When Ed Sheeran wakes up in the morning he checks his sales figures on a laptop. Why is he not selling as many albums in France as he does in Germany? Who should he call about it? Does he need to do a TV show or a gig there? “All the biggest people in the world know about this and if they deny it they are lying,” he says. “If they’re massive. At Beyoncé’s level or Jay Z’s or Taylor’s – someone who’s massive – every one of us cares about sales and figures.”
“Us” is the most important word in that statement.
Sheeran has been playing the numbers game since the very beginning; it’s just that the numbers keep getting bigger. His last album, x, has been streamed over 3.4 billion times (yes, billion) and sold 14 million copies. His biggest hit, 2014’s “Thinking Out Loud”, has been streamed 764m times and sold 2m here and more than 4m in the US. His videos have been watched 3.5bn times on YouTube.
“I still wear skater hoodie,s jeans and skater shoes,” he says, referring to his enduringly steadfast lack of styling, for which he was named GQ’s Worst-Dressed Manin 2013. “I haven’t changed.” He’s right. It’s the world that has changed, or rather it has bent to his will.
Youth is wasted on the young, but not on the young Ed Sheeran. Twelve years ago, the prototype, this distillation of pure teenage vulnerability and defiance, wrote and recorded his first five-track EP. There has never been a wannabe pop superstar who’s planned so far ahead from day one. Sheeran has been plotting since he was 13; he’s 25 now and as unjaded and unrelenting as ever. “It’s a 15-record plan,” he tells me. “The first five EPs then the first album + [Plus], then x [Multiply] and now ÷ [Divide]. There’ll be two more in this series of five albums and then five more after that,” which on current form will take him and us to about 2030. Even Stalin only had five-year plans.
We meet at Rocket Music – in and out of which the management firm’s tracksuited boss, Sir Elton John, shuffles like a mother hen – and sit beside the mixing desk in the bowels of its west London studio. There is an immediate warmth and openness to Sheeran, but it’s encased in unmistakable steel. There is also a scar on his face, the deep ridge cut into his cheek by Princess Beatrice at 4am as part of some faux knighting ceremony after a particularly heavy November drinking session in Windsor. He invites me to touch it and I reach across in the half-light like Doubting Thomas prodding Jesus. “It didn’t hurt and I’ve got a really cool story out of it,” he says, very unlike Jesus. “I like the way it looks in the pictures.”
Sheeran’s path to this point – with a third album out next month and the full expectation of global domination, plus friendship with Taylor Swift, Hollywood royalty and actual royalty – was cleared by a series of seemingly serendipitous events that suggest either destiny or outrageous luck. Of course, a third explanation is the most plausible. He put the hours in. He never gave up. He put his talent on the line every night, when others faded and failed. Sheeran is a living embodiment of Arnold Palmer’s ironic sporting truism: “The more I practise, the luckier I get.” Keeping a watchful eye on his sales is merely a function of his obsession with winning, a word he uses over and over again.
Music is his creative outlet, but once it’s done he turns CEO. It’s as if he has his own Berry Gordy living inside his head. I picture him in the lair of a Bond villain, monitoring a bank of screens as information pours in from territories around the word. He assures me the truth is a little more prosaic. “I have a data sheet emailed to me every week. What’s the problem with doing it? It’s so fun. You’re not going to have success by working just for the love of it. Looking at a sales sheet you can see where you need to do that work. My benchmark for the second album was Coldplay. This album it’s Springsteen. I’m obsessed with how his career spans constantly doing stadiums and putting out work that is centre but left of centre. I bet he cared about stats and figures as well.”
A collaborator of Swift, Pharrell Williams and Harry Styles, a songwriter for Justin Bieber, One Direction, The X Factor and many more to follow, Sheeran is the de facto voice of a generation, with music that reflects his personality and the defining characteristics of his audience. However amorphous any era may be, however problematic the definition of any generation is, the recurring qualities of Sheeran’s music correspond with those that his own generation, the millennials, most value: authenticity, realness, earnestness, sincerity. Millennials also live in a world of economic insecurity, something that chimes with Sheeran’s compulsion. “I do have numerical targets,” he says. “I did 14 million of x and I want to do 20 million of ÷. I know music isn’t about competition, and you’ll get old rockers saying, ‘Why does he care about numbers and figures?’ but I’ve made my album. I love my album. It’s the best album I could have made – it’s the best creative thing – so why not want to win? Why not want to sell 20 million?”
Sheeran’s trick is to be both an everyman and a man apart. He is, to his fans, just like them, but with the talent of Van Morrison and a determination of a honey badger. Where does this intensity come from? It’s easy to imagine some repressed wrong that keeps the fire raging. He speaks without artifice or pretension about his life, passions and success, only occasionally swerving close to self-congratulation at the mention of his best-known associates. Why has he always felt the need to compete and to justify that competition by “winning”?
“It’s because I never won anything ever. As a kid… That shit never leaves you. Look at Taylor; she’s exactly like me,” he says, with the authority of a man who has discussed it with the woman herself. “Taylor is someone who was put down for the whole of her teenage years and now she’s got the opportunity to win and she’s constantly winning.” Whenever he mentions Swift his smile broadens a little.
As if to demonstrate their simpatico relationship, last year Swift, who has toured with Sheeran, celebrated her friend’s 25th birthday by recalling the day he played her the Grammy-winning “Thinking Out Loud” for the first time. “I lived for the moments he would burst into my dressing room with a new song to play me,” she said. “It happened so often that it became normal, and I don’t think he ever knew how much it meant to me that he wanted me to hear his songs first. I don’t think he ever knew how inspired I was by his drive and passion to constantly create new art.”
Before I could finish asking him who he felt he was in competition with he blurted out the name “Adele”. I paused but he rolled on without inhibition. “Adele is the one person who’s sold more records than me in the past ten years. She’s the only person I need to sell more records than. That’s a big f***ing feat because her last album sold 20 million. But if I don’t set her as the benchmark then I’m selling myself short.” That is something nobody could ever say about him. “I’m not in competition [creatively] because we all sit in our own lanes, but once the creative product is out there is a race to the finish line.”
It took almost a decade of work before Ed Sheeran would countenance a break. Last year, for the first time since he picked up an acoustic guitar, he finally paused to draw breath, abandoning his phone and social media. He wanted to spend some money at last – to go where he wanted, when he wanted, without a budget. He spent a month and half in Japan travelling from north to south, rented a Mini and drove along the west coast of Australia and did a bungee jump in New Zealand. “Then I went to Ghana, then Iceland – but I put my foot in a boiling geyser and melted the skin off my foot. I had to get choppered out from the side of a volcano. I missed the Northern Lights because I was in hospital.” He may be a global star, but you suspect there is a little bit of him that will forever be a doofus.
Now he is ready to work again, to welcome back the animus that has possessed him since his father convinced him to take music seriously. At 13 and 14 he spent a lot of time out of the family house in Framlingham, Suffolk. John Sheeran – who the singer references often in his lyrics, usually in reverential terms, but also as one of the sources of his fist-clenching determination – was the London-born son of Irish immigrants and a lecturer and art curator, who ran an art consultancy with Ed’s mother, Imogen, during the Nineties. “My dad’s calmed down a lot but when I was not applying myself at school he was strict with me and always having a big go at me for not working hard,” he says. His elder brother, Matthew, was, it seems, everything Ed was not. He knew what he wanted to do, he completed university and is now a classical composer.
Primary school had been hard: a preppy, sporty, competitive private school that gave him his first taste of life as an outsider. He was already playing the guitar and singing in a choir. “The other kids had a lot of money. I didn’t enjoy it. I was quite a weird-looking kid and a weird kid in general. I was never diagnosed but everyone is convinced I have ADD. The energy always comes from wanting to move on to the next thing. I wish I’d known that in school because you can say that and get away with shit.” His state secondary school left him cold, too, but at least he had his friends (with whom he still goes on holiday twice a year). He says he just hung around “letting off fireworks and doing what 13-year-olds do”. As with so many sons, it was the father who performed the formative role, with Ed both wanting to impress and wanting to prove him wrong – a hero and rock to push against. Perhaps the most important scene of this drama was Ed and John’s trip to see the singer-songwriter Damien Rice in Ireland in 2002. Rice remains, for Sheeran, the force who overcame the inertia. He listened to little else during his mid-teens and Rice was his greatest inspiration. “Every single hero of mine has got in touch with me bar Damien Rice, who I’ve never heard from, even though I’ve name-dropped him in several songs.”
Sheeran’s father finally tired of his rudderless younger son and told him that since the only thing Ed really liked was music, he should take that seriously. “My dad took the initiative.” He was driven to gigs every week, from Bob Dylan to Plan B, in the hope he would find his calling. “I was a typical teenager,” he says. “Angry at life but with no reason to be. I had regular angst. But I look back and think it was a good time. As a teenager my first dream was to make enough money from music to pay the rent and sell 100 CDs.”
By 16, his father’s plan had worked. Sheeran was a young musician who felt like any day in which he did not practise, perform or write a song was a day wasted. So from then until last year he didn’t take a day off. “I had to fill the day with something. It comes from my dad thinking I was lazy and wanting to prove a point.”
In 2008, he dropped out of school and moved to London, beginning an odyssey of hustling for gigs, attention and somewhere to spend the night (the great recurring theme of his life). He busked and slept rough – on the Circle Line and under an arch near Buckingham Palace – etching the Sheeran mythology that made his coming success seem so startling and so well-deserved. This self-imposed slumming reached a satisfying conclusion when he performed at the Queen’s 2012 Diamond Jubilee Concert in view of the heating duct on The Mall he had once called home for a night. In 2009 he flirted with the Academy Of Contemporary Music in Guildford – he could justifiably argue that he had more to teach them than they him – and became a familiar face on London’s gigging circuit, attracting attention from hip hop and grime acts who were drawn to a style that lent itself to theirs, cementing this relationship in February 2010 when Jamal Edwards invited him to perform on his grime-based YouTube channel, SB.TV. “Even with his rapping he can execute it well,” Stormzy, Britain’s biggest grime star, who was also discovered by Edwards, tells GQ. “He’s cold with it. When Ed raps it’s Ed. It’s not some carbon copy. It’s his truth. It’s Ed spitting. He’s a music student. There’s nothing out of his remit.”
The key to his adventures in lo-fi, Sheeran tells me, was not having a place to live. “I was always out searching for a gig to do or a session to be in or a sofa to sleep on. So I ended up mixing with a lot of people in a short space of time. There’s no drive to go out and do something if you have a home to go to. Last night, I had a home to go to and I ate shepherd’s pie and watched The Blacklist with my girlfriend. Back then, even if I had somewhere to stay, I’d want to go to a gig or a session or do a hook for a rapper. I couldn’t relax.”
In April 2010 Sheeran flew to Los Angeles on the strength of a single contact. He did that gig and began searching for more, travelling to any venue or promoter’s house he could to ask for the chance to play. One day he went to the Key Club. In his own words, “I looked f***ing weird. I was boozing and I was very chubby with wild hair. It was an all-black R&B night and all the people looked at me like ‘Get outta here, kid’ but they let me play.” In the audience that night was Jamie Foxx’s manager, who invited him onto the Oscar winner’s radio show, then to play at his club night, after which Foxx asked Sheeran to crash at his house. “I had $50 and the cab fare to his place was $500, so they had to pay it.” This is the kind of thing that always happens to Ed Sheeran.
It came at just the right moment. He had been turned away by a string of labels for a second time and he needed a sign. Then he put out his breakthrough single, “The A Team”, and waited for the next defining moment. That arrived at a Bruno Mars gig at the Notting Hill Arts Club. Sheeran got chatting to a man who invited him back to crash at his place and to play songs to his girlfriend, who was also a songwriter. She turned out to be Miranda Cooper, who had written a string of hits for Girls Aloud and Sugababes. “The next morning my manager rang me up and said Ed Howard really likes your new songs and I said, ‘Who’s Ed Howard?’ and he said, ‘He’s the head of A&R at Asylum Records’ and I said, ‘Have I met him?” and he said, ‘Yeah, you stayed at his house last night.’” When the labels came crawling back he went with the man who had offered him somewhere to stay. A random act of kindness, part of a divine plan or just more reward for Sheeran, the dog with a bone. Take your pick. But whatever you believe, three years and two albums later, this pop pocket battleship was a superstar. Now it was time to win some more.
Sheeran’s third album is bolder, brassier and bassier. He began writing it as soon as he had finished his second but, since he is so prolific, he felt able to discard tens of songs as the project evolved. Ever the collaborator, he returned to tried and trusted favourites for support and sparks: producer Benny Blanco, Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid and singer-songwriter Amy Wadge. Recorded in the house in Suffolk he bought to be closer to his parents (he also bought them a house in London to be closer to him) he finished a first version last summer and played it to Rick Rubin, the legendary producer who had contributed so much to x. “He walked out of the house and said, ‘Write more songs,’” admits Sheeran. “I was like, ‘Oh, ow.’ No one was jumping for joy at the label and I thought there must be a reason. So, I looked at it again and scrapped six songs.”
For Sheeran, this mixed reaction had two consequences. Firstly, he needed to make it better. Secondly, if it was better it would be more successful. “It is my vision – but the reason those artists who have a light that shines for five years then disappear is that they don’t listen to other people. I can’t think I know everything. I know how to write a song and put together an album of good songs, but sometimes it’s difficult to tell which songs should or shouldn’t be on an album. But ultimately the album has improved because of it.”
The opener, “Eraser”, is a confrontational declaration of intent, mixing hip hop with a chorus of layered vocals that introduces the album and addresses – in very specific terms – the trials of his life and career and his newly elevated status in the industry. “Perfect”, which he describes as his favourite, is a classic Sheeran ballad about his current girlfriend and old Suffolk stalwart, Cherry Seaborn. It shows his most underestimated weapon, that glacially clear voice, scaffolded with serious lung power and an ability to change tone when it’s required. “Happier” is another standout ballad with his cleverest and most mature lyrics yet. He tells me about a song he had to fight to keep on the album, “Galway Girl”, which mixes his new bigger sound with traditional Irish -musicians from Dublin. It is the perfect demonstration of how his mind works: he admitted that Irish folk music “isn’t the coolest thing”, as his label feared, but told them it that it was going to be “f***ing massive” because there are 400 million people in the world who will say they are Irish even if they aren’t. For Sheeran, there is no conflict between the demands of creativity and commerce. They are, in every way, in perfect harmony.
“Castle On The Hill” is his grand statement, a foot-stomping stadium anthem about his childhood that has the palatial scope of Coldplay with the memory-jogging details of a Springsteen epic. “I love reminiscing,” he says. “I love the idea of looking back at childhood, like The Goonies and Stand By Me. The area in Suffolk where I’m from is so beautiful and my friends are so amazing that I wanted to write a song about it. No one is ever going to sing a song about Suffolk again. It’s another thing that’s so specific. I had Stormzy at my house and we played our new albums to each other and he said, ‘I can really relate to that’ – and he’s from Croydon.”
Stormzy, who like so many of Sheeran’s influential friends is unabashedly affectionate about him, explains why he has such a huge musical reach. “First of all, there is the human side of Ed,” he told me. “He has such an energy and aura. We [grime acts] appreciate that and he appreciates the mentality of grime. He gets it. He’s been influenced by it and done sick collaborations with grime artists from early on. He’s a musical madman: he’s got grime in him, he’s got country, he’s got R&B – and it’s not fake. It’s not like when people latch on to genres to look good. It’s natural for him. It’s not forced.”
By blending the universality of pop, the confessions of a singer-songwriting and the obsessive listing of hip hop, Sheeran has created something perfectly suited to his audience. The subjects are not novel – sex, drinking, youthful indiscretions, awkwardness and falling in and out of love – but he bristles a little at the suggestion that the level of detail is new, that the specificity of his lyrics is so of its time. “I do have a song that mentions Doritos,” he admits. “But that’s the key to the broad appeal. The closer you can get to the truth and being really specific the better. So ‘Don’t’ [a song on x about a complicated situation involving Ellie Goulding and One Direction’s Niall Horan] is a f***ing -specific song and people in Taiwan listen to it and say, ‘I can relate to that.’ They can’t relate to what actually happened [look it up], but they can relate to the emotion. The key to being massive is to write exactly what you feel. Do not tamper with the truth. Just stick it out and people will hear the emotion in a song.
“I need something in my songs that no one has ever heard before. So, when people hear it they say, ‘That’s an Ed song.’ A line like ‘Everybody’s talking about exponential growth’, the label said they didn’t like. But then they asked, ‘How’s the exponential growth song?’ and I said, ‘Exactly!’ That’s how you member it.” In an industry notorious for bandwagon jumping, it’s unsurprising that Sheeran’s success has caused some head-scratching among rival labels. Was he aware of any Sheeran-lite copycats on the scene? “I can’t comment on that, but what I would say is that every single Brits Critics’ Choice was a female until I was successful and since me they’ve been all male. There are a lot of singer–songwriters around now. I’m not the first but there are more than before. I’m very happy for everyone to be in the same race as me, even if they copy every single thing I’ve done. In a 100m sprint to get a No1 album I just know I’m going to win. I don’t care who’s doing what. I just know I’m going to win. I’m going to make sure I come first.”
Last July, Ed Sheeran played unaccompanied to 90,000 people for three nights at Wembley Stadium, a high-wire act captured in the documentary Jumpers For Goalposts. Sir Elton John told him on stage, “You’re the only person in the world who could do this on your own.” Sheeran said he picked the film’s title because his goalposts are always moving, always getting wider and more ambitious. The next target is to play every country’s equivalent of Wembley. But despite his unnerving business sense and the insatiable need to work – to compete and win – he retains the honest charm of an over-sensitive, wide-eyed adolescent, now a maturing artist driven to express what he thinks and feels. “I get out the darkness in my life through a song,” he says. “There’s loads of songs that never get recorded that are just me being in a mood. Instead of sending a long email or having an angry phone call, I write a song and then bin it. It happened on this album. It’s a very good outlet for emotion.
“I’m very happy in a relationship, coming up for 18 months. I’m incredibly settled. The only point I’ve not been in a relationship was February to July 2015. I was touring places like Manila, Shanghai, then did all Australia and went to South America. That was my fun time. Crazy time. Lots of partying. I -definitely got 98 per cent of my -partying in my life done and out of my system in those months.”
In between asking for a pizza to be delivered (“the one with rocket”) and his plans to watch the David Brent film, he mentions being asked out for dinner by Sir Paul McCartney. Then by Sir Mick Jagger. And by Sir Van Morrison. Then by Eric Clapton CBE. If you include the support of his mentor Sir Elton John, he’s become friends with British music’s Round Table. No wonder he wanted to be knighted. He says they all told him, “I like your shit”, which is no doubt the essence of what they said, if not the exact words. Talk of pizza brings him back to the time Russell Crowe made him one for breakfast. Then on to dinner with Robert De Niro. And the cast of Game Of Thrones popping over to his house in Ladbroke Grove for a party last week. Like Sheeran’s music, there is no artifice or pretence to these stories. There’s barely even any glamour. They are just what happened.
“Every once in a while people like Ed pop up who are a special blend of hard-working, business-minded musical genius,” says Stormzy. “Ed’s that different pedigree of artist, who does things bigger and better than his peers. He’s gonna do crazy things, sell out stadiums, have albums in the charts for years. It’s not a fluke for Ed.”
Sheeran delineates between Ed the global brand and Ed who’s one of the boys in Suffolk. “As the brand guy, I am a musician,” he says. “But it doesn’t define me as a person. I want to be remembered for being a good dad and raising my children well.” Fatherhood is likely to be approached with the same assiduity and ferocious commitment as his music. “I never stopped,” he says. “It’s the same thing as Taylor. There’s an underdog element to it. Taylor was never the popular kid in school. I was never the popular kid in school. Then you get to the point when you become the most popular kid in school – and we both take it a bit too far. She wants to be the biggest female artist in the world and I want to be the biggest male artist in the world. It also comes from always being told that you can’t do something and being like, ‘F*** you. I can.’”
When he talks about writing the song for last year’s X Factor, his first thought is of the poor contestants, baring their souls as he has done for the past decade. His sympathy is really empathy, in that he carries with him the pangs of rejection and doubt, from family to school to London’s post-gig early morning loneliness. “I would be uncomfortable sitting in a judge’s seat and saying to someone, ‘This isn’t for you’, because they might go on in ten years’ time and smash it as well,” he says. “It’s really dangerous to say that to a kid. When I was 17 so many people said a song wasn’t good or a gig wasn’t good and it really knocks your confidence.”
Adele may be Sheeran’s commercial touchstone, but Swift is his spiritual sibling, a kinship founded on shared experiences, past sorrows and present euphoria – before success and after. “We have spent so much of our lives alone and feeling misunderstood,” said Swift. “You write a song about an emotion that confuses you, or about something you’re scared of or excited about, and you release it, and all of a sudden you’re making a conversation with millions of people. Then the final phase is when you look out into a crowd of thousands of people and they know every word. That’s an overwhelming feeling of camaraderie – which we’ve never felt before in our lives.”
Sheeran’s epic stage performances mirror his music and his life. He is a man alone, in control and vivified by the connections his songs make with his people. When we discuss the prospect of playing with a band, especially as his records become increasingly upscaled, orchestrated, multi-styled panoramas, he remains reluctant to consider sharing his limelight with anyone other than his guitar and effects pedals. It’s as if he shares so much of himself with his audience and so much of the spoils of his success with those he loves, that the stage must remain his and his alone. As usual, this is not merely a psychological or existential preference. He knows it’s good business, too. “There are so many singer-songwriters who do what I do that play with a band,” he says. “Everyone walks away from me and thinks, ‘I’ve never seen that before.’ As soon as you lose that element of ‘wow’ you’re just like everyone else. But what sets me apart now is being solo and it would be a drastic mistake to join the gang and be like everyone else.”
He’s only half right about that. In so many ways he is like everyone else. He’s the awkward bedroom poet who writes songs his fans feel could have been written about or for them. He’s the unstyled, unchanged millennial straight out of a skate park or shopping mall food hall, piloting pop’s flight from fantasy and escapism. But there are a couple of things that mean he isn’t just like the rest of us. There’s abundant talent, of course, both God-given and practice-honed, but more than anything there is the will to win. Eight records down, seven to go and Ed Sheeran is still winning. ÷ is out on 3 March.
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