4
Ed was very upset. Without warning, his first guitar teacher had decided that teaching wasn’t for him. Playing the guitar was crucially important to Ed and this seemed like a hammer blow to the twelve-year-old boy. He took it very badly. His mother recognised that she needed to act quickly to rekindle his enthusiasm or Ed would go back into his shell. She started asking around to see if someone else in Framlingham might take on her son, and discovered that two neighbours in the street were both using the same virtuoso guitarist to teach their children. They spoke very highly of jazz musician Keith Krykant, whom they’d found through an ad in a local community paper, and thought he would be ideal for Ed.
Keith, who was in his early fifties, had only moved recently to the town but, coincidentally, he had already heard of Ed. He had started teaching Richard Croney, one of the children who lived across the road from the Sheerans. One afternoon Keith was walking home with Richard when they saw a ginger-haired boy on the other side of the street. Richard piped up, ‘That’s Edward Sheeran,’ and told Keith that Ed played concerts in the town and was already quite well known locally.
Keith and his wife, Sally Voakes, a jazz singer, had started to play gigs in the area and were building a following themselves. Sometimes it would just be the two of them, the Sally Voakes Duo or, for other nights, they might be joined by three or four local musicians.
One evening they were booked as a duo to play the Crown Hotel, which occupied a central position in Market Square. Imogen and John decided to go.
They were impressed, not just with Keith’s playing but also by his calm demeanour. They approached him and asked if he might consider teaching Ed. He agreed to give him a weekly lesson, charging £20 for an hour. The lessons, usually in Ed’s untidy teenage bedroom, continued for the next five years and complemented his development as a guitarist and, just as importantly, as a songwriter.
Ed already had a few guitars hanging on the bedroom wall. His rock guitar had pride of place over the bed. He preferred to decorate the orange walls of his room with his favourite instruments rather than posters of footballers or pop stars. When he grew tired of one or no longer played it, the guitar would be banished under the bed.
One of the first things Keith noticed in the room was an Epiphone Les Paul Sunburst guitar. He offered Ed a Bigsby tremolo unit that he wasn’t using at the time, and popped it round to the house. By the time of the next lesson, Ed had put it on and was practising using it. Ed and his mum were hugely appreciative of the gesture, which helped teacher and pupil form a bond of mutual respect and the Krykants and Sheerans to forge a lasting friendship.
Keith quickly realised that Ed’s playing was ‘pretty advanced’ for his age and that he also had a great deal of confidence in his own ability. Laughing, he recalls, ‘He’d got a little bit of an inflated ego. He once said that I was the only guitarist he’d seen that was better than him. He was only thirteen!’
Musically, Ed was at a crossroads. Like many teenage boys, his initial ambition was to be a rock god. He had his electric guitar, admired Eric Clapton and others, and had formed his own group with two friends from school, Fred and Rowley Clifford. They called themselves Rusty and played heavy-metal covers, mainly Guns N’ Roses. Their showstopper when they appeared at the old Drill Hall in Framlingham was the American band’s most famous hit ‘Sweet Child of Mine’. Ed liked that song but wasn’t wild about the rest of the material.
While Fred did his best impersonation of charismatic singer Axl Rose, Ed took on the Slash role of lead guitarist. He relished the solo, meticulously learning every note in his bedroom after school. He didn’t sing because he wasn’t any good at it. ‘I couldn’t really hold a tune until I was sixteen,’ he admitted.
Eric Clapton’s most famous band, Cream, had been a trio, as was the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Rory Gallagher’s Taste. It seemed the perfect number to draw attention to the guitarist. ‘They took it very seriously,’ observes Georgie Ross. As well as various assemblies and low-key school events, they played at the annual charity concert at Thomas Mills, one of the big occasions of the year.
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
