The story of Ed Sheeran

A red haired boy from Framlingham

Edward Christopher Sheeran was born on the seventeenth of February 1991 in Halifax, West Yorkshire, and spent his first years in nearby Hebden Bridge. His parents, John and Imogen, were Londoners who worked in the art world. John was a curator and lecturer, and Imogen a culture publicist who later designed jewellery. In December 1995, when Ed was four, the family moved to Framlingham, a small market town in Suffolk overlooked by a Norman castle. That castle would one day give him a hit. His father's family is Irish and Catholic, and one grandfather was a Belfast Protestant who married a Catholic from the south at a time when that took real nerve. Ed has an older brother, Matthew, who became a classical composer.[1] [2] [3]

He sang in a church choir from the age of four, but school was harder. He went to a very sporty primary school and stood out for all the wrong reasons. He had bright red hair, big blue glasses, a stutter, and a perforated eardrum that kept him off the playing fields. He has said the bullying left a lasting mark, and that wanting to be liked on a stage grew partly out of it. His father's advice was to hit back as hard as he could. Ed preferred jokes, getting in first before anyone else could. The cure for his stammer came from an unlikely place. He learned every word of Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP and rapped along, and the fast, precise flow helped him stammer less.[1] [2] [3]

Music came from home. His dad played him Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Elton John, and took him to see Eric Clapton at the Royal Albert Hall and Paul McCartney in Birmingham. The moment that changed everything came in June 2002. Eleven year old Ed watched Clapton walk out at the Queen's Golden Jubilee concert with a rainbow coloured Stratocaster and play the opening riff of Layla. Two days later he bought a black Stratocaster copy for thirty pounds and spent a month trying to play that riff. The same year he saw the Irish singer Damien Rice at a small club in Ireland, met him afterwards, went home and started writing songs. He has said that if Rice had been rude to him, he might never have become a musician.[1] [2]

Ed began recording in 2004, and at thirteen he put out his own first collection, called Spinning Man. He later joked that instead of going gold it went plywood, selling about a hundred copies. In early 2006 he saw the folk duo Nizlopi, fresh from their Christmas number one with JCB Song, at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, and then kept writing to them asking for work experience. Singer Luke Concannon remembered an intense teenager who wanted to rap battle everyone because Eminem's film 8 Mile had just come out. His bandmate John Parker remembered an eager kid full of questions, and one who drank the band's beer. Ed ended up as one of their guitar technicians, and in April 2008 he opened for them in Norwich.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sofas, open mics and a loop pedal

At sixteen Sheeran dropped out of school, and by 2008 he was living in London and gigging wherever he could. He got into the Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford in 2009, but walked out within months to go on tour as a support act for Just Jack. His strategy was sheer volume. By one count he played three hundred and twelve gigs in 2009 alone. Folk open mics mostly ignored him, so he went where an acoustic singer was a novelty, to hip hop nights, comedy clubs and jazz sessions. Standing out was the point. His rig was already set by 2008, a guitar and a Boss loop station, which let him build a whole band's worth of rhythm and harmony live, one layer at a time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Money was tight, and home was wherever he could find a sofa. The story of sleeping rough in London during those years became central to his image, as the Guardian later observed. When he was eighteen with nowhere to live, he crashed for a night at the west London family home of Jamal Edwards, a young filmmaker, and stayed for far longer than a night. In 2009 he met a music manager called Stuart Camp. By Ed's own account, the first thing that happened was that they got drunk together and Camp let him sleep on his couch. Camp signed him in 2011 and has managed him ever since, through a company whose name Ed chose himself, Grumpy Old Management.[1] [2] [3]

Jamal Edwards had started a YouTube channel called SBTV as a teenager, filming grime artists on a cheap phone. In February 2010 Sheeran performed on it, the video spread, and the rapper Example invited him on tour. That same month he released an EP called Loose Change, which opened with a song called The A Team. He kept up a relentless run of self funded EPs, including Songs I Wrote with Amy, love songs written in Wales with the songwriter Amy Wadge, whom he had met at seventeen. Then, going through what he called a rough time, he flew to Los Angeles on impulse for a month. He played open mic nights, landed a slot at a club linked to Jamie Foxx, and ended up recording in Foxx's studio and staying at his home.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The breakthrough was a grime record. On the eighth of January 2011 he self released the Number Five Collaborations Project, trading verses with grime MCs including Wiley, Jme, Devlin, Sway and Ghetts. With no label and no promotion, it climbed to number two on the iTunes chart. Soon after, he announced a free show at the Barfly in Camden. More than a thousand people turned up, so he played four times, the last one out on the street after the venue closed. Ben Cook, head of Asylum Records, had already been watching, including one gig in Southampton where Sheeran stood on a chair in the middle of the crowd and played unplugged. Asylum signed him that spring, and Elton John's management company, Rocket, came on board too.[1] [2] [3]

The A Team and Plus

On the twenty sixth of April 2011 Sheeran played The A Team on the BBC's Later with Jools Holland. He had written it at eighteen after a last minute gig at a homeless shelter, where he heard the stories of the people staying there. The song is about a young woman addicted to crack cocaine who sells sex to survive, and the title is a play on class A drugs. He deliberately set the story to a gentle, almost upbeat tune, so the darkness would creep up on listeners. Released in June, it entered the UK chart at number three, sold around fifty eight thousand copies in its first week, and became the best selling debut single of 2011.[1] [2] [3]

His debut album, titled with a simple plus sign and pronounced Plus, came out in September 2011, largely produced with Jake Gosling. It went straight to number one in Britain with more than a hundred thousand sales in its first week, and by March 2012 it had passed a million copies at home. The singles kept coming. You Need Me, I Don't Need You was a fast rap about writing his own songs. Lego House came with a video starring the Harry Potter actor Rupert Grint as an obsessive fan, a joke about how alike the two redheads looked. The album cover was orange, and Sheeran later explained why. Ginger kids learn to make the joke before anyone else gets the chance.[1] [2] [3] [4]

2012 was the year Britain took him to heart. In February he won two Brit Awards, for British Male Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act. In May, The A Team beat Adele's Rolling in the Deep to an Ivor Novello award. In June he sang it outside Buckingham Palace at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee concert, and in August he helped close the London Olympics, singing Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here with Nick Mason and Mike Rutherford while wearing a hoodie and jeans. Behind the scenes he was quietly becoming a songwriter for other stars. He co wrote Moments for One Direction and then Little Things, which gave the band their second UK number one.[1] [2]

America took longer. Taylor Swift heard Lego House while touring Australia and got in touch. They wrote Everything Has Changed sitting on a trampoline in her back garden, and it landed on her album Red. The A Team crept up the Billboard Hot 100 to number sixteen and earned a Grammy nomination for Song of the Year. Organisers told Elton John that Sheeran alone was not big enough for a performance slot at the ceremony, so Elton simply performed with him. In 2013 Sheeran opened every North American date of Swift's Red Tour and moved to Nashville, where the tour was based. He ended the year with three sold out nights at Madison Square Garden and wrote I See Fire for the Hobbit film The Desolation of Smaug.[1] [2] [3]

The Red Tour was a dream job, but he later admitted it was a lonely one. He was living in a country where he felt he did not belong, in a town where he hardly knew anyone, and he started drinking a lot. One night in Nashville, at four in the morning before an arena show, he drummed on a table with two beer bottles. One shattered, and a large piece of glass went into his right hand, missing a nerve by about a millimetre. His co writer Johnny McDaid of Snow Patrol, who had moved to Nashville to work on the next album with him, watched with growing concern. In 2015 McDaid sat him down and warned him that if the elastic snapped, it could take a long time to recover.[1] [2]

Multiply and Thinking Out Loud

For his second album Sheeran went big. He wrote more than a hundred and twenty songs over three years and worked with Rick Rubin, Pharrell Williams and Benny Blanco as well as Jake Gosling. The lead single, Sing, produced by Pharrell, was a funky departure. His team worried it might alienate fans of the ballads, so an acoustic song called One was put out as well. Sing became his first UK number one in June 2014. The album, a multiplication sign pronounced Multiply, came out on the twenty third of June 2014 and topped the charts in both Britain and America. By the end of that year Spotify had named him the most streamed artist in the world.[1] [2] [3]

Its biggest song almost did not happen. In February 2014 Amy Wadge was visiting his house for a rest, not a writing session. While Ed was in the shower she picked up a guitar and strummed a few chords, and he came running downstairs. After dinner, at two in the morning on the fourth of February, they wrote Thinking Out Loud at the kitchen table in about twenty minutes. He was aiming for a Van Morrison feel. The song was about love that lasts into old age, inspired by his grandparents and by his girlfriend at the time, Athina Andrelos. He danced a full ballroom routine in the video. It went to number one in Britain, spent eight weeks at number two in America behind Uptown Funk, and in 2016 won Grammys for Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance.[1] [2] [3]

Another song on Multiply began in a Kansas City hotel room in 2012. Johnny McDaid had a three note piano loop playing on his laptop while Sheeran sat building Lego, and Ed started humming along. That became Photograph, a song about missing someone while on the road, inspired by his long distance relationship with the Scottish singer Nina Nesbitt. He recorded somewhere between sixty and seventy versions before the producer Jeff Bhasker finally cracked it. The Multiply tour peaked in July 2015 with three sold out nights at Wembley Stadium, with Sheeran on stage alone, armed with a guitar and a loop pedal. The concert film was called Jumpers for Goalposts, a joke about playing at the home of English football.[1] [2] [3] [4]

He was also writing hits for others. In 2015 he handed Justin Bieber Love Yourself, a song he had planned for his own next album, and it topped charts around the world. That year he launched his own label, Gingerbread Man Records, through Warner, and its first signing, Jamie Lawson, went to number one. But fame was fraying him. Forbes reported he had earned fifty seven million dollars in a year, and he said friends began texting him pictures of cars, noting what a tiny slice of his income they would cost. He swapped his smartphone for an iPad and a flip phone. He brooded over online jokes about his hair and his weight, and he was drinking hard. Around the end of 2015 he began a year away from music and social media.[1] [2] [3]

The year off and Divide

Sheeran spent 2016 mostly off the grid, travelling with Cherry Seaborn, a friend from his Suffolk secondary school. They had reconnected at an after show party in New York while she was working there, and kept the relationship secret for a year. The trip nearly started in disaster. In Iceland he ignored a guide's instructions and stepped off a path near a bubbling hot spring. The crust gave way, both feet went into scalding water, and he had to be airlifted to hospital. Once he healed, they wandered rural Japan for a month. He also spent three weeks in Ghana as the guest of the singer Fuse ODG, writing African influenced music at parties that ran until dawn.[1] [2] [3]

On the sixth of January 2017 he came back with two songs at once. Castle on the Hill was a love letter to Framlingham and his teenage years there, with the town's castle on the skyline. Shape of You was a sleek pop song written with Steve Mac and Johnny McDaid. A week later they entered the UK chart at number one and number two, the first time any artist had done that with new songs, and he repeated the feat in Germany and Australia. In America Shape of You went straight in at number one. Listeners spotted an echo of TLC's No Scrubs, and its writers were added to the credits. The album, a division sign pronounced Divide, arrived on the third of March and sold six hundred and seventy two thousand copies in its first UK week, the fastest ever by a male solo artist.[1] [2] [3]

The numbers got silly. Every one of the album's sixteen tracks entered the UK top twenty, and he eventually collected ten top ten singles from one album, breaking Calvin Harris's record. His label was against Galway Girl, made with the Irish folk band Beoga, apparently because folk music was not considered cool, and Sheeran had to fight to keep it. It became one of the year's biggest hits. In June he headlined the final night of Glastonbury in front of about a hundred and thirty five thousand people. Perfect, a waltz written for Cherry, was rerecorded as a duet with Beyoncé, went to number one in America and became Britain's Christmas number one. Shape of You ended 2017 as the best selling single in both Britain and the United States.[1] [2] [3]

There was trouble too. In 2016 the songwriters Martin Harrington and Thomas Leonard sued him in California, claiming Photograph copied the chorus of Amazing, a song they had written for the X Factor winner Matt Cardle, and seeking twenty million dollars. In April 2017 the case was settled on undisclosed terms. Sheeran later said he regretted settling. He did it on his lawyers' advice, but it changed how he felt about the song. He stopped playing it for a long time, said it made him feel dirty, and believed it opened the floodgates to more claims against him, including the later fight over Shape of You.[1] [2]

The rest of 2017 was bumpy. In July he made a cameo in Game of Thrones in a scene with Maisie Williams, arranged as a surprise because she was a fan. Reviews ranged from warm to scathing, and the next day his Twitter account briefly vanished. In the autumn a bike accident left him with fractures in his arm, forcing him to postpone or cancel several Asian dates. By then he was also sporting a scar on his right cheek from a late night party near Windsor in 2016 involving ceremonial swords, a story that has been told more than one way. In December Prince Charles invested him with an MBE at Buckingham Palace for services to music and charity.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Record tours, marriage and fatherhood

The Divide Tour ran from March 2017 to August 2019, two hundred and sixty shows in all. In the summer of 2019 it overtook a record held by U2 to become the highest grossing tour of all time, and by the end around seven and a half million people had seen it. He spent eight hundred and ninety three days on the road. In Australia and New Zealand in 2018 he played to more than nine hundred and fifty thousand people, the biggest tour in the region's history. It finished where it had to, with four homecoming nights at Chantry Park in Ipswich in August 2019, each attended by around forty thousand fans. On the last night he told them it might be his final loop pedal gig.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 2018 he announced his engagement to Cherry Seaborn on Instagram, joking that their cats were happy too. That August he showed off what looked like a wedding ring in an interview, fuelling talk of a secret ceremony, and the couple married quietly around the start of 2019. That year he did something unusual for a pop star, playing himself in the film Yesterday, directed by Danny Boyle and written by Richard Curtis, about a struggling singer who wakes up in a world where only he remembers the Beatles. In the film, Sheeran invites the hero to be his opening act. Scenes were shot around East Anglia, near Sheeran's home, and at Wembley Stadium.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2019 he revived an old idea, a sequel to his grime EP called the Number Six Collaborations Project, with guests ranging from Justin Bieber and Eminem to Stormzy, Cardi B, Chris Stapleton and Bruno Mars. I Don't Care with Bieber broke Spotify's single day streaming record, and the album topped the charts in Britain and America. In December the Official Charts Company named him the UK's artist of the decade, with Shape of You the biggest hit of the 2010s. Then he stepped back again. He had taken up painting at the end of the Divide Tour, splashing household paint across canvases. In August 2020 his first daughter, Lyra Antarctica, was born, and he briefly persuaded himself he should retire and be a stay at home dad.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Fatherhood changed his drinking too. Two months before Lyra arrived, Cherry asked him whether he really wanted someone else driving her to hospital when her waters broke. It clicked, and he gave up spirits. In March 2021 his friend, the Australian promoter Michael Gudinski, died. Sheeran flew to Australia, finished a song during two weeks of hotel quarantine, and sang it at the funeral. That song, Visiting Hours, opened his next era. In June 2021 came Bad Habits, with a video casting him as a vampire in a hot pink suit. He later said that if you played it slowly on a piano, it was really a confession about addiction. It spent eleven weeks at number one in Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bad Habits made him the first British solo artist to spend fifty two weeks at number one on the UK singles chart across his career, a tally beaten only by Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Its follow up, Shivers, knocked it off the top. The album, an equals sign pronounced Equals, arrived in October 2021. He called it his coming of age record, about marriage, fatherhood and loss, and he painted its cover himself during lockdown. That Christmas he teamed up with Elton John on Merry Christmas, a charity single whose video spoofed famous festive pop videos, and it went straight to number one. By then he was also sponsoring the shirts of his beloved Ipswich Town, who gave him squad number seventeen.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

February 2022 and Subtract

Early 2022 brought the worst stretch of his life. In March he spent days in London's High Court defending Shape of You. The grime artist Sami Chokri, known as Sami Switch, and his co writer Ross O'Donoghue claimed a short repeated hook in the song copied a refrain from their 2015 track Oh Why. Their barrister called Sheeran a genius, but also a magpie who borrowed ideas and did not always give credit. Sheeran denied it, while royalties estimated at twenty million pounds were frozen. On the sixth of April the judge, Mr Justice Zacaroli, ruled that he had neither deliberately nor subconsciously copied anything, and later ordered the other side to pay more than nine hundred thousand pounds towards his legal costs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

While the case was being prepared, Cherry, six months pregnant with their second child, was diagnosed with a tumour that could not be treated until after the birth. Then, on the twentieth of February 2022, Jamal Edwards died suddenly at thirty one. His heart failed after he had taken cocaine and been drinking. Edwards was Sheeran's best friend, the man whose YouTube channel had launched him and whose family home had once been his. The night before, Ed had been at dinner with Taylor Swift, texting Jamal about a video shoot planned for the next day. Twelve hours later his friend was dead. In early March another close friend, the Australian cricketer Shane Warne, died as well.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Sheeran spiralled. He later told Rolling Stone that he felt he did not want to live any more, a feeling he said had come and gone throughout his life, like drowning under waves. He was ashamed of it as a father. Cherry saw what was happening and pushed him into therapy for the first time. He also spoke openly about binge eating, gorging and then bringing it back up, which he compared to Elton John's account of bulimia. And he admitted to a drug habit that began at festivals in his mid twenties and grew to daily use. After Jamal's death, he said, he would never touch anything again, because that was how his friend had died.[1] [2]

There were mercies. In May 2022 their second daughter, Jupiter, was born, and in June Cherry had successful surgery on the morning he headlined Wembley Stadium. His Mathematics Tour had opened that April with two nights at Croke Park in Dublin. And he wrote his way through it. He had spent a decade polishing an acoustic album to close his run of mathematical symbols. In about a week he scrapped it and replaced it with raw new songs about that February, written over instrumental tracks sent by Aaron Dessner of the National, whom Taylor Swift had introduced him to. It became Subtract, released in May 2023, which the Guardian's Alexis Petridis called easily his best album.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Weeks before Subtract came out he was in court again, this time in Manhattan. The heirs of Ed Townsend, who co wrote Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On, said Thinking Out Loud copied its chord progression and rhythm. Their lawyers played a video of Sheeran sliding from one song into the other on stage. He replied that most pop songs can fit over most pop songs, picked up a guitar on the witness stand and showed how he and Amy Wadge had written it. He had said he would quit music if he lost. On the fourth of May 2023 the jury cleared him after about three hours. A related case from a company called Structured Asset Sales dragged on until June 2025, when the US Supreme Court declined to hear it.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Mathematics, India and Play

2023 was his most prolific year. The Disney Plus documentary series The Sum of It All opened with him describing himself as short, ginger, bespectacled and from the countryside, a boy with a stutter who beatboxed, exactly the sort of person who does not become a pop star. It revealed that Cherry's tumour had been cancer, and that facing it was why they agreed to film at all. In September came a second album with Dessner, Autumn Variations, inspired by Elgar's Enigma Variations, with songs about friends going through upheaval. It was the first album he owned outright, released on his own Gingerbread Man label with no singles and no videos, and he later performed it in full at the Royal Albert Hall.[1] [2] [3]

Meanwhile the Mathematics Tour kept rolling for more than three years, one hundred and eighty eight shows in all, ending in Düsseldorf in September 2025 after selling around eight point eight million tickets. In March 2023 he drew about a hundred and ten thousand people to a single show at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, an Australian record, and in early 2025 he played Bhutan, the kingdom's first international concert. India brought a stranger moment. In Bengaluru in February 2025, while he was busking on Church Street, a police officer walked up and unplugged his microphone. Police said permission had been refused. Sheeran insisted the whole thing had been cleared in advance, and played to thousands that night anyway.[1] [2] [3]

Off stage he became an unexpected campaigner. He objected when the Royal Albert Hall planned to sell more seats to investors, after the House of Lords heard that two hundred pound tickets for his show were listed for up to six thousand. In November 2024 he said he would have declined to appear on the fortieth anniversary remix of Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas, because his understanding of how it portrayed Africa had changed. In 2025 he led an open letter to the Prime Minister calling for two hundred and fifty million pounds for music education, and that November he took partial credit when the government overhauled music teaching in England's state schools.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Musically he pressed Play. Azizam, released in April 2025, was a Persian flavoured love song for Cherry, built with the producer Ilya Salmanzadeh and his Persian heritage, using instruments like the santur. Sapphire, recorded largely in Goa, blended Punjabi rhythms and featured the Indian star Arijit Singh. The album Play arrived on the twelfth of September 2025 and became his ninth UK number one album, though it stalled at number five in America. It is meant to open a series named after the buttons on a music player, Play, Pause, Fast Forward, Rewind and Stop. He told Zane Lowe there is a sixth, called Eject, written into his will, a set of his best songs that Cherry will choose and release after he dies.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Loop Tour storm of 2026

The Loop Tour, built around Play, opened in New Zealand in January 2026 and took the stadium show back to its roots. Sheeran performed alone with his loop pedal, building songs layer by layer in front of crowds of fifty five thousand, while fans scanned a code before the show to request deeper cuts like Visiting Hours and Supermarket Flowers. Midway through, the Irish folk band Beoga joined him for Galway Girl and other songs. The Guardian found it ambitious, if sometimes swamped by stadium echo. After Oceania and a Latin American leg, the tour reached North American stadiums in June.[1] [2] [3]

Then came what the BBC's music correspondent called the biggest controversy of his career. On the fourth and fifth of September 2026 the rapper Macklemore, opening for him at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, called for a free Palestine from the stage and performed his protest song Hind's Hall. Pro Israel groups demanded he be dropped, and several stadium owners told the promoter, Messina Touring Group, they would not host shows with Macklemore on the bill. On the fourteenth of September Messina removed him. Macklemore said Sheeran had told him that Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, had rallied other owners behind an ultimatum. Kraft said Macklemore had crossed a line into antisemitism.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sheeran's first response satisfied almost nobody. On the fifteenth of September he posted that he was appalled by the conflict, that the suffering on both sides was a human tragedy, and that removing Macklemore was the promoter's decision, not his. Within hours every remaining opening act walked out in solidarity with Macklemore, including Finneas, the Danish band Lukas Graham and the Irish singer Aaron Rowe, and so did Beoga, who had been playing on stage with him every night. Critics accused him of cowardice, ticket prices for the next shows tumbled, and Macklemore pledged his entire tour earnings, a million dollars, to organisations helping Palestinians.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the nineteenth of September he walked out alone at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, with protesters outside, and spoke before playing a note. He said he had never wanted to be an activist musician, apologised for making mistakes, and admitted he had not known whether the tour would continue or whether he even wanted to be an artist any more. He called the Hamas led attacks of the seventh of October 2023 horrific, and described what was happening in Gaza as catastrophic and unjustifiable. Not everyone was won over. Charlotte Church told a Cardiff crowd he had chosen commerce over doing the right thing. As of late September 2026 the tour was continuing, with dates booked into December.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The everyman's empire

By the numbers, Sheeran is one of the biggest acts of the century. He has sold around two hundred million records, the Official Charts Company named him Britain's artist of the 2010s, and his Divide and Mathematics tours rank among the most attended in history. By 2024 he had more Spotify followers than any other artist on the planet. He has never pretended not to care about the figures. He once had weekly sales sheets emailed to him, set himself targets for each album, and said that as a kid who never won anything, winning still matters to him enormously. His stated benchmark for Divide was the stadium career of Bruce Springsteen.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Critics have argued about him for fifteen years, and he knows it. The Guardian's Alexis Petridis credited him with bringing pop back down to earth, with one unassuming man, a guitar and a loop pedal. After Multiply the charts filled with earnest, dressed down, boy next door troubadours, and Elton John grumbled fondly that everyone now sounded like Ed Sheeran. Shawn Mendes, Camila Cabello and Louis Tomlinson are among the younger artists he is credited with influencing. Yet in some circles he is still the punchline to a joke about bland pop, and he says so himself. His fans, who call themselves Sheerios, tend to be gentler than most pop fandoms, drawn to his ordinariness.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Suffolk remains the centre of his world. In 2011 he bought a farm near Framlingham and has grown it into an estate the press call Sheeranville, with a private pub, a chapel and a pond that sparked rows with neighbours and planners. He paints, collects art, supports Ipswich Town and brings his daughters on tour. Asked in 2023 which of his songs might become his equivalent of Yesterday, the song that defines a career, he chose Perfect. After the storms of 2026, the next chapter is unwritten, but he has already planned the ending, with an album called Eject waiting in his will.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Ed Sheeran

Ed Sheeran and Cherry Seaborn. They were schoolfriends in Framlingham. She went on to play field hockey for Duke University and England's under twenty ones, then reconnected with Ed in New York in 2015. They kept it secret for a year, got engaged in January 2018 and married quietly around the start of 2019. She inspired Perfect and Azizam, pushed him into therapy in 2022, and faced a tumour while pregnant with their second daughter.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Ed Sheeran and Jamal Edwards. Edwards founded the YouTube channel SBTV and gave Sheeran an early platform in 2010, which Ed credits for his career. When Ed was eighteen and homeless he moved into Jamal's family home. Sheeran called him his best friend and a brother. Edwards died in February 2022, aged thirty one, and his death shaped the album Subtract and led Sheeran to quit drugs.[1] [2] [3]

Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift. Swift heard Lego House in Australia and reached out. They wrote Everything Has Changed together, he opened her Red Tour in 2013, and they later collaborated on End Game, The Joker and the Queen and Run. She calls him the James Taylor to her Carole King, and it was Swift who introduced him to the producer Aaron Dessner.[1] [2] [3]

Ed Sheeran and Elton John. Elton's company Rocket helped manage Sheeran from 2011, and Elton pushed his way on stage with him at the 2013 Grammys when organisers said Ed alone was not famous enough. He has praised Sheeran's gift for simple melodies, and joked that had they been young in the same era, they would have partied for three weeks straight. They topped the Christmas chart together in 2021 with Merry Christmas.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ed Sheeran and Stuart Camp. Sheeran met Camp in 2009, got drunk with him and slept on his couch. Camp signed him in 2011 and has managed him exclusively ever since, travelling everywhere with him. In 2018 he took their firm, Grumpy Old Management, independent from Elton John's Rocket, and Billboard named him international music executive of the year.[1] [2]

Ed Sheeran and Amy Wadge. The Welsh based songwriter met Sheeran when he was seventeen, and his 2010 EP was titled Songs I Wrote with Amy. In 2014 she strummed the chords that became Thinking Out Loud, which won them the Grammy for Song of the Year. She testified alongside him in New York in 2023 and said the lawsuits haunted her for a decade.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ed Sheeran and Johnny McDaid. The Snow Patrol guitarist toured with Sheeran when Ed opened for the band in 2012, then moved to Nashville and Los Angeles with him to write Multiply. He co wrote Photograph and Shape of You and shared the Shape of You court fight with him. He once warned Ed to slow down before the elastic snapped.[1] [2] [3]

Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber. Sheeran wrote Love Yourself for Bieber in 2015, originally meant for his own album, and they later shared vocals on I Don't Care, which broke Spotify's single day record in 2019. Sheeran has praised Bieber's sobriety and tells a wild story about a golf club in Japan.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ed Sheeran and James Blunt. Blunt is one of Sheeran's closest friends and drinking partners. Ed is godfather to Blunt's eldest son, played Blunt's album Back to Bedlam while Cherry was in labour, and wrote Perfect after an early morning at Blunt's house in Ibiza. Blunt opened his Divide Tour dates in North America, and one version of the sword scar story blames him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ed Sheeran and Nina Nesbitt. The Scottish singer met Sheeran before one of his radio gigs in Edinburgh, supported him on tour and appeared in his Drunk video. They dated in 2012. She inspired his songs Nina and Photograph, and much of her album Peroxide was about him. She has said it is disheartening to be known as his ex rather than for her own music.[1] [2]

Ed Sheeran and Eric Clapton. Seeing Clapton play Layla in 2002 made Sheeran pick up the guitar. Years later they became friends. Clapton played a solo on Dive, Sheeran sang on Clapton's I Will Be There, and both were credited under the joke name Angelo Mysterioso. Clapton even signed the wall of Ed's home studio.[1] [2]

Ed Sheeran and Macklemore. Macklemore asked to join Sheeran's Loop Tour and Ed agreed. After the rapper called for a free Palestine at MetLife Stadium in September 2026, he was dropped from the US dates, and the two ended a week of talks in fundamental disagreement. Macklemore criticised Ed for not taking a stand on Gaza.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Ed Sheeran

• Sheeran's grandfather once boxed Charlie Kray, elder brother of the gangsters Ronnie and Reggie, to a standstill. His grandparents Bill and Anne came from Ireland. According to the Independent, Bill was training in dentistry at Guy's Hospital in London when he stepped into the ring with the eldest Kray brother and held his own.[1]
• His first self released album, Spinning Man, came out when he was thirteen and sold about a hundred copies. Sheeran joked to Rolling Stone that the record went plywood rather than gold. Old friends who bought it back then were still at his parties years later.[1]
• He bought his first electric guitar, a thirty pound Stratocaster copy, two days after watching Eric Clapton play Layla. The performance was at the Party at the Palace for the Queen's Golden Jubilee in June 2002. Eleven year old Ed spent the following month trying to master that riff.[1]
• He did work experience with the folk duo Nizlopi and ended up as one of their guitar technicians. After seeing them at Shepherd's Bush Empire, the teenager kept writing to ask for a placement. The band recall him rap battling them and drinking their beer, and in 2008 he opened one of their shows in Norwich.[1] [2]
• By one count he played three hundred and twelve gigs in 2009, before he had a record deal. The Independent reported the figure in a 2014 profile. He gigged anywhere a singer with a loop pedal would stand out, including hip hop nights and comedy clubs.[1] [2]
• He is a second cousin of Gordon Burns, the Northern Irish broadcaster who hosted The Krypton Factor. Burns hosted the long running ITV puzzle show. Sheeran's Irish roots run through his father's side, and one grandfather was a Belfast Protestant who married a Catholic from the Republic.[1]
• In 2012 he was named a baron of Sealand, a self declared micronation off the English coast. The title sits among his more unusual honours, alongside an MBE in 2017 and an honorary degree from the University of Suffolk in 2015.[1]
• In Iceland in 2016 he stepped off a path, broke through the crust and plunged both feet into scalding water. He had ignored a guide's warning near a bubbling hot spring. Cherry pulled off his sock and his skin came with it. He was airlifted to hospital.[1]
• A Nashville drumming session with two beer bottles left a shard of glass in his right hand. It happened at four in the morning before an arena show on Taylor Swift's Red Tour. The glass missed a nerve by about a millimetre.[1]
• After Forbes published his earnings, he dumped his smartphone for an iPad and a flip phone. Friends had started texting him photos of cars, pointing out how small a percentage of his income they would cost. The flip phone was kept for close family.[1]
• His first date with Cherry Seaborn was an American Institute for Stuttering gala where he was receiving an award. He found the evening upsetting because of the children there who could not get their words out. Their second date was a birthday party for Adele's manager.[1]
• Visitors to his home studio are asked to sign the walls, and he planned a wall just for legends. Rick Rubin, Harry Styles and Benny Blanco signed, Damien Hirst added a drawing, and one wall held only Eric Clapton's name, with Elton John due next.[1]
• On Eric Clapton's album I Still Do, Sheeran is credited as Angelo Mysterioso. Clapton repaid the favour with a guitar solo on Dive, from Divide, credited under the same joke name. Sheeran called appearing on his hero's record an honour beyond measure.[1]
• He has a Heinz ketchup tattoo and starred in a Heinz advert based on his own pitch. The company even released a limited bottle nicknamed Heinz Edchup. He reportedly carries ketchup on tour.[1]
• The strings on Perfect were arranged by his brother Matthew, their first recording together. Their grandmother had suggested the brothers work together shortly before she died. The full orchestration was later reused for the version with Andrea Bocelli.[1]
• Thinking Out Loud was written at two in the morning in about twenty minutes, and nearly had a different title. The first draft of the chorus used a different phrase, which Sheeran sang for the jury from the witness stand in 2023. He recorded the song on his phone that night.[1] [2]
• Photograph began as a three note piano loop on Johnny McDaid's laptop while Sheeran built Lego in a hotel room. It was May 2012 in Kansas City, on Snow Patrol's tour. Sheeran then recorded around sixty to seventy versions before settling on one.[1]
• Before settling on Galway Girl, Sheeran tried Wexford Girl, Clonakilty Girl and Cork Girl. He knew Steve Earle had an older song called Galway Girl, but none of the alternatives worked. In Dublin in 2017 he played Earle's song and his own back to back.[1]
• Sheeran wrote twenty five songs in the week he wrote Shape of You. He told Rolling Stone in 2023 that he prefers to keep the tap running rather than wait for inspiration, and had years of finished music stockpiled.[1]
• Rupert Grint returned to Sheeran's world in 2025, reprising his Lego House role in the video for A Little More. In the original 2011 video, the Harry Potter actor played a deranged fan impersonating Sheeran, a joke on their resemblance.[1]
• Ipswich Town gave Sheeran squad number seventeen in 2021, and he later bought a small stake in the club. He was already sponsoring their shirts. He joked the number had better be ceremonial if the team wanted promotion. In 2024 he acquired a stake of about one point four percent.[1] [2]
• He is godfather to James Blunt's eldest son and played Blunt's debut album while Cherry was in labour. Blunt told the Guardian the tale over lunch in 2024, joking that Sheeran's public praise had cost him a quarter of a million.[1]
• In Auckland in 2023, a loop pedal failure forced him to finish a stadium show with just voice and guitar. Subwoofer vibrations had damaged a chip in the pedal. He played seven songs unplugged, then called the night excruciating, though fans raved about it.[1]
• Sheeran created the Divide album artwork using Damien Hirst's spin painting wheel. He paints with household gloss, and in 2025 exhibited his Cosmic Carpark Paintings, made in a disused car park in Soho during mornings between tours.[1]
• He applied in 2022 to build a crypt beneath the chapel on his Suffolk estate. The plans described a small burial zone under the floor of a flint lined chapel with a spiral stair tower and stained glass, first approved in 2019 as a place for contemplation and prayer.[1]
• His Mathematics Tour included the first international concert ever held in Bhutan. He played the Himalayan kingdom in early 2025, during the Asian leg that also took him across India.[1] [2]
• A three pound ticket to his first gig, at the British Legion in Framlingham, was auctioned for charity in 2020. The lots also included handwritten lyrics to Perfect, Lego bricks he played with as a boy and a handmade copy of his 2009 EP.[1]
• The Divide Tour kept him on the road for eight hundred and ninety three days. That compared with seven hundred and sixty days for U2's previous record breaking tour, according to figures reported by the BBC.[1]
• Visiting Hours features backing vocals from Kylie Minogue, Jimmy Barnes and the comedian Jimmy Carr. All three were friends of the late promoter Michael Gudinski, to whom the song is a tribute. Sheeran first sang it at Gudinski's funeral in Australia in March 2021.[1]
• His manager's firm is called Grumpy Old Management, a name Sheeran picked. Stuart Camp has managed him exclusively since 2011. Camp joked to Billboard that he had no children, just one surrogate child with ginger hair.[1]
• His father allegedly silenced a no smoking warning at a Warner party by announcing that he was Mr Warner. Sheeran told the story to Rolling Stone to illustrate that his dad takes no nonsense, in contrast to a mother he described as an angel.[1]
• He has written into his will instructions for a posthumous album called Eject. Cherry is to choose the tracks from songs he wrote from age eighteen onwards. He said he did not want someone jumbling his work together after he is gone.[1]
• GQ named him its worst dressed man in 2013, and he said he still wore skater hoodies and jeans. He told the Observer in 2014 he would never hire a stylist because looking too much like a star kills the connection with fans.[1] [2]
• Two hundred pound tickets to his Royal Albert Hall show were once listed for up to six thousand pounds on resale sites. The House of Lords heard the figure in 2023, while Sheeran's team opposed the hall's plan to sell more seats to investors.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.