Ed Sheeran birthday: 10 pivotal moments that took him from zero to hero

We chart his mind-boggling rise, from playing gigs in people’s back gardens to becoming the biggest UK artist of the decade
Ed Sheeran Mathematics Tour
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Jochan Embley17 February 2021

Over the course of the last decade or so, Ed Sheeran went from a gigging Suffolk teenager with an acoustic guitar and a loop pedal, to someone who’s played in front of the Queen, sold out arenas around the world and, by most measures, become one of the very biggest musicians to ever walk the planet.

So… how exactly did he do it? Here, we’ve picked out 10 pivotal moments from across his career, starting from his very first musical release back in the mid-Noughties, and taking us all the way up to the 2010s. It’s been quite the ride.

2005: Releases first ever CD, almost immediately hopes everyone forgets about it

No-one really wants to revisit the art of their early teenage years, and especially not Sheeran. Aged 13, the fledgling artist released a promo CD called Spinning Man, with “most of the songs about a girl called Claire”, Sheeran later recalled. But rather than parade it as proof of his early promise, Sheeran has since set about making sure no-one ever gets their hands on one. Only 20 copies are thought to exist, and Sheeran owns 19 of them. That other copy? It managed to escape Sheeran’s grasp, and in September last year, was sold at auction for £50,000.

2008: Moves to London, starts gigging incessantly

We’ve heard it all before: small-town kid moves to the big city to follow their dreams. Countless people do it to no avail, but when Sheeran left school aged 16 and relocated to London from the dozy market town of Framlingham, he was hellbent on bucking the trend. Most nights he surfed sofas, crashed on floors or, on occasion, waited until the Underground opened at 5am and got a few hours’ sleep on the Circle Line. All the while, he was playing music like his life depended on it, either busking, spending time in the studio or playing gigs at any venue that would have him — most estimates reckon he took to the stage more than 300 times in 2009.

2010: Wows the internet with You Need Me, I Don’t Need You on SBTV

At the dawn of the 2010s, YouTube channel SBTV was the place to go if you wanted to keep up with youth culture. It had been charting the rise of grime and UK rap for years, but when Ed Sheeran popped up, things went stratospheric. His loop-pedal wizardry and tri-lunged rapping skills were on full display, alerting the world to just how far this young musician could go. It currently sits on 11m views, making it SBTV’s eighth most popular video (the most viewed is, of course, an Ed Sheeran remix).

2011: Releases The A Team, wins the nation’s heart

If the SBTV video showed everyone just how technically talented Sheeran was, then The A Team proved his ability to strike a sentimental chord with a wider audience. The lead single from his commercial breakthrough album, +, it didn’t quite top the charts in the UK, but did make top 10, as it did in a handful of countries around the world. But it’s where the song took Sheeran that made it so important. He played it in front of the Queen during her Diamond Jubilee concert in 2012 (that’s right, Her Maj listening to a song about drug-addicted prostitute) and a year later, alongside Sir Elton John at the Grammys. “National treasure” potential? It certainly seemed that way.

2012: Sheeran takes America

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Another cliché busted by Sheeran: popular UK artist tries to make it big in the States and… actually succeeds. With the winds of his multi-million-selling debut album in his sails, Sheeran crossed the Atlantic and played a headline tour of some pretty sizeable venues, and then upgraded to arenas as Taylor Swift’s opening act during the North America leg of her Red tour. Just a month after finishing that, in October 2013, Sheeran went one — or, in fact, three — better, selling out a trio of shows at New York’s Madison Square Gardens, shifting some 60,000 tickets in the process. America, consider yourself taken.

2014: Transforms UK wedding culture with Thinking Out Loud

If you’ve been to a wedding sometime in the last seven years, chances are you’ve watched a pair of newlyweds awkwardly shuffling along to Thinking Out Loud. Sheeran’s stab at uber-sentimentality was a monumental success, not just in becoming the go-to track for first dances, but also in its commercial performance — it spent a full year in the UK top 40 in 2015, has since gone triple platinum in this country and has combined plays on YouTube and Spotify of 4.8 billion. It hasn’t gone without controversy, though, being the subject of an ultimately unsuccessful court case on behalf of Marvin Gaye’s estate, who took umbrage at the song’s alleged similarities to Let’s Get It On. At least it’ll make for a fun game of spot the difference next time you have to sit through it at a wedding reception.

2014: Develops a taste for slightly peculiar cameos

Shortland Street is New Zealand’s longest-running soap opera. It’s something along the lines of Holby-City-meets-Hollyoaks, and it’s also where Ed Sheeran made one of his first major cameos. It’s something he’s been pretty keen on doing over the years, most famously appearing as a singing soldier in Game of Thrones, and as a rather bemused version of himself in both Bridget Jones’s Baby and Yesterday. He’s not exactly the next De Niro, but it’s a measure of his star power that he keeps popping up.

2017: Redefines “absolutely supermassive megahit” with Shape of You

Thought Thinking Out Loud was ubiquitous? Us pre-2017 folk hadn’t seen anything yet. The inescapable dancehall-pop groove of Shape of You was, and still is, Sheeran’s biggest hit by some distance. If he wasn’t already among the planet’s biggest pop stars, this cemented it; number one in 34 countries, first song to hit two billion Spotify streams, biggest selling song of the decade in the UK, etc, etc, etc. But musically, it once again proved something that we had all known since his earliest work, that Sheeran knew how to write a thoroughly bulletproof hit (even if he did take more than a bit of inspiration from No Scrubs by TLC in the melodies, something that led to all members of the girl group being given co-writing credits).

2017: Releases ÷, then tours and tours and tours

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The work ethic that got Sheeran through his early days as an unfamous gigger in London is something that never seems to have left him. After releasing ÷, he could quite fairly have done a few festival headline slots, maybe a few arenas, and then called it quits. Instead, he embarked on a 29-month, 260-show world tour, taking in six continents (you can bet he would have played the Antarctica Arena if it existed). The work paid off, with the shows becoming the highest grossing tour of all time, selling more than 4.8m tickets and grossing somewhere in the region of £341.7m — that’s roughly £1.3m per gig.

2019: Completes a decade of modern domination

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A list of Sheeran’s commercial achievements could fill a small book, but one of the most illuminating is his near-total dominance over the world of streaming. When Spotify released their decade-long survey of listener habits in 2019, Sheeran came second in the list of the most streamed artists worldwide, beaten only by Drake. In a 10-year period in which the music industry got turned on its head, Sheeran managed to stay on top as a very modern star.

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