Ed Sheeran loves Ireland – he kept saying so when he played 3Arena in Dublin last month. Alas, we don’t get much of a look-in across his new Disney+ series, which accompanies the singer on his marathon run of stadium gigs in 2022 but skips the Irish shows with which he kicked off the tour. The closest to an Irish moment is a brief shot of a tricolour. It is affixed to the ceiling of the pub he has built on his estate in Suffolk, hanging opposite a Union Jack.
The private pub, says Sheeran, is one of the two things about him that everyone knows about. The other is that he’s always being sued. At the time of filming, he was batting off two plagiarism lawsuits. The first, in the UK, concerned Shape Of You, the other, unfolding in the US, focused on Thinking Out Loud.
That second case, brought by the estate of Marvin Gaye, is still proceeding. This week Sheeran has said that he will quit music if the decision goes against him. For that reason, his four-part Disney + documentary, Ed Sheeran: The Sum of it All (Disney + from today) is perhaps a tad off the pace in its chronicling of a period of unprecedented upheaval in the life of Sheeran, one of the world’s most streamed artists and, with his scruffy hair and hand-dog demeanour, surely its least likely pop icon.
Nonetheless, director David Soutar does exemplary work capturing an artist at the crossroads. The Sum Of It All stands as an impressive example of a music documentary that grapples with a subject broader than the tribulations of the music industry.
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Because while – lawsuits aside – Sheeran has never soared higher as an artist, privately his life has been rocked by a series of challenges. In February 2022 year his wife, Cherry Seaborn, pregnant with their second child, was diagnosed with cancer. That same month, Sheeran’s close friend, Jamal Edwards, died suddenly.
Seaborn would recover and, as of now, is in the clear. But Sheeran is still reeling from the loss of Edwards, who put the weight of his online platform behind the songwriter when he was just a scruffy urchin from Ipswich. The centrepiece of the four-part series is a concert at a church in London. Sheeran, debuting new material written in the white heat of grief, breaks into sobs. “I didn’t feel like an entertainer, I felt like a guy on a stage, crying,” he says afterwards.
We should never entirely believe what we see on camera – especially in a rockumentary made with the blessing of its subject. Still, the picture painted of Sheeran in the Sum of It All is of a stunningly normal superstar.
He hasn’t been crippled by fame. Seaborn, he says, helped him deal with the paranoia he used to feel when fans recognised him in public. And he understands that his mega-celebrity period will eventually sputter out. Over dinner, he tells his wife that, when their daughters are older, he’ll able to spend more time with them because his career will have slowed down.
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Sheeran’s new album, Subtract, will explore in further detail his grief for Edwards and the turmoil he and his wife went through as she received treatment for cancer. Whether or not the record is his swan song will, if we are to believe Sheeran, hinge on the outcome of the Thinking Out Loud trial. Regardless of what happens, Ed Sheeran: The Sum Of It All is a moving portrait of the artist as a young man in the spotlight.
It will be lapped up by Sheeran fans. But even Ed agnostics will be fascinated by the singer’s struggle to create a place of calm for himself and his family as stormy waters do their best to capsize him.
