Ed Sheeran - Sean Smith

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an outstanding school. And he managed to convince us all to go on this journey with him.’ Ofsted agreed, declaring, ‘This is a good school where pupils make good progress and reach high standards in an atmosphere of civilised collaboration.’

      Ed seemed equally at ease with boys and girls. His parents’ close friends, Dan Woodside and Wendy Baker, had two daughters. Lauren and Martha were of similar ages to the Sheeran boys, and the families spent many sociable Sundays together. Dan was a decorative artist and Wendy an artist and art teacher, so they shared John and Imogen’s creative tastes. Dan had worked on major restoration projects, including the ceiling at the entrance to the National Gallery, London, and the gilding of the Crimson Drawing Room at Windsor Castle.

      Dan and Wendy had moved to the town a couple of years after their like-minded friends and turned their new home in Market Square into the Dancing Goat Café, which soon became a focal point for wiling away sunny afternoons. Ed and his new friends from Thomas Mills would gravitate there after school. He was always calling round on his own as well, to see if Lauren was coming out. In recognition of their families’ long-standing friendship, Ed would give Dan and Wendy a gold record of his first album +, which now hangs proudly on the café wall.

      Ed had a close circle of friends but was never constrained by Framlingham. The regular trips to Ireland and London, combined with his mum and dad’s sociability, had broadened his horizons. John continued to extend his son’s musical education by taking him to concerts and he managed to get tickets for a great night in April 2003, when Ed was twelve: they saw Paul McCartney in concert at Earl’s Court. The most famous name in pop played a mammoth set of thirty-seven songs that spanned his entire career, from the heyday of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo material. David Lister, writing in the Independent, observed that Paul dished up a generous two-and-a-half-hour set of classics with ‘such panache and emotion that it made the nerves tingle’. It was a tour de force and Ed decided that he preferred it to the Green Day gig.

      Friends became used to Ed taking a guitar everywhere. By this time, he had a Faith, a decent-enough learning instrument. It was like a young child’s teddy bear: he was rarely seen without it. He showed precocious bravery when he took to the stage and played ‘Layla’ at his school’s spring charity concert. Inside, he wasn’t feeling too confident but he blossomed in front of an audience of several hundred people in the school hall. By then he had mastered the song, so playing it was second nature and, to his relief, he was warmly applauded: ‘It was fun. No one could have said a bad word, because I was so young and enthusiastic.’

      At the end of his first summer term, Ed’s year went to a resort in Holland, which was very exciting as they would all be away from home for a week. John and Imogen were keen for their sons to have adventures that would take them away from the narrow confines of Framlingham. Naturally, Ed took his acoustic guitar with him. On the coach he was determined to give everyone a song. His art teacher, Nicky Sholl, recalls that they asked for volunteers to go up and do a turn: ‘Of course Ed went up and sang a song and then went back to his seat. And then he came back and sang one again. And everyone was like “Get him off the microphone!” It was very funny.’

      He was also one of 140 pupils who sat around on the beach and chilled out at the end of a sightseeing day as the sun went down. Georgie Ross has never forgotten it: ‘Ed just got up with his guitar and got them all singing along with him. He was already a real hit with this crowd of young people. He sang “Stan”.’

      It was a perfect end to the day, although Ed was about to discover that his musical progress would have its downs as well as ups.

      4

       Spinning Man

      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

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