Everyone goes into a huge romantic sigh. Instead of the thousand stars in the lyric, I can see a thousand and more torch lights from mobile phones shimmering in the darkened stands. Considering that he has only released three mainstream albums, Ed has already produced many classics – songs that will be first dances at weddings, reminders of first dates and kisses or just simply ‘our songs’.
This is the beginning of four peerless ballads. He follows ‘Thinking Out Loud’ with ‘One’ and ‘Photograph’, also from the × album. During the latter, the big screens behind him flash up images of Ed as a child. Could it get any more poignant? And then he plays ‘Perfect’.
Ed explains one of his secrets. This song is ‘super-personal to me’, he reveals. We know it’s written for Cherry but it doesn’t have the same emotion for everyone: ‘It’s my song before it comes out, but when it comes out, it becomes your song.’ This is a universal truth about music.
As if to prove that point, the grey-haired couple behind me put their arms around each other. The young mum next to me picks up her son and cuddles him, while a few rows down I can see a small boy standing between his mum and dad and they all have their arms around each other. It’s an ‘I was there’ moment that they will always remember. Perfect, indeed.
‘Nancy Mulligan’, the song he wrote about his Irish grandparents, wakes everyone from their romantic reverie and we all start dancing again – all except one superdad I spotted, who was determined to stay seated while his young daughter bopped away enthusiastically next to him. Even he got up for ‘Sing’, the closing number.
Ed pops offstage briefly to change his shirt. He’s back wearing a number-eleven jersey with Gareth Bale on the back, which gets a cheer. The reception for the first number of the encore, his biggest hit to date – ‘Shape of You’ – is the loudest of the night. He finishes with a frantic wall-of-noise version of ‘You Need Me, I Don’t Need You’, which is the song he traditionally performs as his last of the night.
Part of me thinks he should have ended with ‘Thinking Out Loud’ or ‘Perfect’, but that’s clearly not what he’s decided to do. He wants to leave with a dramatic climax, and that he achieves. This is the song that sums up his philosophy: be true to your own dreams and follow them. He wishes us a safe journey home and is gone – no fuss, no unnecessary milking of the applause, no insincere ‘I love you, Cardiff’ nonsense. He came, he played, he conquered.
On my way out with 60,000 other people, I thought about the end of the video for ‘Photograph’, perhaps my favourite. There’s a shot of Ed at the top of a hill and a voice asks, ‘Are you at the top of the mountain?’ His phenomenal success – in terms of record sales, downloads, streaming, audience figures – doesn’t lie. He is unarguably at the top of the mountain, looking down on the rest of the music business. My job, I thought, is to discover how on earth a scruffy, ginger-haired bloke climbed up there.
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Undeniably, Edward Sheeran was a cute baby. The proof is in the many home movies his doting parents, John and Imogen, took of their second son as he crawled and gurgled, whooped and squealed around their first family home.
The footage was used charmingly in the nostalgia-packed video that accompanied his 2014 ballad ‘Photograph’. While the sweet film had little to do with a melancholic lyric that declared how much ‘loving can hurt’, it provided a fascinating window on to his world.
We see Ed grow from baby to small boy, with ginger hair, large blue NHS specs and a small port-wine stain near his left eye, to a teenager busking in the street while learning his craft and, finally, to the man acknowledging the applause of thousands at a pop festival.
The large late-Victorian stone house that is the setting for many of the clips is not, however, in his beloved Suffolk, the county so closely associated with Ed, but in West Yorkshire where he was born, and where he spent his early years in the cosmopolitan market town of Hebden Bridge.
John and Imogen Sheeran lived halfway up Birchcliffe Road, one of the steepest hills in the town and a lung-bursting trek from the centre for a young mum with a baby and a toddler. Their first child, Matthew Patrick, was born eight miles away in Halifax General Hospital not long after the couple had relocated from London. Edward Christopher followed just under two years later, on 17 February 1991.
Calderdale, the valley in which Hebden Bridge sits, is ideal for bringing up a young family if you want to be sure of fresh air, spectacular countryside and wonderful walks. The road the Sheerans settled in winds its way to the crest of the hill where the views over the town and its distinctive streets of stone-built cottages are breathtaking.
Everything about Hebden Bridge shouts character. The town, which takes its name from the old packhorse bridge across the River Hebden, has bundles of it – from the quirky craft shops, the organic restaurants and boutique cafés to the tall, narrow terraced houses that seem to cling to the hillside as if stuck there with glue. Recently, the town has featured as a location for the hit television series Last Tango in Halifax and Happy Valley.
When Ed was born, the place was a work in progress – more basic and much less touristy than it is today. It had thrived as a bustling mill town specialising in corduroy and moleskin goods, but that prosperity ended in the 1970s when the textile industry went into decline. Hebden Bridge began to flourish again towards the end of that decade when it was transformed into a destination for creative minds and free spirits. It became well known for its strong sense of community and tolerance, in particular becoming a welcoming haven for lesbians and gay men.
Local author Paul Barker explained, ‘It was a small mill town in steep decline. There were lots of squatters who had creative skills – writing, painting or music – so it started as an arts-based thing. It’s a tolerant place, which allowed this scene to develop. People came to visit friends and realised the freedom to be able to live how they wanted.’
A strong literary connection already existed, although not a particularly happy one. The controversial poet laureate Ted Hughes was born in the village of Mytholmroyd, two miles down the road towards Halifax. His former home at Lumb Bank, two miles in the other direction, is now a residential writing centre.
Of more interest to literary pilgrims is the grave of Hughes’s first wife, Sylvia Plath, in the village church in nearby Heptonstall, where his parents lived. She immortalised the location in her bleak poem ‘November Graveyard’ that spoke of ‘skinflint trees’. The revered American poet had tragically committed suicide in London in 1963 but Hughes arranged for her to be buried in this most picturesque of locations. Many devotees of her work wishing to pay their respects stay in Hebden Bridge.
John and Imogen were drawn to the artistic nature of the town when they decided to settle there. Hebden Bridge was perfectly situated for a young and ambitious couple forging strong reputations in the world of art. They had begun promising careers in London where they were brought up in neighbouring districts south of the river – John in South Norwood and Imogen, a vivacious blonde, in Forest Hill. They were married in May 1984 at the historic Christ’s Chapel of Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift in the aptly named Gallery Road, Dulwich. He was twenty-six and she was twenty-four.
John was always a man who grasped an opportunity, impatient to make something of his life. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he had been appointed keeper of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1980 at the age of twenty-three. He had been taken under the wing of the gallery’s charismatic first director,