Ed Sheeran has some famous friends. In a new podcast interview with Louis Theroux, he namechecks (among others) Van Morrison, Eminem and Elton John (or simply ‘Elton’, as Sheeran refers to him) giving us a little insight into his encounters with each of them.
There was also talk of Bob Dylan. Sheeran has never met The Bard, but he has, in a slightly indirect way, helped to fund his lifestyle.
That’s because, back in 2012, Sheeran featured on Watchtower, a track by British rapper Devlin. This uses elements of Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower - including an interpolation of the guitar part from Jimi Hendrix’s classic cover - and was subsequently synced to various TV films productions, generating increased royalties that Dylan got a significant portion of.
“I met Dylan’s manager and they were just like, ‘Bob’s very grateful for all the sync money’ of that song,” says Sheeran. “Because he obviously owns 100% of that tune.”
Sheeran admits that he doesn’t know if Dylan has ever actually heard Watchtower or whether it only registered with him after it started swelling his coffers, but at least he has some kind of connection.
One artist who Sheeran definitely has broken bread with is Van Morrison. He says that he first met the Northern Irish singer-songwriter when he got a 6am call to his hotel room from someone saying that “Mr Morrison is in the lobby - he wants to have breakfast with you.”
“And I was like half asleep and half drunk,” says Sheeran. “So I just hung up and I was like, ‘I have no idea who Mr Morrison is.’”
Fortunately for Ed - who’s a big fan of Van the Man - the person on the other end of the phone tried again, this time clarifying who they were talking about.
“And I suddenly sort of woke up, had a really quick shower, ran downstairs and there he was waiting for me and we had breakfast together, which is really surreal,” remembers Sheeran.
What did they talk about, though? “One of the subjects was actually Spotify,” says Ed. “Spotify was quite a new thing at that point and he was… I had embraced Spotify quite early in my career and I think he was, like, asking me to explain Spotify to him.”
We’re guessing that Morrison wanted to know about how the streaming platform worked rather than how to install the app on his phone, but who knows?
Asked by Theroux if he found Morrison to be a bit grumpy, as some others have reported, Sheeran responded: “I think anyone I’ve met in the industry can be grumpy if you meet them in the wrong way and I think I met him as an artist… a fellow artist and we had a lovely conversation. I’ve met him since and really get on with him.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Sheeran says that he and Eminem share a similar sense of humour (“he likes fucking with you”) and that he sent the rapper a Nintendo 64 console and a copy of classic James Bond game GoldenEye, which he still considers to be “the best first person shooter there is.”
And Sheeran has Elton John (who still insists on mis-pronouncing his surname as ‘Sheer-ann’, it turns out) to thank for his habit of buying a big stack of new album releases on vinyl every week (he also collects cassettes, it turns out): “I sort of wanted to replicate that,” says Sheeran, “so I’ve kind of got his setup now - all the new releases come in and I listen to as many of them as I can.”
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