the wedding. He melted all his gold teeth in his dental surgery and turned them into a wedding ring.’
Exactly how much of the story is true and how much is artistic licence is a guessing game that fans can play with the majority of Ed’s songs. He takes a genuine fact or feeling as a starting point and develops it into a song that resonates with every listener. Everyone has their own stories of love and can relate to the observation that Bill had never seen ‘such beauty before’ when he met his future wife. Fortunately the song met with a thumbs-up from his gran, although she was very modest about it: ‘Oh, it’s fine as long as I’m not there while he’s playing it!’
In real life, Bill and Anne married in 1951 and settled in South Norwood, an area of London south of the River Thames, which seems slightly less glamorous than the ‘Wexford border’ Ed sings about.
Bill’s second love – after his family – remained boxing while he built a thriving dental practice. When his own boxing days had passed, he became more involved in the administration of the sport as a respected steward. A popular figure, he was in charge of many of the biggest nights in British boxing and was on good terms with the sport’s then best-known names, including Muhammad Ali, Henry Cooper and, Ireland’s finest, Barry McGuigan.
While boxing might seem an unlikely bedfellow for the artistic world so enjoyed by his son John, Bill had a passion for collecting art connected to the sport. When the family moved to the quieter waters of Chislehurst in Kent, he filled the house with paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculpture and silver.
In his affectionate tribute to his father after his death at eighty-six in December 2013, John recalled how, in later years, Bill had given away most of his collection to friends. Touchingly, he gave the World Light Heavyweight Championship belt and trophy, won by Freddie Mills, back to the boxer’s widow, Chrissie.
Two years before Ed was born, his Irish grandparents retired to the same farmhouse where Anne had been born in County Wexford. In ‘Nancy Mulligan’, they have twenty-two grandchildren. By the time of Bill’s death that number had risen to twenty-three and there were also four great-grandchildren, a number that Ed has often said he is looking forward to increasing.
Bill loved to show the finer points of boxing to the younger members of the family. Ed’s cousin Jethro Sheeran, better known as the recording artist Alonestar, became a huge fan of the sport, especially after Bill gave him a video one Christmas of Sugar Ray Leonard versus Marvin Hagler, one of the most celebrated fights of all time. From an early age he would be down at Bill’s gym practising Sugar Ray’s moves. Jethro, like many of the younger generation, idolised his grandfather: ‘He always instilled into us to be humble and respect others.’
It’s easy to imagine Bill teaching Ed, who was quite a small boy, self-defence. Anne proudly remembers that her grandson was ‘lovely as a kid’. Ed revelled in his visits to the farm in the summer holidays when he would camp with his cousins in the big barn beside the house. He forged a lifetime love of Ireland, its people and its traditional music, and still visits his grandmother whenever he can.
Boxing proved to be the focus of the 2017 video for ‘Shape of You’, Ed’s biggest-selling single to date. He displayed some promising moves as an aspiring boxer in love with a female fighter in his gym. By then his grandfather had died, after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease but, in the poignant ‘Afire Love’, Ed recalls his dad telling him as a boy that it wasn’t his grandfather’s fault he no longer recognised his grandson’s face.
Bill was president of the Gorey Boxing Club and members formed a guard of honour for his funeral, paying a personal tribute to him: ‘In Bill Sheeran we have lost a mentor, inspiration and role model whose generosity and kindness has helped thousands of young men and women.’ He was buried with a pair of boxing gloves in his coffin. In his obituary for Bill, published in the Guy’s Hospital journal, the GKT Gazette, John Sheeran recalled his father’s car-bumper sticker, which robustly declared, ‘Pugilism not vandalism’.
Ed fell in love with the Irish music he heard on his childhood holidays. He adored the traditional Irish folk groups Planxty and The Chieftains, but most of all he loved an artist who, ironically, he had first heard his dad play on one of the long drives south from Yorkshire. Van Morrison was the first of three major musical influences on Ed Sheeran. He listened to his classic albums Moondance and Irish Heartbeat and was hooked.
Moondance, which was released in 1970, is often hailed as a masterpiece of modern music and remains one of the best-loved albums of all time. Perhaps more interesting with regard to Ed’s musical development was Irish Heartbeat, a collaboration between Van and The Chieftains.
Van, who was born in Belfast, had been an Irish icon for more than thirty years since he first came to prominence in the group Them, with whom he recorded classics such as ‘Here Comes the Night’ and, more significantly, ‘Gloria’. His most famous song, ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ was his first solo single in 1967. He became a master of soulful blues, releasing a string of acclaimed albums.
While he had never deserted his Irish background in his songs, Irish Heartbeat was a return to more traditional music – albeit overlaid with Van’s inimitable vocal style. Three tracks in particular resonated with young Ed, who was seven when the album was released in 1998. He loved the folk songs ‘Carrickfergus’, ‘On Raglan Road’ and, most of all, the elegiac title track. Ed has yet to release these songs himself but acknowledged, ‘Van Morrison is a key influence in the music that I make.’ He paid homage to Carrickfergus by including a reference to it in ‘Galway Girl’ as well as mentioning ‘Van the Man’ in his hit, ‘Shape of You’.
And if you had been lucky enough to be drinking in the back room of the Cobden Arms in Mornington Crescent in 2010, you might have heard nineteen-year-old Ed enjoying a pint with musician friends and singing these favourites at the top of his voice. That, though, was many years in the future and the last thing on the mind of a quiet schoolboy still trying to conquer his stammer. It was time to do something about that.
3
Ed was trying all sorts of things to help with his stutter. He had coaching sessions with a speech therapist and took a variety of different homeopathic remedies but nothing seemed to make much difference. He didn’t have the worst stammer in the world but it did become more pronounced when he was excited and rushing to search for the right word. Interestingly, it didn’t affect him when he was singing in the choir or in his dad’s car. But conversation remained difficult.
When Ed was nine, Eminem was one of the biggest acts in the charts. Rap music was selling millions of records and Eminem was at the forefront of its popularity. When he released The Marshall Mathers LP – his real name – in May 2010, it became the fastest-selling album of all time in the US. More importantly, perhaps, his work was well received by the critics, who compared his autobiographical songs to those of Bob Dylan.
In Framlingham, this had passed John Sheeran by as he continued to play his old favourites. His brother, Ed’s uncle Jim, was more enlightened about contemporary music and told him that Eminem was the next Dylan. John was always receptive to new ideas across the artistic spectrum so he went ahead and bought the album for his younger son even though he had never listened to it and had no idea that it contained controversial and sexually explicit lyrics. Ed would later describe rap music as storytelling.
Ed had a great capacity to absorb things – he had the musical equivalent of a photographic memory. He set about learning the songs on the album, including all the bad language: ‘I learned every word of it, back to front, by the age of ten.’ That would invariably be the case with music he liked. He had an enviable talent for working out how to play songs just by listening to them.
He discovered that rap was the best therapy for his speech. In 2015, while receiving an award at the New York benefit gala for the American Institute for Stuttering, Ed spoke about being indebted to Eminem: ‘He raps very fast and very melodically, and very