Live in the Bing: Ed Sheeran

Anyone who comes from England must be good, or is that just because I am a tad biased? Ed is 21 going on quite a bit more I terms of his experience and sophistication, while keeping that almost innocent boy look. With his guitar in hand he performs an interesting merge of hip hop, pop, ballad. His English fans have already given him (or he has given them) 10 hits along with a multi-platinum debut album (The A Team). Last year he won 3 awards and this year has already won awards for British Breakthrough Act and British Solo Male Artist along with a bunch of other nominations. This is a guy who is not afraid to work hard. In 2009 he performed 312 gigs as well as recording an EP.

Now he wishes to take America by storm and I caught him playing in the Bing Lounge thanks to kink.fm. The first thing you notice is the beaten up guitar sitting there and the scruffy hair and a few days of ginger stubble. He told us he had another guitar, almost exactly that same but not quite as beaten up, but he thought he would use this one. Rather than going to college, he headed off to London at the age of 16, with no money and nowhere to live. He said he had a rucksack full of CDs and he would sell a few each night and that funded everything.

He has been noticed by Elton John. Ed said that Elton, or should we say Sir Elton, buys a copy of every CD released every week and has three copies delivered to his houses and he listens to them all. And if he likes it he will “ring them up”. Elton’s advice to him was that America is quite a big country. Texas is 4 times the size of the UK, and it took him 5 years to crack the UK, so with 50 states, it could take quite a time. So everyone agreed that we were quite happy to have him cracking Portland.

He is currently opening for Snow Patrol on their US tour. He said he feels lucky that they are giving him 35 minutes at the beginning of the show. He knows they are here to see Snow Patrol so he just wants to make sure he “entertains the hell out of them”.

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