the Cambridge University Musical Society (CUMS) orchestras, as well as a number of prestigious singing groups, including the Purcell, BBC and Ambrosian Singers.

In a family of high-achievers, Shirley’s husband, Dr Stephen Lock, perhaps stands pre-eminent. He is a CBE, one rank below a knight, and has a long entry in Who’s Who. For sixteen years, he was the much-respected editor of the BMJ (British Medical Journal) until he retired from the role the year Ed was born. His speciality, for which he won a worldwide reputation, was the future of the editing of scientific data and the responsibilities of ‘journalogy’ as he called it.

Stephen also supported the new venture of Sheeran Lock. He joined forces with his son-in-law John to write a book entitled The Gift of Life, which explored the paintings of Sir Roy Calne, the organ-transplant pioneer. Imogen continued the family’s medical heritage by producing A Picture of Health. Her book accompanied a landmark exhibition of Susan MacFarlane paintings at the Barbican Gallery, London, about the clinical treatment of breast cancer.

Stephen shared his wife’s artistic passions, for opera in particular. In Who’s Who he declares, amusingly, his recreations as ‘reading reviews of operas I can’t afford to see’ and ‘avoiding operas whose producers know better than the composer’. For many years he has been a popular volunteer at the Britten-Pears Foundation library in his beloved Aldeburgh.

Although Ed was close to his grandparents, he never knew his Uncle Adam. He had been fatally wounded at his home in Alleyn Crescent, Dulwich, two weeks after Matthew’s birth in March 1989. The local newspaper, the South London Press, described the distressing circumstances under the stark headline ‘Man Shoots Himself’.

Adam, an investment manager in the City, shot himself twice with a shotgun he used for clay-pigeon shooting. According to the paper, he left his girlfriend asleep upstairs at about 4 a.m. one Friday morning while he let himself into the garage. There, he sat in an old armchair and turned the gun on himself. The first bullet pierced his left shoulder. He then reloaded and shot himself a second time.

Adam died two hours later in King’s College Hospital, Camberwell. He was thirty-one. The death certificate was issued by the Inner South District coroner Montagu Levine after an inquest in June. He listed the cause of death as ‘Gunshot Wound to Head and Chest. He killed himself’.

On the first anniversary of his death, in 1990, a dignified notice appeared in the In Memoriam column of The Times, remembering Adam Timothy Southwick Lock and quoting Tennyson:

But trust that those we call the dead

Are breathers of an ampler day

For ever nobler ends.

The poet wrote his monumental elegy In Memoriam, also known as In Memoriam A.H.H., as a tribute to his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who had died tragically young from a brain haemorrhage. The most often quoted lines are: ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ Tennyson took seventeen years to write his masterpiece as he struggled to deal with the effects of sudden bereavement.

In March 1991, when Ed was six weeks old, the same notice appeared again in The Times. In 1995, without fuss, a painting was adopted in memory of Adam Lock at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. The peaceful work by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Adriaen van Ostade is an oil on panel entitled simply ‘Interior of a Cottage.’ Adam would not be forgotten.

Ed’s grandparents’ love of music rubbed off on his mother, Imogen, who has a lovely voice and has been a mainstay of her church choir for many years. Ed, however, has never shared the family’s enthusiasm for classical music, unlike his brother Matthew, who had an obvious talent for it from an early age.

Ed enjoyed musical instruments, though. In his first classroom there was a musical bar where the children could help themselves to drums, recorders and other instruments and make as much noise as they liked. Ed loved this – much more than sport, for which he never had much of a taste.

By the time Ed began school, his birthmark had been successfully treated by laser but he was painfully shy, with a pronounced stammer. He later revealed that it was a result of one of his laser treatments, when the technicians forgot to administer the anaesthetic cream. Although the two brothers started at Heathfield Junior School at the same time, they were in separate classes because of the difference in age. Matthew, who was much more confident, never fussed around his younger brother but he was always there if Ed needed him.

Ed began in Reception, the infants’ class. The teaching assistant, Gillian Sunderland, remembers that the two brothers had very contrasting personalities, with Ed being by far the quieter: ‘He was rather nervy. He wasn’t needy in the sense of needing looking after but he was extremely shy. Extremely shy! He found mixing with other children rather challenging so he needed to be encouraged to mix really. He had a slight stutter but it was noticeable and I think he probably struggled with that.’

Looking back, Ed recalled that he had a ‘really, really bad stammer’. His own memories confirm that, as a little boy, he found it difficult to join in. He told Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs that he was a bit of a weird kid: ‘I lacked an eardrum so I couldn’t go swimming – which helps get friends.’

Heathfield is a private co-educational school in the small village of Rishworth, a ten-mile drive from Hebden Bridge down demanding country lanes, but it was worth it for the idyllic setting. Heathfield and its senior equivalent, Rishworth School, occupy 130 acres. The youngsters could spend much of the summer outdoors, playing and being taught in the open air. Gillian explains, ‘There are other schools but if you want your child to enjoy the environment then you would choose here.’

While Ed would learn the basics of English, maths and phonics, much of the teaching at the school revolved around being creative. A small river ran through the grounds and the class would be taken down to look at the water and were encouraged to write a little story about it or perhaps draw a picture. Ed particularly liked to sit outside quietly and draw with his crayons.

The teachers liked Edward, as everyone called him at school, because he was such a gentle boy. While he was small for his age, he stood out with his bright ginger hair and big round glasses. ‘He wasn’t the type of boy who liked fuss, though,’ recalls Gillian. ‘He was very much a “Let’s get on with it” type. He wasn’t in need of stroking all the time.’

In the well-known photograph of young Ed in his burgundy-coloured school blazer and grey shorts he is wearing the Heathfield uniform. Throughout his childhood he was fortunate in that his parents were sociable, and popular with other parents and teachers. Gillian observes, ‘They were the type of people that you don’t forget because they were lovely – so genuine and very supportive and caring.’

When it came time for the Sheeran boys to move on because the family were relocating to Suffolk, Imogen presented Gillian Sunderland and form teacher Christine Taylor with a thank-you card – a pencil drawing of her two sons.

Growing up, Ed and Matthew were the subject of many works of art. One important creative decision that Ed’s parents made was to commission paintings, sculpture and lithographs of their children so that there would be a lasting record of their early lives. As a result, there is a superb archive of them, not just sentimental camcorder shots. A further consequence of their foresight is that Ed has always been entirely comfortable posing for camera or paintbrush, and thousands of pictures of him are in circulation. Imogen’s thoughtful gift ensured the boys would not be forgotten at Heathfield. One of the key reasons for their departure was the discovery that Matthew – not Ed – had considerable musical talent. He was showing potential as a treble soloist and there were greater opportunities for a boy soprano in Suffolk, near his grandparents in Aldeburgh and at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds.

Imogen let slip why they were moving when she showed potential buyers around the house in Birchcliffe Road. Eventually it was bought by a local vet, Clare Wright, who was in awe of the art scattered throughout their home. She recalls, ‘There was wonderful, beautiful artwork everywhere.’ Every inch of wall seemed to have a painting hung on it, making the walls look bare when she moved in just before Christmas in 1995, when the family had left with their artworks. Ed was nearly five.

The Sheerans did, however, leave behind the piano, which also features in the ‘Photograph’ video, with Ed attempting to play it. Pianos are notoriously difficult to move and this was no Steinway, so it stayed put in the front room.

Eventually, Clare decided to give it away and, consequently, Ed Sheeran’s first piano moved ten miles down the Burnley road to the Elland Working Men’s Club. The family would need a new one when they moved into their next home in the Suffolk market town of Framlingham.

2
Pugilism not Vandalism

One item of furniture that was not on the removal firm’s inventory was a television. The Sheerans didn’t own one. Imogen and John were keen that their two boys should not become little couch potatoes. Theirs was an artistic household and they wanted the children to develop their creative nature in the important early years. It was a policy that would pay off handsomely.

Ed would later moan, tongue in cheek, that when they did eventually get a television, all they were allowed to watch was a box set of David Attenborough’s Life on Earth. They didn’t own a TV licence so it was videos or nothing. Nevertheless, Ed formed a lifelong appreciation of Attenborough and his standing as a true national treasure. ‘I was a massive fan,’ he admitted.

Imogen and John were very strict where TV was concerned. Edward and Matthew were allowed to watch one video each evening before they were directed to more meaningful play. Ed enjoyed Pingu, the long-running animated series about a family of penguins at the South Pole. When he was seven, he liked The Land Before Time, the classic animated feature film about the adventures of a family of dinosaurs.

After their viewing allowance, they were encouraged to draw or paint or, in Ed’s case, build with Lego. He loved it, and those happy hours spent as a child would benefit him later when he needed to apply himself patiently to constructing a song. Even as an adult, Lego was comforting.

His mother and father finally weakened and bought a TV licence when Ed was nine. He wondered what all the fuss was about until he discovered The Simpsons – but it was shown at 6 p.m. and clashed with choir practice on a Friday evening. Ed’s heart wasn’t in that musical activity. One regular churchgoer still smiles when she remembers the two Sheeran boys scampering out of the Sunday service at St Michael’s almost before the organist had played the last notes of the final hymn. Their mother’s continued support for the choir, on the other hand, was much appreciated locally: ‘You can tell when she’s singing,’ observes one member of the congregation.

Ed nagged his parents to let him off singing in the church choir. Eventually, they agreed on the understanding that he joined his school choir instead. He was now a pupil at Brandeston Hall, which was in a beautiful location that could rival that of his first school in Yorkshire. The imposing stately hall is at the heart of the village of Brandeston, about four miles south of Framlingham. From its position next to the River Deben, the views across the water meadows would inspire any painter.

The hall was destroyed by fire in 1847 but was rebuilt as an almost exact replica of the Tudor original. It became the prep school for Framlingham College in 1949, and still has the stopped-in-time quality that J. K. Rowling might have imagined for her Harry Potter stories. At Brandeston Hall, Ed came out of his shell. He made a best friend called James Mee and the two boys would take it in turns to go to each other’s houses after school.

James did not have the same television restrictions and it was at his house that Ed was introduced to The Simpsons. He also tasted meat for the first time. Imogen had been keen to start her sons on a healthy diet so the household was vegetarian for a few years. Ed was somewhat taken aback when he sat down for tea in James’s kitchen and was presented with a hearty plate of bangers and mash. He told his friend’s mum, ‘These are the best sausages I’ve ever eaten’, which was true, as he had never tried them before.

From then on, sausages would become a particular favourite. Imogen’s full English fry-ups were a sought-after breakfast when they had friends or visiting musicians to stay. The Sheerans soon became popular hosts in Framlingham, or ‘Fram’, as it’s known locally. Their sociability and ease in company contributed to their younger son’s cautiously growing confidence.

Everything about the market town of Framlingham was cosy – a picture postcard of old England, steeped in history. It was compact, easy to get around and surrounded by delightful countryside. An added bonus was that it was only fourteen miles to the coast where Imogen’s parents lived in Aldeburgh. The drive to Ipswich station to catch the train to London, a journey Ed would become very familiar with over the years, took forty minutes on a good day.

Just like Hebden Bridge, Framlingham has a strong sense of community, with traditional local pubs, independent shops and higgledy-piggledy streets full of the pink cottages so representative of the heart of Suffolk. On any day in the Market Square, the hub of the place, you are likely to see at least six people you know.

The cream-tea atmosphere of the present hardly matches the town’s colourful and somewhat violent past. Framlingham Castle was the seat of the earls and dukes of Norfolk until it passed to Henry VIII’s daughter Mary – ‘Bloody Mary’, as she was known. This was where she gathered her troops before she was proclaimed Queen of England and marched to London to take her throne in the summer of 1553.

The castle was a short walk from the new family home, a spacious detached house, which they bought for the relatively bargain price of £125,000. Today it would cost you £600,000. Ed had his own bedroom and a new piano was installed downstairs in one of the reception rooms at the back, which was perfect for entertaining.

In pride of place amid all the artwork the Sheerans continued to acquire, there were framed photographs of the two boys meeting the Prince of Wales. The family’s association with Prince Charles represented the pinnacle to date of John Sheeran’s career as a curator of prestigious exhibitions. He was appointed to organise and co-ordinate the prince’s fiftieth-birthday exhibition, in 1998. Entitled ‘Travels with the Prince’, it celebrated his work as a watercolourist. It included paintings by contemporary artists such as Emma Sergeant, Derek Hill and Susannah Fiennes, cousin of the Oscar-winning actor Ralph Fiennes. The artists had been specially chosen to accompany Charles on his tours abroad.

The exhibition at the Cartoon Gallery in Hampton Court Palace, in Surrey, proved a big success. With little fuss, Prince Charles has become one of the UK’s most successful artists, whose paintings have raised millions for the Prince of Wales Charitable Foundation. The deal for the travelling artists was that their trip was paid for, the prince had first choice of their paintings and, subsequently, they were free to sell their own work. It was a formula that worked exceptionally well.

Sheeran Lock produced a sumptuous book to accompany the exhibition, in which Imogen wrote the preface and John the text. It was part of a golden period for the couple as John’s star continued to rise. In 2003, he was commissioned by the then President of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, to curate a special show of present-day Nigerian art in Abuja where the Commonwealth heads of government were meeting. The exhibition included a ground-breaking art-education project for young people from all regions of Nigeria. John and Imogen were inspired by that success to devise other programmes to help disadvantaged young people in the UK. Their philosophy was simple – nobody should be excluded from appreciating art and participating in it.

Ed was shielded from hardship in Framlingham and settled in well to life at a gentle Suffolk pace. The family had a more lively time on their frequent trips to Ireland to visit John’s parents in County Wexford. John is one of eight children – five boys and three girls including his twin sister, Mary Anne – which meant Ed had cousins all over the country. The Sheerans are a large close-knit clan: Ed has always been aware of the importance of family, and has often sung about it. Despite John being born in South London, the Sheerans were very much an Irish clan so Ireland and its music have had a profound influence on Ed’s life.

Ed’s grandfather, Bill Sheeran, was born in Magera, a small town in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. He grew up in the East End of London after his father, James, became a local doctor in Bow. James, who was Ed’s great-grandfather, was reputedly a decent boxer and family legend has it that he once fought the great heavyweight champion Jack Johnson in an exhibition bout in 1913. After a spell of bullying at school when Bill was spotted carrying his violin case, his father had enrolled him in a boxing club and taken him to local tournaments, which had led to a lifelong love of the sport. In a similar way, Ed’s love of music was enhanced by joining his own father for evenings out at pop concerts.

During the Second World War, Bill Sheeran boxed for his school, Epsom College, then trained as a dentist at Guy’s Hospital in Southwark. He continued his love affair with the noble art and became captain of the hospital’s boxing club, where he was trained by Matt Wells, a former world welterweight champion. One of Bill’s favourite jokes was that the hospital’s motto, Dare Quam Accipere, was perfect for boxers. More familiarly translated, this means, ‘[It is better] to give than to receive.’

While studying at Guy’s, Bill took on his most infamous bout – against Charlie Kray, the elder brother of the notorious gangsters, Ronnie and Reggie. Expert opinion gave Bill no chance. Walter Bartleman, boxing correspondent of the old London evening paper the Star, and later the Evening Standard, told him before the fight, ‘He’ll eat you.’ It didn’t work out like that: Bill won the bout on a stoppage when Charlie was unable to continue.

Bill met his future wife Anne Mulligan at Guy’s where she worked as a nurse. She had been raised on a farm near Gorey, a small town in County Wexford, about sixty miles south of Dublin. Ed romanticised their story on his ÷ album. The track ‘Nancy Mulligan’, a traditional Irish jig, describes how theirs was a Romeo and Juliet story. In Ed’s tribute to his grandparents, he highlights the religious divide between a Protestant boy from Northern Ireland and a Catholic girl from the Republic. Her father, according to the song, did not approve of their marriage. He relates their love affair from Bill’s point of view and would later explain, ‘They got married and no one turned up to the wedding. He melted all his gold teeth in his dental surgery and turned them into a wedding ring.’

Exactly how much of the story is true and how much is artistic licence is a guessing game that fans can play with the majority of Ed’s songs. He takes a genuine fact or feeling as a starting point and develops it into a song that resonates with every listener. Everyone has their own stories of love and can relate to the observation that Bill had never seen ‘such beauty before’ when he met his future wife. Fortunately the song met with a thumbs-up from his gran, although she was very modest about it: ‘Oh, it’s fine as long as I’m not there while he’s playing it!’

In real life, Bill and Anne married in 1951 and settled in South Norwood, an area of London south of the River Thames, which seems slightly less glamorous than the ‘Wexford border’ Ed sings about.

Bill’s second love – after his family – remained boxing while he built a thriving dental practice. When his own boxing days had passed, he became more involved in the administration of the sport as a respected steward. A popular figure, he was in charge of many of the biggest nights in British boxing and was on good terms with the sport’s then best-known names, including Muhammad Ali, Henry Cooper and, Ireland’s finest, Barry McGuigan.

While boxing might seem an unlikely bedfellow for the artistic world so enjoyed by his son John, Bill had a passion for collecting art connected to the sport. When the family moved to the quieter waters of Chislehurst in Kent, he filled the house with paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculpture and silver.

In his affectionate tribute to his father after his death at eighty-six in December 2013, John recalled how, in later years, Bill had given away most of his collection to friends. Touchingly, he gave the World Light Heavyweight Championship belt and trophy, won by Freddie Mills, back to the boxer’s widow, Chrissie.

Two years before Ed was born, his Irish grandparents retired to the same farmhouse where Anne had been born in County Wexford. In ‘Nancy Mulligan’, they have twenty-two grandchildren. By the time of Bill’s death that number had risen to twenty-three and there were also four great-grandchildren, a number that Ed has often said he is looking forward to increasing.

Bill loved to show the finer points of boxing to the younger members of the family. Ed’s cousin Jethro Sheeran, better known as the recording artist Alonestar, became a huge fan of the sport, especially after Bill gave him a video one Christmas of Sugar Ray Leonard versus Marvin Hagler, one of the most celebrated fights of all time. From an early age he would be down at Bill’s gym practising Sugar Ray’s moves. Jethro, like many of the younger generation, idolised his grandfather: ‘He always instilled into us to be humble and respect others.’

It’s easy to imagine Bill teaching Ed, who was quite a small boy, self-defence. Anne proudly remembers that her grandson was ‘lovely as a kid’. Ed revelled in his visits to the farm in the summer holidays when he would camp with his cousins in the big barn beside the house. He forged a lifetime love of Ireland, its people and its traditional music, and still visits his grandmother whenever he can.

Boxing proved to be the focus of the 2017 video for ‘Shape of You’, Ed’s biggest-selling single to date. He displayed some promising moves as an aspiring boxer in love with a female fighter in his gym. By then his grandfather had died, after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease but, in the poignant ‘Afire Love’, Ed recalls his dad telling him as a boy that it wasn’t his grandfather’s fault he no longer recognised his grandson’s face.

Bill was president of the Gorey Boxing Club and members formed a guard of honour for his funeral, paying a personal tribute to him: ‘In Bill Sheeran we have lost a mentor, inspiration and role model whose generosity and kindness has helped thousands of young men and women.’ He was buried with a pair of boxing gloves in his coffin. In his obituary for Bill, published in the Guy’s Hospital journal, the GKT Gazette, John Sheeran recalled his father’s car-bumper sticker, which robustly declared, ‘Pugilism not vandalism’.

Ed fell in love with the Irish music he heard on his childhood holidays. He adored the traditional Irish folk groups Planxty and The Chieftains, but most of all he loved an artist who, ironically, he had first heard his dad play on one of the long drives south from Yorkshire. Van Morrison was the first of three major musical influences on Ed Sheeran. He listened to his classic albums Moondance and Irish Heartbeat and was hooked.

Moondance, which was released in 1970, is often hailed as a masterpiece of modern music and remains one of the best-loved albums of all time. Perhaps more interesting with regard to Ed’s musical development was Irish Heartbeat, a collaboration between Van and The Chieftains.

Van, who was born in Belfast, had been an Irish icon for more than thirty years since he first came to prominence in the group Them, with whom he recorded classics such as ‘Here Comes the Night’ and, more significantly, ‘Gloria’. His most famous song, ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ was his first solo single in 1967. He became a master of soulful blues, releasing a string of acclaimed albums.

While he had never deserted his Irish background in his songs, Irish Heartbeat was a return to more traditional music – albeit overlaid with Van’s inimitable vocal style. Three tracks in particular resonated with young Ed, who was seven when the album was released in 1998. He loved the folk songs ‘Carrickfergus’, ‘On Raglan Road’ and, most of all, the elegiac title track. Ed has yet to release these songs himself but acknowledged, ‘Van Morrison is a key influence in the music that I make.’ He paid homage to Carrickfergus by including a reference to it in ‘Galway Girl’ as well as mentioning ‘Van the Man’ in his hit, ‘Shape of You’.

And if you had been lucky enough to be drinking in the back room of the Cobden Arms in Mornington Crescent in 2010, you might have heard nineteen-year-old Ed enjoying a pint with musician friends and singing these favourites at the top of his voice. That, though, was many years in the future and the last thing on the mind of a quiet schoolboy still trying to conquer his stammer. It was time to do something about that.

3
The Eminem Remedy

Ed was trying all sorts of things to help with his stutter. He had coaching sessions with a speech therapist and took a variety of different homeopathic remedies but nothing seemed to make much difference. He didn’t have the worst stammer in the world but it did become more pronounced when he was excited and rushing to search for the right word. Interestingly, it didn’t affect him when he was singing in the choir or in his dad’s car. But conversation remained difficult.

When Ed was nine, Eminem was one of the biggest acts in the charts. Rap music was selling millions of records and Eminem was at the forefront of its popularity. When he released The Marshall Mathers LP – his real name – in May 2010, it became the fastest-selling album of all time in the US. More importantly, perhaps, his work was well received by the critics, who compared his autobiographical songs to those of Bob Dylan.

In Framlingham, this had passed John Sheeran by as he continued to play his old favourites. His brother, Ed’s uncle Jim, was more enlightened about contemporary music and told him that Eminem was the next Dylan. John was always receptive to new ideas across the artistic spectrum so he went ahead and bought the album for his younger son even though he had never listened to it and had no idea that it contained controversial and sexually explicit lyrics. Ed would later describe rap music as storytelling.

Ed had a great capacity to absorb things – he had the musical equivalent of a photographic memory. He set about learning the songs on the album, including all the bad language: ‘I learned every word of it, back to front, by the age of ten.’ That would invariably be the case with music he liked. He had an enviable talent for working out how to play songs just by listening to them.

He discovered that rap was the best therapy for his speech. In 2015, while receiving an award at the New York benefit gala for the American Institute for Stuttering, Ed spoke about being indebted to Eminem: ‘He raps very fast and very melodically, and very percussively, and it helped me get rid of the stutter.’

Ed’s remedy was not unique: many young people used singing as the best form of therapy – although not all of them chose The Marshall Mathers LP. Ed’s favourite track from it, and the one that had most influence on him, was the UK number one ‘Stan’. The song combined two elements that are very important in Ed’s music: a catchy melody line, which was sung by Dido, and a poetic, rhythmic rap by a master of the craft. Ed included the song in his Desert Island Discs and a separate list of his all-time favourites, which he gave to Rolling Stone magazine.

The song, which told of an obsessive fan’s suicide, gradually builds into a rage, then takes it back a step for the Dido chorus, which was basically a sample from her hit ‘Thank You’. Ed enjoyed its contrast of different emotions.

Even when so young, Ed seemed able to appreciate different musical genres. He still loved Van Morrison but now he was discovering new artists for himself. He noticed that Dr Dre, the producer of The Marshall Mathers LP, had a new album coming out entitled 2001, much of which featured Eminem. Ed, who earned pocket money from odd jobs, including washing cars, made sure he bought it, then widened his collection to include Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Tupac, who had been killed in a drive-by shooting in 1996, and the Notorious B.I.G., who had been shot dead in a similar fashion a year later. Hip-hop music seemed wild and exciting to a boy soon to start high school in a small Suffolk town.

Ed was fortunate in that his older cousin Jethro had similar tastes, which meant there was someone to appreciate his new music on family holidays. Jethro, who was brought up in Bristol, had been inspired to become a rap artist when he heard Tupac’s hit ‘Dear Mama’, a tribute to his mother whom he loved dearly despite her addiction to crack cocaine. Jethro was already fifteen when Ed first discovered hip hop but over the years the two worked closely together on each other’s songs, particularly when Ed was still learning his craft in Framlingham.

Tupac’s stories were grittier than those of Hollywood A-lister and rapper Will Smith, but Ed had become a big fan of the latter, too, when he discovered that The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was on TV after The Simpsons on a Sunday night. He lost little time in learning Will’s theme-tune rap. He loved it and is liable to drop a verse randomly into a song at one of his concerts.

Curing his stutter undoubtedly enhanced Ed’s confidence but he still had his problem eardrum. That was finally operated on when he was eleven, which was obviously a relief, although he would continue to have problems with it in the coming years.

While Eminem undoubtedly influenced Ed’s choice of more contemporary music, his love affair with the guitar was triggered by an old master on TV. He watched Eric Clapton performing ‘Layla’ at Party at the Palace, the June 2002 concert to celebrate the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in the gardens of Buckingham Palace.

The concert became famous for Brian May playing ‘God Save the Queen’ on the palace roof, but Eric was the highlight for Ed. He had slipped unassumingly onstage after an unlikely collection of Emma Bunton, Atomic Kitten and Cliff Richard had joined Brian Wilson to perform ‘Good Vibrations’. He commanded the space, dressed immaculately in an expensive dark suit and playing a guitar that was itself a work of art. The renowned New York graffiti artist John ‘Crash’ Matos had painted one of Eric’s signature Stratocasters and presented it to him as a gift. Eric was delighted and commissioned others from the artist, who had made his name spray-painting trains across the city. The guitars became known as ‘Crashocasters’ and Eric played the original on a world tour. The big video screens to the side of the stage zoomed in on his hands as they moved nimbly around the musical work of art.

‘Layla’ is an iconic rock anthem that Eric has played thousands of times since 1970, when the track first featured on an album by his band Derek and the Dominos. An intensely passionate composition about love, the song changes halfway through into a much more melodic number that features a long, melancholic guitar solo.

Ed was spellbound by the whole magnificent performance – the majestic riff, the guitar and the sheer presence of Eric. ‘I was like “Wow. That was so cool. I want to play that.”’ Even at eleven, once Ed had decided to do something, he did it. Fortunately his parents would invariably back him up.

Ed was in danger of always being half a step behind his elder brother, Matthew, who played the violin and continued to progress as a young classical musician. Ed had started taking cello lessons at school and his parents initially wanted him to tread a traditional musical progression of passing exams. Ed went along with it, but even at eleven he saw a different future for himself. He explained in the book A Visual Journey that classical music didn’t inspire, excite or do anything for him whatsoever.

Instead, two days after watching Clapton, he walked into a pawnbroker’s in Ipswich with £30 in his pocket and came out with a black Stratocaster copy. From that moment, Ed spent the majority of his leisure time shut away in his bedroom playing guitar. For the first few weeks, it was just ‘Layla’. One can only imagine what the rest of the Sheeran household thought, hearing its famous riff played badly again and again … and again.

His parents decided he needed proper lessons and found a guitar teacher, Graham Littlejohn, who played with a local band and taught Ed to widen his repertoire. Under Graham’s guidance, he learned to play rock classics, including ‘A Million Miles Away’, a thrilling piece by the celebrated Irish guitarist Rory Gallagher.

Just a month after seeing Eric Clapton on TV, Ed went to his first live concert. He persuaded his dad to take him to see the enduring American punk band Green Day when they brought their Pop Disaster tour to Wembley Arena in July 2002. He was eleven, and due to start high school in a couple of months. It was the first of many occasions when John Sheeran would accompany his son – in fact, he would be with him on every step of his musical journey. Many of Ed’s friends were fans of the band, who were one of the biggest-selling acts in the world, and going along to see them in London earned him plenty of bragging rights.

Ed was pretty much a guitar geek by the time he started at Thomas Mills High School in September 2002, but not in an irritating way. He wasn’t a loner and found it easier to make friends than he had in the past, especially if they were keen on music, too. Many of the mates he already had, including James Mee, moved to Framlingham College and inevitably they lost touch. James, who went on to become head boy, was more academically minded than Ed and achieved nine A*s at GCSE.

Thomas Mills was in the town, meaning Ed could walk to school – which was a bonus. His first form teacher was Georgie Ross, a charismatic young woman who was also in charge of drama. She noticed Ed among the new boys and girls right from the start, not just because of his striking ginger hair and glasses but also because he had brought his guitar with him on the first day. She recalls, ‘It was his passion. That was the first thing I noticed about him. We had a getting-to-know-you exercise and he talked about his guitar. He was very funny and endearing, a jovial sort of cheeky chappie.’

Ed has never explained why, having been to fee-paying private schools, he moved on to attend a state secondary. He has intimated that he found Brandeston Hall sporty and competitive, adding, ‘The other kids had a lot of money. I didn’t enjoy it.’ The huge fees at Framlingham College may also have had something to do with it. His parents’ business was successful but was at the mercy of supply and demand, and there were no guarantees that they could afford the five-figure sum needed to keep two boys at public school for the next five years.

Ed has hinted that he was bullied during his school years but he has never been specific about when and where. He accepted that he was a ‘weird-looking kid’ and that everyone suffers ‘a bit of bullying at school’. A particularly unpleasant boy threw a milkshake over him from a car while he waited at the bus stop. Such treatment motivated Ed to beat them at life.

Thomas Mills had a growing reputation as a school that encouraged children to make the most of their talents, particularly in the arts. The school dates back to the eighteenth century but was established as a comprehensive in 1979 by the merger of the old Mills Grammar and Framlingham Modern schools. Matthew was already being noticed by the time his younger brother joined him. He had been praised for his crystal-clear singing of ‘Pie Jesu’ at an end-of-term prizegiving. Both boys were fortunate that they arrived at the school when it was going through a golden period under the then headmaster David Floyd. He is one of the unsung heroes of the Ed Sheeran story in that he gave Ed and others the breathing space to develop their talents.

Georgie Ross observes, ‘There was a sense of pride about being at the school. I think the majority of the children knew they were sort of lucky to be at this school. David had a real vision of what he wanted the school to be – an outstanding school. And he managed to convince us all to go on this journey with him.’ Ofsted agreed, declaring, ‘This is a good school where pupils make good progress and reach high standards in an atmosphere of civilised collaboration.’

Ed seemed equally at ease with boys and girls. His parents’ close friends, Dan Woodside and Wendy Baker, had two daughters. Lauren and Martha were of similar ages to the Sheeran boys, and the families spent many sociable Sundays together. Dan was a decorative artist and Wendy an artist and art teacher, so they shared John and Imogen’s creative tastes. Dan had worked on major restoration projects, including the ceiling at the entrance to the National Gallery, London, and the gilding of the Crimson Drawing Room at Windsor Castle.

Dan and Wendy had moved to the town a couple of years after their like-minded friends and turned their new home in Market Square into the Dancing Goat Café, which soon became a focal point for wiling away sunny afternoons. Ed and his new friends from Thomas Mills would gravitate there after school. He was always calling round on his own as well, to see if Lauren was coming out. In recognition of their families’ long-standing friendship, Ed would give Dan and Wendy a gold record of his first album +, which now hangs proudly on the café wall.

Ed had a close circle of friends but was never constrained by Framlingham. The regular trips to Ireland and London, combined with his mum and dad’s sociability, had broadened his horizons. John continued to extend his son’s musical education by taking him to concerts and he managed to get tickets for a great night in April 2003, when Ed was twelve: they saw Paul McCartney in concert at Earl’s Court. The most famous name in pop played a mammoth set of thirty-seven songs that spanned his entire career, from the heyday of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo material. David Lister, writing in the Independent, observed that Paul dished up a generous two-and-a-half-hour set of classics with ‘such panache and emotion that it made the nerves tingle’. It was a tour de force and Ed decided that he preferred it to the Green Day gig.

Friends became used to Ed taking a guitar everywhere. By this time, he had a Faith, a decent-enough learning instrument. It was like a young child’s teddy bear: he was rarely seen without it. He showed precocious bravery when he took to the stage and played ‘Layla’ at his school’s spring charity concert. Inside, he wasn’t feeling too confident but he blossomed in front of an audience of several hundred people in the school hall. By then he had mastered the song, so playing it was second nature and, to his relief, he was warmly applauded: ‘It was fun. No one could have said a bad word, because I was so young and enthusiastic.’

At the end of his first summer term, Ed’s year went to a resort in Holland, which was very exciting as they would all be away from home for a week. John and Imogen were keen for their sons to have adventures that would take them away from the narrow confines of Framlingham. Naturally, Ed took his acoustic guitar with him. On the coach he was determined to give everyone a song. His art teacher, Nicky Sholl, recalls that they asked for volunteers to go up and do a turn: ‘Of course Ed went up and sang a song and then went back to his seat. And then he came back and sang one again. And everyone was like “Get him off the microphone!” It was very funny.’

He was also one of 140 pupils who sat around on the beach and chilled out at the end of a sightseeing day as the sun went down. Georgie Ross has never forgotten it: ‘Ed just got up with his guitar and got them all singing along with him. He was already a real hit with this crowd of young people. He sang “Stan”.’

It was a perfect end to the day, although Ed was about to discover that his musical progress would have its downs as well as ups.

4
Spinning Man

Ed was very upset. Without warning, his first guitar teacher had decided that teaching wasn’t for him. Playing the guitar was crucially important to Ed and this seemed like a hammer blow to the twelve-year-old boy. He took it very badly. His mother recognised that she needed to act quickly to rekindle his enthusiasm or Ed would go back into his shell. She started asking around to see if someone else in Framlingham might take on her son, and discovered that two neighbours in the street were both using the same virtuoso guitarist to teach their children. They spoke very highly of jazz musician Keith Krykant, whom they’d found through an ad in a local community paper, and thought he would be ideal for Ed.

Keith, who was in his early fifties, had only moved recently to the town but, coincidentally, he had already heard of Ed. He had started teaching Richard Croney, one of the children who lived across the road from the Sheerans. One afternoon Keith was walking home with Richard when they saw a ginger-haired boy on the other side of the street. Richard piped up, ‘That’s Edward Sheeran,’ and told Keith that Ed played concerts in the town and was already quite well known locally.

Keith and his wife, Sally Voakes, a jazz singer, had started to play gigs in the area and were building a following themselves. Sometimes it would just be the two of them, the Sally Voakes Duo or, for other nights, they might be joined by three or four local musicians.

One evening they were booked as a duo to play the Crown Hotel, which occupied a central position in Market Square. Imogen and John decided to go.

They were impressed, not just with Keith’s playing but also by his calm demeanour. They approached him and asked if he might consider teaching Ed. He agreed to give him a weekly lesson, charging £20 for an hour. The lessons, usually in Ed’s untidy teenage bedroom, continued for the next five years and complemented his development as a guitarist and, just as importantly, as a songwriter.

Ed already had a few guitars hanging on the bedroom wall. His rock guitar had pride of place over the bed. He preferred to decorate the orange walls of his room with his favourite instruments rather than posters of footballers or pop stars. When he grew tired of one or no longer played it, the guitar would be banished under the bed.

One of the first things Keith noticed in the room was an Epiphone Les Paul Sunburst guitar. He offered Ed a Bigsby tremolo unit that he wasn’t using at the time, and popped it round to the house. By the time of the next lesson, Ed had put it on and was practising using it. Ed and his mum were hugely appreciative of the gesture, which helped teacher and pupil form a bond of mutual respect and the Krykants and Sheerans to forge a lasting friendship.

Keith quickly realised that Ed’s playing was ‘pretty advanced’ for his age and that he also had a great deal of confidence in his own ability. Laughing, he recalls, ‘He’d got a little bit of an inflated ego. He once said that I was the only guitarist he’d seen that was better than him. He was only thirteen!’

Musically, Ed was at a crossroads. Like many teenage boys, his initial ambition was to be a rock god. He had his electric guitar, admired Eric Clapton and others, and had formed his own group with two friends from school, Fred and Rowley Clifford. They called themselves Rusty and played heavy-metal covers, mainly Guns N’ Roses. Their showstopper when they appeared at the old Drill Hall in Framlingham was the American band’s most famous hit ‘Sweet Child of Mine’. Ed liked that song but wasn’t wild about the rest of the material.

While Fred did his best impersonation of charismatic singer Axl Rose, Ed took on the Slash role of lead guitarist. He relished the solo, meticulously learning every note in his bedroom after school. He didn’t sing because he wasn’t any good at it. ‘I couldn’t really hold a tune until I was sixteen,’ he admitted.

Eric Clapton’s most famous band, Cream, had been a trio, as was the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Rory Gallagher’s Taste. It seemed the perfect number to draw attention to the guitarist. ‘They took it very seriously,’ observes Georgie Ross. As well as various assemblies and low-key school events, they played at the annual charity concert at Thomas Mills, one of the big occasions of the year.

Ed was already getting bored with the band. Keith Krykant observes, ‘He was playing this rock but I think was beginning to realise there was other stuff out there. He’d done that. He exhausted it. He was just imitating others.’

Everything changed when Ed discovered the second of the three great musical influences in his life. He was staying up late one night, watching videos on the music channels, when he saw ‘Cannonball’ by a then little-known artist called Damien Rice. It was very quirky, a series of apparently random images sprinkled with shots of Damien’s face as he sang. The almost surreal experience was linked together with a hypnotic acoustic riff.

Ed was immediately hooked. He went out and bought Damien’s debut album O the very next day, which was later his choice in Q magazine’s fascinating ‘The Album that Changed my Life’. He admired its honesty and rawness: ‘It was like he’d reached down his throat, grabbed his heart, ripped it out, stuck it on a plate and served it up to the world.’ Ed couldn’t wait to share his discovery with his friends. Unfortunately the Clifford brothers thought it was ‘shit’ so Rusty was hastily disbanded due to artistic differences. The falling-out was an early indication to Ed that he was better off doing it all himself.

Damien was born in Dublin and brought up in the thriving town of Celbridge, about fourteen miles from the city. He was already in his late twenties when he released the album that made his name internationally. He had spent his first years in music as part of a rock group called Juniper, which he had formed with friends from secondary school. Eventually, he became disenchanted with the musical compromises he felt he was making to please their record company. He became his own man and travelled around Europe busking, eventually settling in Tuscany where he wrote many of the songs for O.

His first solo composition to be released as a single was the agonisingly beautiful ‘The Blower’s Daughter’, which highlighted his ability to share his emotions with the listener. Ed was entranced by Damien’s ability to sing with such passion and share his private and innermost feelings with the world. Some of the songs were inspired by his relationship with the singer Lisa Hannigan, who provided fragile, haunting vocals alongside Damien on many of the tracks. She was his muse, they worked well together and he loved her taste.

Commercially, Damien has yet to top O. The Irish Independent described the album as ‘one of the great Irish cultural success stories of the decade’. Sadly, Damien and Lisa would later split acrimoniously. The notoriously private singer heartbreakingly told the Irish music site Hot Press, ‘I would give away all the music success, all the songs and the whole experience to still have Lisa in my life.’

Ed had soon learned to play all these poignant songs but he had to wait to see Damien in concert for the first time. That changed in 2004, during the late summer holidays in Ireland. Ed’s cousin Laura told him that Damien was playing a low-key gig for under-eighteens at Whelan’s in Dublin where she lived. The pub in Wexford Street was widely recognised as the original music venue in the city and was internationally famous for the quality of the acts that had performed there and as a popular location for television and films.

Laura and Ed were able to get tickets that stipulated, ‘All adults must be accompanied by an under-18’. The adult, as ever, was John Sheeran. The gig would prove to be highly significant for Ed, one of the most important evenings of his life so far. For the first time he saw a solitary singer captivate an audience by performing his own songs: ‘He holds them in the palm of his hands with just songs he has written on his own with a guitar.’ Ed stood at the front, unbothered at being surrounded mainly by winsome teenage girls.

Afterwards, John took his two charges into the front bar area where Ed, who barely looked his then age of thirteen, had his first experience of a meet-and-greet where an artist takes the trouble to chat, sign autographs and pose for pictures with members of the audience. This interaction was an essential part of the whole experience of small gigs in pubs and a lead that Ed would follow diligently in the future.

He was lucky in that he was standing next to Damien’s cellist, Vyvienne Long, who asked him, ‘Can you watch my cello for a bit?’ He dutifully guarded the instrument for twenty minutes until she reappeared, this time with Damien and the rest of the band. Ed told Lisa Hannigan he hoped to make a recording soon and she sweetly gave him an address so that he could send her a CD when it was finished. Ed, in a bright yellow T-shirt, had his picture taken with Damien, who was wearing a red hoodie, the same item of clothing that would be associated with Ed when he first started gigging. While not exactly scruffy, Damien was clearly an artist unbothered by image and the need to look like a star every minute of the day.

When he met Damien, Ed thought he was very cool: ‘If he had been a dick, I’d probably be working in a supermarket.’ He would later admit that it was life-changing – at that moment, he decided that he, too, was going to write songs like Damien. He was not a teenager who dreamed of doing something: he would go and do it. He would be a singer–songwriter, and one day he would appear at Whelan’s with just a guitar. Like Damien, he was destined to write many songs that would never see the light of day. Both were constantly creative.

Fortunately, his cousin Laura shared his enthusiasm. Whenever they got together, Ed would say, ‘I’ll be Damien, you be Lisa,’ and they would record all the songs on O, which Ed knew backwards and forwards, in the garden shed at her family’s house in Tuam, County Galway. Ed was lucky to have two older cousins, Jethro and Laura, who were inspired by the music he loved.

Back in Framlingham for his next lesson with Keith, he couldn’t wait to tell his guitar mentor that he had seen Damien Rice and he, too, was going to be a singer–songwriter. First, though, he needed to find an old guitar. Damien played one from the Lowden guitar factory in Ireland, which looked the worse for wear but had a beautiful sound that filled the room. Keith recalls, ‘I turned up one day as usual and he said to me straight away, “Have you got an old acoustic guitar? I don’t want a new one. I want an old, battered, characterful acoustic guitar.” So I told him I did have one actually, a Dallas model I’d bought for my wife Sally twenty-five years or so before. We didn’t use it much anymore so I sold it to him. He wanted to play “Cannonball”. And he started generally to get more into acoustic music.’ Ed was thrilled to have the instrument as it meant he could practise playing Damien’s music and make it sound more authentic. He probably knew the songs better than anyone other than the artist himself. That was part of his extraordinary gift. He was a sponge who could soak up a piece of music, then improvise and experiment to turn it into something entirely new and unique to him.

An additional attraction of O was that each song seemed to build slowly from an initial guitar riff and blossom into an emotional climax – something Ed aspired to achieve with his songs from the beginning.

For Christmas 2004, Ed’s main present was a Boss Digital Recording Studio, a home studio for his bedroom. He immediately threw himself into recording his first album. He was determined to finish it in the holidays so it would be ready in time for the next term at Thomas Mills. He started work on Boxing Day 2004, and had completed fourteen songs twenty-four days later on 19 January 2005. Although he was proud and excited at the time, he now keeps Spinning Man away from the public. It is an amazing achievement for a thirteen-year-old, but it sounds nothing like the Ed Sheeran songs we know today.

For starters it’s a rock album, bearing far more of the influence of Green Day, Guns N’ Roses and Oasis than the acoustic lyricism of Damien Rice. He seems to have taken the power punk of Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’, combined it with the more traditional rock of ‘Sweet Child of Mine’, and thrown in a dash of ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’.

He had been building up his collection of guitars and wanted to play his best one on the album. He had acquired a striking B. C. Rich rock guitar during his Rusty days. Slash and Axl Rose played B. C. Rich models onstage. You couldn’t miss Ed’s, which was purple with gold hardware. Keith was impressed: ‘It was a really serious guitar with a beautiful bird’s-eye maple neck.’

Spinning Man featured fourteen tracks and fifty minutes of music. The album starts with a drum intro and a dirty guitar riff. This is ‘Typical Average’, one of the first songs Ed wrote. Lyrically, it’s not a high point, repeating, ‘I’m a typically average teen, if you know what I mean’, but it does possess a strangely catchy quality, even if the vocal is distinctly shaky.

The second track, ‘Misery’, contains another powerful rock solo, setting the tone for the guitar work on the complete album. His first rap is ‘On My Mind’, which seems to be directed at an unnamed girlfriend and, while it lacks the power of his later, more sophisticated work, it sounds more like Ed than his Green Day numbers. And it was the first Ed Sheeran composition to contain the phrase ‘fuck off’.

Even more interesting is ‘No More War’, which is a protest song about the futility of war. The older Ed would deliberately avoid writing strong political statements so this is a rare song that proclaims, ‘Put down your guns because it’s not for fun’. ‘Moody Ballad of Ed’ is back in ‘Typical Average’ territory and is probably even shakier vocally as he drifts in and out of tune. He sounds a little better on a slower number, ‘Addicted’, but ‘Butterfly’ and ‘Concord’ are more representative of what is basically a rock album. The last consists of crashing chords and a power solo that would have done Deep Purple or Jeff Beck proud circa 1970. There’s more of that on ‘Crazy’, which has an even longer head-banging guitar solo, and ‘Broken’, which seems to reference ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, a classic Cream track that featured Eric Clapton.

That rock sound continued on ‘Celebrity’ and ‘Sleep’, which must have been a precious commodity in the Sheeran household, with Ed on electric guitar in one room and Matthew on violin in another. ‘Mindless’ was a post-punk homage to Kentucky Fried Chicken before the album ended on a high note with ‘I Love You’, which was probably the closest track to future Ed Sheeran. The problem with his slower songs was that they exposed more obviously his vocal limitations at the time. As every musician knows, recording the album is only the start of the process. He needed a title and decided to call it Spinning Man after a late work by the great surrealist Salvador Dalí. John Sheeran had hung a print on a wall at the house so Ed was very familiar with it and the title seemed perfect for a spinning CD.

To add to the professional feel of the project, Ed enlisted his parents to help produce a proper CD, complete with case and sleeve notes, which proudly declared that all the material was copyright Ed Sheeran and Sheeran Lock Ltd. He asked Alison Newell, a local artist and family friend, to design the cover. She featured his Faith guitar to one side of a black background. Some delicate white spirals, shaped like a prawn, make simple embroidery. The back featured a photograph taken by his father of Ed playing the same guitar on the streets of Galway the previous summer, his first venture into busking. In his thanks, Ed included ‘all those who put money into my guitar case’.

He also thanked his cousins Laura and Jethro, his brother Matthew and all Sheerans and all Locks. There are thanks, too, for Mums and Dabs, his pet names for his mother and father since he was a toddler. Among the friends he acknowledges, he mentions Claire – the inspiration for some of the songs, including ‘I Love You’. According to Ed, they had a very innocent hand-holding friendship that was over by the time he recorded the album, although he was upset when they broke up.

For his musical inspiration, Ed cites Damien Rice, Eric Clapton and ‘Jimmy H’ (presumably Jimi Hendrix) but there is sketchy evidence of their influence on the album. There’s something of Hendrix and Clapton but Spinning Man bears no resemblance to Damien Rice, who really doesn’t do solos, big riffs or long instrumentals on an electric guitar. At thirteen, Ed was still searching for his own sound and his first album was really a hangover from his schoolboy band Rusty. He is, though, too modest about the achievement.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Spinning Man is its maturity, best exemplified by his personal message on the sleeve notes: ‘Songwriting and playing the guitar are like having a direct line to my thoughts and feelings. Everyone has strong feelings whatever their age. We can all feel love, joy, longing, pain and hate.’ His mother may have used her editing skills to help but it clearly reveals Ed’s early self-awareness.

He sent the CD to Lisa Hannigan but wished he had waited when he didn’t get a response. The reaction from those he played it to in Framlingham was very encouraging. Nobody wanted him to lose heart by being over-critical of his first recordings, particularly his mother and father. They agreed that if he wanted to make money out of his music, it had to be recorded to a higher standard than he could achieve in his bedroom. He also needed to work on his singing.

When his mum and dad realised how seriously Ed was taking his music, they asked Keith, who had been a television and radio producer, if he could find a local studio to record some of the songs to a more professional standard: ‘John said to me, “Give him some experience in a studio.”’ John was more interested in Ed spending time in a proper studio than in the finished product.

They found the ideal location just a few miles away in the town of Leiston at the renowned Summerhill School, the progressive educational facility founded by A. S. Neill. His grandson Henry Readhead ran the studio there mainly for the school but said that Ed could come with Keith for a session in March 2005.

Keith agreed to waive his fee as producer for the day in return for an hour or two in which John would show him how to improve his business online and make better connections for his own music and performance. John taught him how to build a network of links so that one gig would lead to another. Imogen told him, ‘It’s the currency of the day.’ That system of barter had served Sheeran Lock well and would continue to be useful to Ed as he sought to promote his work.

For The Orange Room, named in honour of his bedroom, they chose Ed’s five favourite tracks from Spinning Room and put them in a different order: ‘Moody Ballad of Ed’ followed by ‘Misery’, ‘Typical Average’, ‘Addicted’, finishing again with ‘I Love You’.

The most striking improvement from Spinning Man was the use of acoustic guitar and, generally, a better vocal, but his attempt at falsetto on ‘Addicted’ needed plenty of work. Occasionally, there are hints of the later Ed Sheeran. Keith remembers doing his best to convince Ed that he needed to tune his guitar all the time because it would show up on an edit even if it was just slightly out of tune: ‘He was a little bit lazy about it.’

Ed had turned fourteen and was beginning to stick up for himself musically. When Keith hinted that a vocal was just a little bit out of tune and they should go back and do it again, Ed was quite clear: ‘I like that. I want to keep that as it is.’ Henry acted as sound engineer and one of his protégées, Megumi Miyoshi, who was sixteen and a promising singer, helped with mixing and some backing vocals.

The Orange Room clearly illustrates the growing influence of Damien Rice, although ‘Typical Average’ still sounds like Green Day jamming after a heavy night out and is not remotely related to anything from O.

Ed saved up and pooled all his resources to have a thousand CDs produced, which was quite optimistic. He proudly took them to school and offered them round for a fiver. Most of them sat around in boxes at home, where they remained until he became famous. Then he had to ban his mum from selling either The Orange Room or Spinning Man.

In an interview on The Jonathan Ross Show in December 2014, Ed played a short segment of a song from his phone. It was ‘Addicted’ and sounded very average. His guitar work was good but not the vocal, which had cats running for cover. In Ed’s defence, his vocal problems were mainly because his voice had yet to break so he struggled with intonation. But as Ed accurately commented, ‘You have to learn and really practise.’

5
The Loopmeister

One evening Keith and Sally Krykant were among a group of friends invited round to John and Imogen’s house for dinner. When they arrived, Preston Reed was already sitting at the dining table. Anyone taking an interest in guitar would have known about him, a striking figure who featured often in the serious music press talking about his unique playing style.

Ed had noticed in a guitar magazine that the virtuoso player was offering places on a summer-school venture at his home in Scotland. He would be teaching his percussive method, known in the business as ‘tapping’, to a few chosen students during the summer holidays. Ed set about convincing his parents that the workshop was vital to his development as a musician.

Preston, it transpired, was playing a gig locally and the Sheerans went along. Instead of grabbing a quick autograph, they invited him to stay at the house; he accepted. Keith was particularly impressed: ‘This guy is a world-class international player, who had developed his own style of playing. It was completely different to just changing the tuning.’

Presumably John and Imogen made a deal involving the ‘currency of the day’ because, during the next summer holidays, Ed set off with his father on a train to Girvan on the Ayrshire coast for a five-day summer workshop. Preston had moved to this beautiful part of Scotland, fifty miles south of Glasgow, from his home in Minneapolis in 2001.

This was not a holiday for Ed, although he and his father managed to fit in a boat trip to Ailsa Craig, the famous granite island in the Firth of Clyde. Preston was impressed by Ed’s work ethic, unusual in one so young: ‘He was intelligent and quick; he very quickly picked up the things he had come up to learn. Even at fourteen, you could tell he had a real determination and ambition.’

The trip was made more memorable for Ed by the presence of the only other student on the trip, an amazing guitar player from Oklahoma called Jocelyn Celaya, who would develop a strong following in subsequent years as Radical Classical. Jocelyn had arrived with her boyfriend, who told everyone that he used to be a gangster in Mexico. Ed, who was enthusiastic about gangsta rap at the time, couldn’t believe he was face to face with a real one and bombarded him with questions. On the last night, everyone got together for a party and Preston played some of his own compositions including ‘Fat Boy’, ‘Metal’ and ‘Ladies Night’. Ed entertained everyone by making up rap lyrics to accompany the music. ‘He just rattled it off,’ recalled Preston. ‘It was quite funny and impressive as well.’

On his return to Framlingham, Ed was not about to become the second Preston Reed but the interlude helped him view the acoustic guitar as more than just a stringed instrument. Preston’s technical innovations showed him ‘the music you could make using the guitar as a source of sounds’. Ed absorbed that lesson from his trip to Scotland and would use it in his own way when he was introduced to an even more important character in his development as a performer.

But, first, he had to go back to school. Ed was fortunate in that it wasn’t just his mum and dad who recognised he had a special talent and could make something of his music. The director of music at Thomas Mills, Richard Hanley, realised early on that the teenager was different from his other students and needed a more thoughtful approach. Richard specialised in classical music and was more closely involved with teaching Matthew, but he followed the headmaster’s lead and gave all his students the opportunity to flourish. That was the key for Ed, who has always acknowledged the debt he owes his school.

At first, Richard was hoping to persuade Ed to follow his brother and join the school orchestra, but soon discovered he was persevering with the cello on sufferance. Ed was relieved to give it up and concentrate on the guitar. He could often be found in one of the small practice rooms in the music department working on a new song. Richard explains, ‘I think the school gave him the chance to be creative, to have the time and space to play and compose and perform.’ His passion for his music was all-consuming.

Ed was never going to match Matthew’s academic dedication. Even Imogen acknowledged that her younger son was not an exam person and struggled to apply himself to read music properly. In many ways, though, Matthew was the more eccentric of the two talented brothers. Richard acknowledges that Matthew was very creative as well as academic: ‘He had some quite avant-garde ideas.’ One Easter he composed ‘Broken Pavements’ for the school concert at St Michael’s: ‘It was a very atmospheric piece. I can still remember the sunlight pouring through the great east window at the church illuminating the players. It was a magical moment.’

As teenagers, the two Sheeran boys were totally different. They had their own groups of friends and just did their own thing. For a time, Keith Krykant taught Matthew as well: ‘He particularly wanted to know about jazz improvisations. He was very mathematical in his music and was very interested in theory. He wanted to know how the notes added up mathematically to give a certain chord.

‘He wanted to consolidate some of the things he was doing on the piano and understand how they related to the guitar. He used to compose on a computer and had a much more mechanical approach to that than Ed, who was more interested in getting a song out with a rhythm and a melody.’ In his own way, Matthew was just as ambitious as Ed: he wanted to establish himself as a classical composer. The two boys never fell out but, as Keith remembers with a smile, ‘They never used to speak to each other in the house.’

Keith was still trying to teach Ed some music theory but he was fighting a losing battle. Every week he would arrive at the house with a careful plan for the lesson with ‘Edward’ – as he always called him, just as his parents did. He explains, ‘I would decide that we would take a piece of music – pure music notation – and I would explain to him how we would get that on to a guitar. It is quite tedious. And we maybe would get five minutes into the theory and he wasn’t really interested in it. He would suddenly say, “Oh, Keith, do you want to hear a song that I wrote last night at one o’clock in the morning?” And I would say, “OK.” So he would start playing this song. And ask me, you know, “What do you think of this?” And I might suggest that he put something extra in just to bridge the chords – harmony, if you like. And if he liked it, he would light up and go, “Wow, that really works now. Keith, you’re a genius!”’

Ed was showing great maturity for his age in what he was listening to and what he wanted to play. His father’s taste had rubbed off on him. He still wanted to enjoy his favourite hip-hop artists but, post Damien Rice, he was developing more interest in singer–songwriters such as Ray LaMontagne, whose debut album, Trouble, in 2004, had showcased his distinctive vocal style, as well as all-time greats, including Paul Simon. He spent an entire lesson with Keith learning how to play the famous Simon and Garfunkel hit ‘Sound of Silence’.

‘You could see that he liked songs with strong melodies,’ observes Keith. ‘Most of the kids at the time were listening to The X Factor, which had just started, and following that, but he was appreciating other things.’

Another of Ed’s characteristics that served him well as a teenager was his lack of fear. He was appreciative but not overawed by the occasion. He took meeting Preston Reed in his stride. On another memorable occasion John and Imogen had arranged a dinner party where the guests included the local vicar. Keith and his wife were there: ‘Edward sang a ballad in the front room in front of the vicar and everybody else in a very, very confident and emotional way. It was very mature because he was only fourteen. It was extraordinary. Most of the children I teach won’t ever sing or play in front of their mum and dad. In fact they will play in front of anyone else but their mum and dad. But his mum and dad were there and he sang this song and completely held the audience – except the vicar, who can’t stand guitar music.’

The priest might not have appreciated being in the audience for a concert at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in January 2006. The modest Sunday-night gig would change the course of Ed’s life as a performer. He and his dad had driven to London to see Nizlopi, an unconventional duo who had just had a number-one hit with their ‘JCB Song’. He was transfixed, though, by the opening act, an Irish singer–songwriter called Gary Dunne.

Gary used a Boss Loop Station and it was the first time Ed had witnessed how exciting that could be live. Gary built a song that filled the popular venue even though he was alone. He performed five numbers finishing with his ‘Amerikan Folk Song’, which Ed singled out as the track that had made him realise looping was the way forward for him to create his own individual sound. The musician plays a few bars, then has the loop station play it back while he lays another set of chords over the top. This can be done multiple times building layers of sound. In other words, you become your own band.

Gary did his best at performing the often thankless task of being a supporting act when the audience were standing around chatting and having a pint. He made a point of plugging his album, Twenty Twenty Fiction, which was on sale at the merchandise desk in the foyer. He also announced that he did house concerts, if anyone was interested.

Ed couldn’t stop talking to his dad about the loop pedal so John wrote to Gary saying, ‘My son absolutely loved what you did,’ and inviting him to Framlingham for Ed’s fifteenth-birthday party in a few weeks’ time.

‘House concerts’ were part of Gary’s musical world. They enabled him to earn extra pennies when he was between tours, further spread the word about his music and hopefully sell some CDs. He quoted John his standard deal at the time: ‘It was accommodation, a few hundred quid and a six-pack of Guinness. They were simple times.’

The week before his birthday, there was a tragic turn of events. One of his school friends, Stuart Dines, was killed in an horrific coach crash in Germany. Stuart, who was three months younger than Ed, was one of a group of pupils from Thomas Mills on a half-term trip to the Austrian ski resort of Fugen. On the autobahn near Cologne, the double-decker coach got a puncture and had to pull over onto the hard shoulder. A lorry carrying metal rods careered into the stationary vehicle.

Stuart was killed when a piece of metal from the lorry smashed through one of the coach windows.

Ed was not on the trip, but he knew Stuart well and they had been round to each other’s houses. Stuart lived in the nearby town of Woodbridge and his elder brother and sister went to school there. His parents, however, chose Thomas Mills for Stuart because he had ADHD and they felt it would better suit their son. That proved to be the case and, just like Ed, he was a happy and popular classmate and not at all an outsider. His proud father Robert recalls, ‘Stuart was very outgoing and if anyone was a bit shy, they could latch on to Stuart. He would talk to anybody. He had so much energy.’ He also shared Ed’s gift of being able to memorise complicated lyrics, which would leave his father wondering why he couldn’t do the same with his schoolwork.

The school flag was at half mast when everyone returned after half-term. The headmaster at the time, Colin Hirst, who had faced the difficult task of telling Stuart’s parents what had happened, said that the children were ‘devastated and shocked’.

Stuart’s father Robert remembers, ‘Ed was very, very upset, like a lot of the children.’

Ed had to come to terms with the death of someone he saw practically every day. He resolved to write a song about his feelings. He composed, he said, ‘whilst I got round to actually accepting it.’

The song that he eventually finished is a breathtakingly beautiful tribute to his friend called ‘We Are’. He completed it in time for Stuart’s funeral at Woodbridge Methodist Church and the CD recording was played during the service along with some of Stuart’s favourite Queen records. So many people wanted to pay their respects that they filled the church and the hall next door, into which they piped the music so that everyone could hear it. Afterwards Ed presented Robert, and Stuart’s mother Jackie, with a signed copy of the CD. ‘It is a lovely song,’ observes Robert.

Before the funeral, Ed’s fifteenth birthday party was a chance to cheer himself up, as well as his friends. Ed went to a lot of trouble setting up a PA system in the spacious living room at home and he and his dad drove off to Ipswich Station to collect Gary. This was the first time they had met him. Gary played a hugely appreciated set of his songs to ‘Ed and all his teenage buddies, who told me they loved the show’.

He stayed up late talking with John and Ed and a few of his mates. They reminisced about Ireland. Gary is from Portlaoise, fifty miles west of Dublin. His father, also called John, ran a folk club at Kavanagh’s pub, which hosted many of the musicians Ed most admired, including Andy Irvine, an original member of Planxty. Gary still has the picture of Andy, his father and a teenage Ed taken there.

Most of the country had seen a loop pedal for the first time when the Scottish singer–songwriter KT Tunstall used one to mesmerising effect on a 2004 edition of Later … with Jools Holland. She stole the show when she created a one-woman-band effect for her song ‘Black Horse and the Cherry Tree’. But Gary had first become interested in looping two years earlier when he had played at the Lobby Bar, a music pub in Cork. He was on a bill that included the acclaimed American singer–songwriter Joseph Arthur and could scarcely believe Joseph wasn’t using a backing track. Gary had marvelled at how he could make all those sounds live through a loop station. The music business is full of such chance connections. That gig in a tiny bar in Cork would lead indirectly to one of the most important ingredients in the development of the Ed Sheeran sound.

By coincidence both Gary Dunne and Damien Rice had supported Joseph Arthur at one time. Ed was thrilled to hear that Gary had also opened for Damien Rice on tour and told him about the gig at Whelan’s he had been to with his cousin Laura. Gary observes, ‘He was a hardcore Damien Rice fan back then.’

Gary found meeting the Sheeran family a ‘very warm and enjoyable’ experience: ‘In the morning Imogen cooked a big, beautiful fry-up and we went for a walk near by.’ Before he left Framlingham, Gary went through the process of looping with Ed. He showed him the Boss RC20 model he used and recommended that Ed try it. It was a simple but rugged piece of equipment that could survive being hauled around by an impatient teenager.

Ed went straight out and bought one, which cost roughly £250. Looping was not a technique you could learn overnight and it took him well over two years of constant practice to feel that he had finally mastered the pedal – he soon found that one mistake could throw a whole song out of synch. The new skill, however, did allow him to improve ‘We Are’ and turn it into a multi-layered ballad, recognisable as the one he would perform many times in the future.

Gary was happy to offer advice by phone or email and they remained on very good terms. It was a two-way street: Ed had videoed Gary’s gig at his house, chopped it into individual songs and put the entire thing on Gary’s Myspace page.

Ed was of the generation that appreciated the power of a good live video online. Gary observes, ‘I was ten years older and just didn’t understand at the time. He was so digital savvy and web savvy in a way that I wasn’t and I wasn’t really interested in. I remember him telling me, “You’ve got to get out there.” He kind of ran my Myspace for six months.’

Gary and Ed never composed together. He explains, ‘Our connection isn’t about songs. It’s about live looping. I suppose I passed on a craft to him, a way of making music. Of course, he has since evolved massively but the craft remains the same. He is just using it in a much more complex way than I ever did.

‘Looping is like playing a different instrument. It’s not just getting onstage with a guitar and singing a song. It’s getting onstage with your voice and your guitar and creating a sound. You are using a different canvas.’

Gary is proud of his part in Ed’s journey to global success: ‘When I sit in an audience of 80,000 people and I see Ed do his thing with an acoustic guitar and a loop station, I can hear a little DNA of where he and I connected. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.’

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