Seeing Red
He’s the success story of the year and not even your humble Hot Press know-it-alls predicted it – scruffy song and guitar man Ed Sheeran may have just signed his first record deal six months ago, but he’s already shifted a million singles, with album sales not far behind. Celina Murphy meets the 20 year-old folk-rapper to talk fans, Lego and sneaking into Beyoncé’s album launch.
Celina Murphy, 14 Nov 2011
don’t know about you, but hearthrobs were different in my day. Leonardo DiCaprio had pinchable good looks, Will Smith was the funniest man in America and Robbie Williams practically wrote the book on bad boy charm (such a book would have later been recalled, for obvious reasons). Surely I’m not the only one who finds it curious that, a certain silky-haired Canadian aside, diminutive folk rapper Ed Sheeran has become the teen idol du jour?
Unashamedly scruffy with a mop of wild ginger hair, he’s far from Hollywood’s idea of the boy next door, but still, I’ve witnessed young girls nearly toss their cookies when he appears on stage. It helps that he’s a sensitive singer-songwriter type, but then, until recently, I didn’t realise that hormonal schoolgirls were into raps about weed and songs about prostitutes. This is the part of the Ed Sheeran puzzle that has people confused. One minute he’s a self-styled urban poet (see lyrics like: “I’m up and coming like I’m fucking in an elevator”); the next, he’s a starry-eyed acoustic softie, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out which of these personae has the girls all aflutter. Unless it's both...
I meet Sheeran in the penthouse of the Morrison, where he’s biding his time before an appearance on The Late Late Show, aka his gran’s favourite programme. Not a single fan is lurking outside the hotel, so either he’s not quite at police barricade level yet, or his trip to Dublin is a very well-kept secret.
“I haven’t got to the stage where I can’t walk down the street,” he grins, “but I have got to the stage where I have bright ginger hair and a few songs in the charts so I generally don’t walk down the street!”
Already, Sheeran is coming off as a rather modest chap, but there was no masking his popularity last month when he performed to a heaving Olympia crowd as part of the Guinness Arthur’s Day celebrations. Unless, of course, all those screams were coming from his Irish relatives…
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