Читать книгу Ed Sheeran - Sean Smith - Страница 14

As soon as his voice broke, Ed’s vocals improved dramatically. The time was right for him to have some lessons. He struck lucky with Claire Weston, a Framlingham-based singer and one of the best-known sopranos in Suffolk. She had been a leading light of the English National Opera before settling back in her home county to teach at Framlingham College and Woodbridge School. She also took on pupils from Thomas Mills.

Claire’s favourite piece of music is Verdi’s Requiem, although she is very partial to Benjamin Britten as well. Neither composer featured on Ed’s mixed tapes but she also admitted a liking for The Beatles, a connection shared by many of the players in Ed’s journey. Under her expert guidance, Ed’s singing began to resemble the familiar style of the future. Still a little shaky in places, he sounded more like the Ed Sheeran on his next CD venture, an album he called simply Ed Sheeran. The title may seem uninspired but it followed a long-established method in the music business of getting your name in front of the public.

The music revealed a gentler, more thoughtful Ed. He had discovered that he wrote in waves so most of the songs for Ed Sheeran have a similar feel. They were pleasant without having the extra ingredient that grabbed you by the throat. He was in proper singer–songwriter territory, with a series of considered ballads including the poignant ‘In Memory’ and ‘The Sea’, which reflected a more serious-minded teenager.

In the 1970s this album might have been considered bedsit music – introspective tracks that you would put on the stereo, lie on the bed, gaze at the ceiling and consider the injustice of the world. Fittingly, on one of the catchiest tracks, ‘Spark’, he says the world is harsh and he is ‘stuck in the dark’.

He highlighted his change of mood from Spinning Man and The Orange Room by calling one of the tracks ‘Quiet Ballad of Ed’. The ‘moody’ song had been banished to history. The lyrics are more mature, although his vocals still sound young. He didn’t completely forget his earlier teenage self: the guitar in ‘Billy Ruskin’ is very reminiscent of his old favourite ‘Sweet Child of Mine’.

Perhaps the most interesting track is ‘Pause’, which fused rap and melody, as so much of his music would in the future. The rap was provided by his cousin Jethro, whose verse – including a name check to Sheeran Lock – fits snugly into a catchy song that included one of Ed’s anthem-like choruses.

The next step in the musical education of Ed Sheeran was to make his first video. He went along to Bruizer Creative Film & Video Agency in nearby Woodbridge to make a film to accompany him singing the opening number on the album, ‘Open Your Ears’, which, unusually for Ed at the time, featured a piano melody as well as backing vocals from his cousin Laura. She’s not in the video, which showed Ed, in a red Nizlopi T-shirt and smart black blazer, gazing upwards at a camera. The whole three minutes is filmed from above with Ed, looking very clean cut with neatly brushed hair, against a spinning backdrop – a spinning man. He is standing on a black paw print, which he had adopted as his new logo and featured on the front of the CD cover. He may have got the idea from the family cat or from the sign by the roadside outside Framlingham for the Earl Soham Veterinary Centre.

The overall effect is inoffensive, but neither the song nor the video hinted at the artist Ed Sheeran would become. He is definitely a work in progress, although it reflected the mindset in the Sheeran household. Keith Krykant, who continued to be impressed with how they went about achieving their goals, observes, ‘His parents took Ed very seriously. Because of their background in media and promotion, they were already treating Ed like a celebrity – quite extraordinary really.’

Part of the necessary process of celebrity was to take Ed out of his comfort zone in Framlingham and into the wider world. He continued to hope that contact with Nizlopi would prove the answer. They were firmly established as his favourite band but he was having no luck in engaging their attention. Ed was among the collection of fans known as the People’s Republic of Nizlopi, who knew the words to every song. Damien Rice was not forgotten, but Ed wanted to meet the duo from Royal Leamington Spa who offered so much more than one hit record. While he was enthusiastic about Gary Dunne’s looping at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Nizlopi moved him. He was spellbound by the way they engaged with the audience and made everyone at the venue feel involved.

Nizlopi were two old school friends – Luke Concannon, who sang and played guitar, and John Parker, a beatboxer and double bassist. Like Ed, they both have strong Irish connections. John’s mother is Irish and Luke’s grandparents were from Kerry and Roscommon, while his dad, Kieron, is an accomplished musician and keen piper. The boys grew up playing in folk-music sessions and festivals, singing in pubs and busking in Ireland. Luke explains, ‘It was very relatable for Ed. Our families are really quite similar.’

They also had a musical heritage that Ed could appreciate: ‘We had two strands of musical influence. We had the singalong stuff like The Beatles that we used to hear and play in pubs in England, as well as having some rare old times in Dublin. But alongside that, there was also this thing about being a modern young person listening to and playing hip hop. We had to figure out what our music was and so we called it folk hip hop.’

Their background was almost identical to Ed’s. He, too, had absorbed the classic Beatles tracks his dad played in the car, loved Planxty and The Chieftains during his trips to Ireland and had embraced the music of Eminem and Dr Dre. Later, when Ed would describe his own sound, he called it ‘acoustic hip hop’.

Luke and John needed to find a name for themselves. One afternoon they were sitting with their then band in the kitchen at Luke’s home when his mum mentioned to her son that a family friend, Di Nizlopi, was popping around on Sunday. One of the band misheard and asked ‘What’s a dinizlopi?’ thinking it was some weird dinosaur. Everybody laughed, and there and then they decided to call themselves Nizlopi, a Hungarian name. Luke liked the idea in particular because he had a ‘lust’ for the family’s daughter, Nina.

When he left school, Luke studied English at Sussex University and after he had graduated invited John to join him in Brighton. They spent time gigging around the town while writing and rehearsing much of their first album, Half These Songs Are About You