over by the time he recorded the album, although he was upset when they broke up.
For his musical inspiration, Ed cites Damien Rice, Eric Clapton and ‘Jimmy H’ (presumably Jimi Hendrix) but there is sketchy evidence of their influence on the album. There’s something of Hendrix and Clapton but Spinning Man bears no resemblance to Damien Rice, who really doesn’t do solos, big riffs or long instrumentals on an electric guitar. At thirteen, Ed was still searching for his own sound and his first album was really a hangover from his schoolboy band Rusty. He is, though, too modest about the achievement.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Spinning Man is its maturity, best exemplified by his personal message on the sleeve notes: ‘Songwriting and playing the guitar are like having a direct line to my thoughts and feelings. Everyone has strong feelings whatever their age. We can all feel love, joy, longing, pain and hate.’ His mother may have used her editing skills to help but it clearly reveals Ed’s early self-awareness.
He sent the CD to Lisa Hannigan but wished he had waited when he didn’t get a response. The reaction from those he played it to in Framlingham was very encouraging. Nobody wanted him to lose heart by being over-critical of his first recordings, particularly his mother and father. They agreed that if he wanted to make money out of his music, it had to be recorded to a higher standard than he could achieve in his bedroom. He also needed to work on his singing.
When his mum and dad realised how seriously Ed was taking his music, they asked Keith, who had been a television and radio producer, if he could find a local studio to record some of the songs to a more professional standard: ‘John said to me, “Give him some experience in a studio.”’ John was more interested in Ed spending time in a proper studio than in the finished product.
They found the ideal location just a few miles away in the town of Leiston at the renowned Summerhill School, the progressive educational facility founded by A. S. Neill. His grandson Henry Readhead ran the studio there mainly for the school but said that Ed could come with Keith for a session in March 2005.
Keith agreed to waive his fee as producer for the day in return for an hour or two in which John would show him how to improve his business online and make better connections for his own music and performance. John taught him how to build a network of links so that one gig would lead to another. Imogen told him, ‘It’s the currency of the day.’ That system of barter had served Sheeran Lock well and would continue to be useful to Ed as he sought to promote his work.
For The Orange Room, named in honour of his bedroom, they chose Ed’s five favourite tracks from Spinning Room and put them in a different order: ‘Moody Ballad of Ed’ followed by ‘Misery’, ‘Typical Average’, ‘Addicted’, finishing again with ‘I Love You’.
The most striking improvement from Spinning Man was the use of acoustic guitar and, generally, a better vocal, but his attempt at falsetto on ‘Addicted’ needed plenty of work. Occasionally, there are hints of the later Ed Sheeran. Keith remembers doing his best to convince Ed that he needed to tune his guitar all the time because it would show up on an edit even if it was just slightly out of tune: ‘He was a little bit lazy about it.’
Ed had turned fourteen and was beginning to stick up for himself musically. When Keith hinted that a vocal was just a little bit out of tune and they should go back and do it again, Ed was quite clear: ‘I like that. I want to keep that as it is.’ Henry acted as sound engineer and one of his protégées, Megumi Miyoshi, who was sixteen and a promising singer, helped with mixing and some backing vocals.
The Orange Room clearly illustrates the growing influence of Damien Rice, although ‘Typical Average’ still sounds like Green Day jamming after a heavy night out and is not remotely related to anything from O.
Ed saved up and pooled all his resources to have a thousand CDs produced, which was quite optimistic. He proudly took them to school and offered them round for a fiver. Most of them sat around in boxes at home, where they remained until he became famous. Then he had to ban his mum from selling either The Orange Room or Spinning Man.
In an interview on The Jonathan Ross Show in December 2014, Ed played a short segment of a song from his phone. It was ‘Addicted’ and sounded very average. His guitar work was good but not the vocal, which had cats running for cover. In Ed’s defence, his vocal problems were mainly because his voice had yet to break so he struggled with intonation. But as Ed accurately commented, ‘You have to learn and really practise.’
5
One evening Keith and Sally Krykant were among a group of friends invited round to John and Imogen’s house for dinner. When they arrived, Preston Reed was already sitting at the dining table. Anyone taking an interest in guitar would have known about him, a striking figure who featured often in the serious music press talking about his unique playing style.
Ed had noticed in a guitar magazine that the virtuoso player was offering places on a summer-school venture at his home in Scotland. He would be teaching his percussive method, known in the business as ‘tapping’, to a few chosen students during the summer holidays. Ed set about convincing his parents that the workshop was vital to his development as a musician.
Preston, it transpired, was playing a gig locally and the Sheerans went along. Instead of grabbing a quick autograph, they invited him to stay at the house; he accepted. Keith was particularly impressed: ‘This guy is a world-class international player, who had developed his own style of playing. It was completely different to just changing the tuning.’
Presumably John and Imogen made a deal involving the ‘currency of the day’ because, during the next summer holidays, Ed set off with his father on a train to Girvan on the Ayrshire coast for a five-day summer workshop. Preston had moved to this beautiful part of Scotland, fifty miles south of Glasgow, from his home in Minneapolis in 2001.
This was not a holiday for Ed, although he and his father managed to fit in a boat trip to Ailsa Craig, the famous granite island in the Firth of Clyde. Preston was impressed by Ed’s work ethic, unusual in one so young: ‘He was intelligent and quick; he very quickly picked up the things he had come up to learn. Even at fourteen, you could tell he had a real determination and ambition.’
The trip was made more memorable for Ed by the presence of the only other student on the trip, an amazing guitar player from Oklahoma called Jocelyn Celaya, who would develop a strong following in subsequent years as Radical Classical. Jocelyn had arrived with her boyfriend, who told everyone that he used to be a gangster in Mexico. Ed, who was enthusiastic about gangsta rap at the time, couldn’t believe he was face to face with a real one and bombarded him with questions. On the last night, everyone got together for a party and Preston played some of his own compositions including ‘Fat Boy’, ‘Metal’ and ‘Ladies Night’. Ed entertained everyone by making up rap lyrics to accompany the music. ‘He just rattled it off,’ recalled Preston. ‘It was quite funny and impressive as well.’
On his return to Framlingham, Ed was not about to become the second Preston Reed but the interlude helped him view the acoustic guitar as more than just a stringed instrument. Preston’s technical innovations showed him ‘the music you could make using the guitar as a source of sounds’. Ed absorbed that lesson from his trip to Scotland and would use it in his own way when he was introduced to an even more important character in his development as a performer.
But, first, he had to go back to school. Ed was fortunate in that it wasn’t just his mum and dad who recognised
