The speed with which he’s become a global phenomenon may be startling, but there’s nothing of the boy racer about Ed Sheeran.
The Range Rover he bought recently was a gift for his manager (‘I can give good presents now’). So what does he drive, I ask, assuming that since he’s a multi-millionaire at the ludicrous age of 23, it’s going to be something fast?
‘I still can’t drive,’ he says. ‘But if I did, I’d like a Mini. It’s kind of understated. Sports cars scare the s*** out of me because they go so fast.’
Incontrovertible proof Sheeran is not your average 23-year-old.
The singer-songwriter may look like an overgrown teenager, slouched on the sofa, Converse-clad feet on the table, but it’s not just cars he can’t drive.
He’s possibly the only young man on the planet who doesn’t know one end of a PlayStation from the other.
When he was growing up, his parents limited how much TV he watched (‘for years we didn’t have TV in the house’), and banned electronic games. Instead, they bought him a load of art books and an acoustic guitar.
‘I still don’t know what to do with an Xbox. On our tour bus everyone’s playing Fifa, and I kind of wish I could play it, but I have no clue what to do. ’
How his record company (and bank manager) must applaud Mr and Mrs Sheeran. For Ed is one of the hottest properties in music right now.
The kid with the ginger hair and NHS specs recorded his first track in 2005, and moved to London in 2008 — staying on a succession of mates’ sofas and even sleeping rough on the Underground — to try to break into the music industry.
By 2012, he’d won two Brit Awards, and his second album, x (meaning ‘multiply’), released in June, charted at No 1 in the UK and U.S.
When he’s not recording his own songs, he’s writing for other people — most famously
He’s already got an Ivor Novello award for songwriting. How many songs has he written that even die-hard fans won’t know about?
He opens his laptop and does a tally. ‘Well, I’ve recorded 87 more. But written? Hundreds.’
As well as being so prolific, Sheeran may be the best connected 20-something ever. Elton John is a mentor (he is signed by Elton’s management company).
‘It’s always an unknown number when he calls, which I’m wary about answering. But I generally get an email first saying “Reg is calling”.’
Paul McCartney came up to him at an awards do and said he was a fan.
‘He’d heard my stuff on Hollyoaks. My first thought was, “S***. Paul McCartney watches Hollyoaks”.’
Days before we meet, he had breakfast with Van Morrison, who called when he was gigging in Dublin and ‘invited me for a pot of tea’. Even Ed seems amazed by that one. ‘Yeah, that was . . . quite something.’
Is there any hero who hasn’t beaten a path to his door? ‘Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan.’
I joke that his contacts list must look like a Who’s Who of showbiz. He plays along and scrolls through his phone, saying ‘Who will you have heard of? Rob Brydon? Rory McIlroy?’
But perhaps his oddest showbiz friend is Friends star Courtney Cox. How does a Yorkshire-born, Suffolk-raised kid who never watched TV come to be friends with a Hollywood actress?
He tells it as if such things happen every day. ‘I did a gig in LA and Bill Lawrence and Christa Miller [the TV producer and his actress wife] brought their daughter to meet me.
‘Next day, I happened to be having lunch in the same restaurant and they said would I like to come to a party that night? It was at Courtney’s house.’
He ended up spending the night.
‘She lives quite far out and the car that had brought me had gone back. She’s going to have a spare room, isn’t she?’
So was born a lasting friendship — and he later returned to stay for a few months when he was recording in the U.S. ‘Rent free, yeah, but I did make the tea,’ he adds.
The word is that he introduced Cox to her fiancé, Derry-born musician Johnny McDaid of the band Snow Patrol
‘I think I did the “Courtney meet Johnny, Johnny meet Courtney” thing, but Sacha Baron Cohen did the matchmaking. It’s just two people who fell in love and I hope they’re really happy.’
When Cox met her future in-laws in Northern Ireland, Ed went, too. ‘She went to Tesco. She thought it was a farmer’s market.’
Ed does a great job of selling his showbiz pals as down-to-earth. ‘She’s really normal,’ he says of Cox.
‘She’s from Alabama, so it’s bred into her, but everyone she surrounds herself with is the same. Jennifer Aniston’s just as friendly. I’d only ever experienced the darker side of Hollywood and they give you faith in everything.’
So what was his problem with Hollywood before that? He pulls a face.
‘Everyone in LA introduces themselves with their first name, last name, what they do, who they work for, how many awards they’ve won, how much they earn — but only if they know who you are.
'I’ve been ignored for a whole dinner party and then someone says, “Oh, this is Ed, he does this” and suddenly I’m being given all these cards.
‘Whereas the first time I went to Courtney’s I brought my cousin Murray, who isn’t a superstar — well, he is in my eyes, but he’s not an actor or a musician. But everyone spoke to him and thought he was cool.’
You can see why people warm to Sheeran. He’s blissfully devoid of celebrity nonsense. At one point, the publicist says she’ll send me a copy of his new book (I’ve read it in on a computer) and he says: ‘She can take my copy. There’s no point paying postage and packaging’.
His book (‘It’s not an auto-biography. They’re for people like Mick Jagger, people who have really lived’) is a lovely, clever account of his journey to date, sweetly illustrated with drawings by a childhood friend.
What a story it is. At one point, he slept on the streets outside Buckingham Palace — inspiring his song Homeless.
‘I wasn’t really homeless. Not proper cardboard box stuff. But yeah, I would gig at night and, if I didn’t have a sofa to crash on I’d sleep on the Circle Line all day. Then I’d gig the following night, and do it all again.’
There’s no hint that he’s let success change him. ‘I do what people of my age do, stay in student houses and drink tea out of bowls.’
Sort of. He has bought a house. Actually, three — but he doesn’t seem to live in any of them. I was told to avoid questions about his private life, but he doesn’t seem remotely bothered.
And let’s face it, his love life has inspired most of his songwriting. The hit Don’t was first thought to refer to Taylor Swift, although he denies they were ever in a relationship, and is now widely thought to refer to a fling with Ellie Goulding.
It details the discovery that she’d two-timed him (with Niall from One Direction, no less), although he’s never confirmed this. He dances around it today.
People jumped to that conclusion because I put the line “we make money in the same way” in, but who’s to say that wasn’t about my property investment? It could have been about a property developer from Slough.’
Whoever it’s about, it was an incredibly public way of hitting back at someone. Has he ever regretted being so open?
‘I think if it hadn’t been a hit I would have done. In retrospect, it worked out for me. It elevated my career.’ Wow. Harsh? ‘Yes, but it’s how it is.’
He’s good at explaining the songwriter’s curse. ‘I spend all day long wishing I could write another song like that. When it happens, you think “Wicked, I’ve finally got inspiration”.’
Even if your heart is in bits? ‘Yeah. It’s what songwriting is.’
Sometimes life is too painful even for that. ‘There’s an entire relationship last year that no one knows about. I probably wrote 40 songs about that.
'I haven’t used them because they were a bit too dark. It was just anger and pain. I like my songs to have a bit of musicality!’
He’s happy with his girlfriend Athina Andrelos, 25, who works for chef Jamie Oliver, and oddly, for someone who embraces all things itinerant, he does want to settle down. He’s quicker to discuss this than most men his age would be.
‘Of course I want kids. I actually thought my career would plateau quicker than this. I thought I’d have a career in England, and it’s quite simple to maintain that and home life. You tour for a month, then you make an album.
‘I thought, “I can have kids early, I can get married early”. But now we’re touring in Asia and South America and selling out gigs in Poland and Manila. It’s going to be an amazing moment when I actually have a year to spend with someone.’
Whatever the future holds, it’s unlikely showbiz will claim Ed Sheeran in the way it did Amy Winehouse, that other prodigious talent.
He’s not squeaky clean — when I ask about drugs he says, ‘I’ve never gone for anything addictive,’ but seems aware of the pitfalls. He used to drink to excess, but now does so rarely.
‘If anything ever got out of control, I’d just switch it off, like I did with drinking.
‘I’ve got no deep-seated emotional turmoil, so there’s nothing really to go off the rails about.’
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