Sean Smith - Ed Sheeran

Ed was already getting bored with the band. Keith Krykant observes, ‘He was playing this rock but I think was beginning to realise there was other stuff out there. He’d done that. He exhausted it. He was just imitating others.’

Everything changed when Ed discovered the second of the three great musical influences in his life. He was staying up late one night, watching videos on the music channels, when he saw ‘Cannonball’ by a then little-known artist called Damien Rice. It was very quirky, a series of apparently random images sprinkled with shots of Damien’s face as he sang. The almost surreal experience was linked together with a hypnotic acoustic riff.

Ed was immediately hooked. He went out and bought Damien’s debut album O the very next day, which was later his choice in Q magazine’s fascinating ‘The Album that Changed my Life’. He admired its honesty and rawness: ‘It was like he’d reached down his throat, grabbed his heart, ripped it out, stuck it on a plate and served it up to the world.’ Ed couldn’t wait to share his discovery with his friends. Unfortunately the Clifford brothers thought it was ‘shit’ so Rusty was hastily disbanded due to artistic differences. The falling-out was an early indication to Ed that he was better off doing it all himself.

Damien was born in Dublin and brought up in the thriving town of Celbridge, about fourteen miles from the city. He was already in his late twenties when he released the album that made his name internationally. He had spent his first years in music as part of a rock group called Juniper, which he had formed with friends from secondary school. Eventually, he became disenchanted with the musical compromises he felt he was making to please their record company. He became his own man and travelled around Europe busking, eventually settling in Tuscany where he wrote many of the songs for O .

His first solo composition to be released as a single was the agonisingly beautiful ‘The Blower’s Daughter’, which highlighted his ability to share his emotions with the listener. Ed was entranced by Damien’s ability to sing with such passion and share his private and innermost feelings with the world. Some of the songs were inspired by his relationship with the singer Lisa Hannigan, who provided fragile, haunting vocals alongside Damien on many of the tracks. She was his muse, they worked well together and he loved her taste.

Commercially, Damien has yet to top O . The Irish Independent described the album as ‘one of the great Irish cultural success stories of the decade’. Sadly, Damien and Lisa would later split acrimoniously. The notoriously private singer heartbreakingly told the Irish music site Hot Press , ‘I would give away all the music success, all the songs and the whole experience to still have Lisa in my life.’

Ed had soon learned to play all these poignant songs but he had to wait to see Damien in concert for the first time. That changed in 2004, during the late summer holidays in Ireland. Ed’s cousin Laura told him that Damien was playing a low-key gig for under-eighteens at Whelan’s in Dublin where she lived. The pub in Wexford Street was widely recognised as the original music venue in the city and was internationally famous for the quality of the acts that had performed there and as a popular location for television and films.

Laura and Ed were able to get tickets that stipulated, ‘All adults must be accompanied by an under-18’. The adult, as ever, was John Sheeran. The gig would prove to be highly significant for Ed, one of the most important evenings of his life so far. For the first time he saw a solitary singer captivate an audience by performing his own songs: ‘He holds them in the palm of his hands with just songs he has written on his own with a guitar.’ Ed stood at the front, unbothered at being surrounded mainly by winsome teenage girls.

Afterwards, John took his two charges into the front bar area where Ed, who barely looked his then age of thirteen, had his first experience of a meet-and-greet where an artist takes the trouble to chat, sign autographs and pose for pictures with members of the audience. This interaction was an essential part of the whole experience of small gigs in pubs and a lead that Ed would follow diligently in the future.

He was lucky in that he was standing next to Damien’s cellist, Vyvienne Long, who asked him, ‘Can you watch my cello for a bit?’ He dutifully guarded the instrument for twenty minutes until she reappeared, this time with Damien and the rest of the band. Ed told Lisa Hannigan he hoped to make a recording soon and she sweetly gave him an address so that he could send her a CD when it was finished. Ed, in a bright yellow T-shirt, had his picture taken with Damien, who was wearing a red hoodie, the same item of clothing that would be associated with Ed when he first started gigging. While not exactly scruffy, Damien was clearly an artist unbothered by image and the need to look like a star every minute of the day.

When he met Damien, Ed thought he was very cool: ‘If he had been a dick, I’d probably be working in a supermarket.’ He would later admit that it was life-changing – at that moment, he decided that he, too, was going to write songs like Damien. He was not a teenager who dreamed of doing something: he would go and do it. He would be a singer–songwriter, and one day he would appear at Whelan’s with just a guitar. Like Damien, he was destined to write many songs that would never see the light of day. Both were constantly creative.

Fortunately, his cousin Laura shared his enthusiasm. Whenever they got together, Ed would say, ‘I’ll be Damien, you be Lisa,’ and they would record all the songs on O , which Ed knew backwards and forwards, in the garden shed at her family’s house in Tuam, County Galway. Ed was lucky to have two older cousins, Jethro and Laura, who were inspired by the music he loved.

Back in Framlingham for his next lesson with Keith, he couldn’t wait to tell his guitar mentor that he had seen Damien Rice and he, too, was going to be a singer–songwriter. First, though, he needed to find an old guitar. Damien played one from the Lowden guitar factory in Ireland, which looked the worse for wear but had a beautiful sound that filled the room. Keith recalls, ‘I turned up one day as usual and he said to me straight away, “Have you got an old acoustic guitar? I don’t want a new one. I want an old, battered, characterful acoustic guitar.” So I told him I did have one actually, a Dallas model I’d bought for my wife Sally twenty-five years or so before. We didn’t use it much anymore so I sold it to him. He wanted to play “Cannonball”. And he started generally to get more into acoustic music.’ Ed was thrilled to have the instrument as it meant he could practise playing Damien’s music and make it sound more authentic. He probably knew the songs better than anyone other than the artist himself. That was part of his extraordinary gift. He was a sponge who could soak up a piece of music, then improvise and experiment to turn it into something entirely new and unique to him.

An additional attraction of O was that each song seemed to build slowly from an initial guitar riff and blossom into an emotional climax – something Ed aspired to achieve with his songs from the beginning.

For Christmas 2004, Ed’s main present was a Boss Digital Recording Studio, a home studio for his bedroom. He immediately threw himself into recording his first album. He was determined to finish it in the holidays so it would be ready in time for the next term at Thomas Mills. He started work on Boxing Day 2004, and had completed fourteen songs twenty-four days later on 19 January 2005. Although he was proud and excited at the time, he now keeps Spinning Man away from the public. It is an amazing achievement for a thirteen-year-old, but it sounds nothing like the Ed Sheeran songs we know today.