After years of hard work, 20-year-old Suffolk-born singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran’s loop-based indie pop has been majorly championed among grime scenesters – and his single ‘The A Team’ has just gone to Number Three in the charts. His The One Take EP is free to download from www.edsheeran.com. Here are the Sheeran essentials in his own words.
He nearly became an actor instead of a musician.
Yeah, I auditioned for Britannia High. Me, Bluey Robinson and Pixie Lott got down to the final five and didn’t get in. Now we’re all doing all right. Am I glad I didn’t do it? Mate, I am so, so happy. I was quite young, and at that time I thought I wanted to be an actor, because I wasn’t really taking music that seriously. That decision obviously paid off.
A trip to LA reinvigorated his appetite for live performance.
There was a bit of a lag in my enthusiasm to gig, so I went out to LA to revitalise it and do some challenging open-mic nights. It was cool. I ended up getting in with Jamie Foxx’s camp from doing their show, and spent some time recording at his house. But I’m not going to ask for anything from him until I’m in a position to say thank you. I’d like to break America first.
A live performance of his song ‘You Need Me, I Don’t Need’ for sbtv.co.uk got more than 100,000 views in two days. But it all came about due to his movie tastes.
The first footstep towards my career snowballing was the SBTV video. But that all happened through Twitter. My producer Jake retweeted SBTV saying ‘It’s Orange Wednesday, what should I go watch?’ I tweeted them saying, ‘What about Precious?’. Then they got back to me saying ‘I’ve heard some of your stuff, would you like to make a video some time?’
That opened the door for him to work with grime artists.
I’m a bit of an urban geek. I’m a really big fan of UK underground music, be it grime or dubstep or drum ’n’ bass or hip hop. I got into Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, JME and Skepta when I was about 15. Then I got into Sway, Devlin, Wretch 32 and other people on the scene. Once I’d done the SBTV video, most of them were at the kind of events I was playing, or they’d get in touch for me to sing hooks for them.
He thinks you can hear a rap influence in his lyrics.
I write all my lyrics as raps, and I know Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys does the same. When you’re a massive rap fan, you tend to write your lyrics as raps, and then put them into your music. You’d never guess that Alex Turner was into hip hop if you were just listening to Arctic Monkeys songs, but if you really listen into it as a rap fan, you hear the similarities. You’d hear that in my music as well, which is why a lot of UK artists get into it.
He was determined to make it on his own before signing to a major label.
I signed with Atlantic two days after my Collaborations EP came out [which got to Number Two in the iTunes chart despite being self-funded]. I’d always wanted to do five independent EPs and then sign. I don’t know why five: I just decided I wanted to do an indie one, a clean-cut singer-songwriter one, a folk one, a live one and a collaborative one.
