Interview: Ed Sheeran, pop’s newest sensation

Maybe that way no one would have made an issue of his ginger looks, or tried to change them.

“Everyone still thinks I’m Scottish – that’s totally wicked,” says 20-year-old Ed Sheeran when he emerges from the loos of his record label, toothbrush in hand and obviously as a No 1 artist having to grab freshen-up moments where he can. “But my red hair was viewed by some people as an impediment to my career. These guys suggested I get blond highlights. They told me to stop rapping. They told me to write proper love songs like James Blunt. And then they wanted me to ditch my name. The alias they came up with was Redward, which would of course have brought everything back to the hair. Also, it was just before Jedward, so imagine if I’d done that. I could never have competed – with those barnets or anything.”

Sheeran tried one suggestion – he cut out the hip-hop stuff. “I hated doing it, I’d rather have worked in Tesco.” Eventually he won that contract, on his own terms, and wrote a song called You Need Me, I Don’t Need You which, I tell him, must make his former manager feel a bit like Dick Rowe, who went to the grave as the man who turned down the Beatles. “That was actually about six different people,” he says. What, he had six managers dishing out the bad advice? “Six people who wanted to alter me somehow. When my album went to No 1 I got a nice text from one of them saying ‘Well done.’ ” And the other five? “I think they would have been a bit miffed!”

Sheeran is dressed in shorts, a hoodie and, because he can, a mad hairstyle suggesting he’s been in a fight, in a comic-strip, where the only primary colour available is indeed red. As you can probably tell, he’s a confident lad. When he tells me he’s just back from Germany where they ask “deep” questions – yet the example he quotes involves verification of a tweet about breakfast cereal – I think I’ve got his measure. But then I suggest he’s got a lot to thank social media for and he says: “You can’t call me a Twitter phenomenon or a YouTube one. These things are useful but so’s hard gigging. One year I did 311 shows. I did six in one night alone. I came off the Example tour, which I hoped would have got my name out there, and in Swindon I performed to just the sound engineer. When I missed my train and had to sleep in the station I decided to give America a try. The next thing I knew I was the only white boy in this LA club, the only one singing on what was a comedy night. Some of the Wu-Tang Clan were in and I was just about to rap... ”

More of that later but let’s go back to the beginning for Sheeran (he favours Frosties, by the way). This amazing story begins in unremarkable Suffolk. “Cradle of Filth and Charlie from Busted – hardly a rock’n’roll heartland,” he laughs. His was a typical adolescent round these parts – “Hanging round Framlingham Castle, drinking cider.” Already he loved the Beatles and Bob Dylan from long car journeys with his parents – local arts impresarios – and big brother Matthew, now making his way in the classical world. A key moment came when he was given an Eminem album by his rapper-cousin Jethro.

After that Sheeran started writing songs with a beatbox and loop pedal. Every waking tweet seems to go into them, with one beginning: “And I know you love Shrek cos we’ve watched it 12 times.” But they’re far from frivolous: breakout hit The A Team is about a homeless girl resorting to prostitution who he met doing charity work and Small Bump tells of a friend’s miscarriage. Quite a few are love songs, if not quite the type preferred by the first industry types he encountered. “My love songs are very personal and quite weird,” he admits. “They don’t really have the big radio hit choruses because basically they’re my therapy, stuff I have to get off my chest. I guess I was supposed to make them less specific, more generic, more one-size-fits-all, but we’re hardly short of them are we?”

All of the love songs are about one girl, his girlfriend of four years with whom he recently split. Lyrics like “You live in your halls and I live on a tour bus” describe the break-up. “It’s sad, but right now we’re both too busy. I suppose I could meet someone else who blows my socks off but I’m not the type to pimp myself about. I want to settle and have kids and, you know, I’ll probably end up marrying the same girl – she’s known me since before any of this happened.”

She knew him when he felt like the only red-haired boy in Suffolk and when he was definitely the only ginger in the Savoy Entertainment Center in Inglewood – a suburb of Los Angeles that his mum Googled and told him to avoid, fearing it over-lively. Too late, he was already at the side of the stage, readying his equipment. “Because I was white, one of the comedians thought I was a roadie and started ripping into me. I was like: ‘Get me out of here.’ ” But the Wu-Tangers didn’t jeer when he rapped. “I sold 170 EPs afterwards, the most ever until that point.” And Hollywood star Jamie Foxx, who was also in the crowd, booked him for both his nightclub, the Foxxhole, and his radio talk show.

“The show was another of those WTF moments. Twenty people round a table discussing racism and why black women shouldn’t marry white guys, then suddenly: ‘And here’s Ed! He’s gonna sing for us!’ But Jamie was great. He invited me to stay at his house and use his studio. There was a party going on, cowboy-themed, of course.”

Sometimes Sheeran wonders how he managed to keep believing, to not give up. Maybe it’s partly down to the thing that so many pop professionals wanted to change. “I’ve had years of teasing about my red hair but I definitely think it toughened me up. If you’re ginger, you end up pretty quick-witted.” v

Ed Sheeran’s album + is out now on Atlantic. He plays the ABC, Glasgow, on Friday, and the Picturehouse, Edinburgh, on 12 January, 2012.