Sheeran

A Biography

Sean Smith

• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781635766523
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito musicale

The first comprehensive biography of the Grammy winner, from shy kid with a stammer to worldwide star: "Well-researched, entertaining."— Publishers Weekly With hits like "Thinking Out Loud, " and "Shape of You, " Ed Sheeran strikes chords in millions of listeners worldwide—a feat all the more staggering given that he couldn't even carry a tune until the age of fifteen. Bestselling biographer Sean Smith traces the astonishing journey of the shy little English boy with a stammer who recorded an album in his bedroom and grew up to become a global phenomenon, all the while avoiding flashy showmanship. With compelling new research and interviews, Smith delivers the story of Sheeran's remarkable parents, who supported their son's dream long before it seemed achievable; the friends and mentors who encouraged his raw talent; and the lovers who inspired his most famous songs. Smith describes the setbacks Sheeran faced before his fortunes were transformed by Elton John's management company, a record deal, and a song that changed everything—with some help from Taylor Swift. Now Sheeran has sold more than 150 million records worldwide and earned $432 million touring in 2018 alone—but still made time to play for just 400 people at a charity night to raise money for the homeless. As this captivating book reveals, there's no one quite like Ed. "Sheeran fans will relish this well-told biography."? Publishers Weekly "[Ed Sheeran] has a huge, rabid fan base that will love the story told here...A bio as affable as the subject himself...informative and inspiring."? Booklist

PART ONE

FAMILY IS
ALL

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 into 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 performing 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 center 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 February 17, 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 specializing 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 toward 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 realized 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 toward Halifax. His former home at Lumb Bank, two miles in the other direction, is now a residential writing center.

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 immortalized 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 neighboring 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 program. Throughout the 1980s, John seized the chance to organize 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 working in the world of museums for seven years, 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 traveling, 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 favorites 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 lyrics revealed Elton’s songwriting 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 jewelry 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 on Birchcliffe Road into a magical potpourri of beautiful paintings and sculptures. She ditched wallpaper and emulsion in favor 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 office, 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 playhouse 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 favorite 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 preeminent. 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 specialty, 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 McFarlane 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 hemorrhage. 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 b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Sheeran
• Also by Sean Smith
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Principality Stadium, Cardiff, June 24, 2018
• PART ONE: FAMILY IS ALL
• PART TWO: THE NEXT BIG THING
• PART THREE: THE SHAPE OF THINGS
• Last Thoughts
• Ed’s Stars
• Life and Times
• Acknowledgments
• Select Bibliography
• Picture Credits