Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Singer-songwriter and musical storyteller with global chart-topping hits and multiple international awards.
On the island
Eight records
that riff just stuck in my mind. That day I was like, I want to be a musician. I want to play guitar. So I got a guitar for Christmas, and that was the first song that I learned, and the only song that I could play for a long time.
Van Morrison and the Chieftains
I come from an Irish family and spent most of my childhood summers and birthdays and Christmases in Ireland listening to trad music, bands like Planxty. And this was a record that my dad played a lot. And this is probably one of my favourite songs in general in life.
I was going to choose another Eminem song, but it was probably not Radio 4 friendly.
Damien Rice was what made me want to write songs. I remember getting home after seeing him and writing four or five songs just in a row like that.
Flooded QuarryFavourite
everything from my live set, you know, the way I control my voice, the way I control the audience, the way I play the guitar, even the way I use beatbox and stuff, this comes from this band.
This one is quite topical because George Michael covered it very beautifully. And it's just one of those songs where you just hear Stevie Wonder really, really let rip on the vocals.
This was in a time where he was using an orchestra for everything and it's like a three part rock opera and it's just phenomenal.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:03What is it about connecting with the people who listen to your music that you like the most?
My songs are not my songs as soon as they're out there. A song like Thinking Out Loud, for instance, when I wrote it, very personal, and then I released it, and suddenly it's no longer my song. It belongs to Stacey, who got married here, or Kevin, who proposed to it, or Dave, who had his first kiss on it. You know, it's because everyone remembers what their first dance was, and the fact that they've kind of bestowed that honour on a song of mine to make it immortal in their lives. The song might not be immortal in the public domain forever, but in that one person's mind, it lives on, which is, I think, pretty cool.
Presenter asks
2:50How do you write a song?
I try to write as much as possible. I'll try to write like four or five songs in a day and just write them as fast as possible. If I'm in like album making mode, it'll be four or five songs a day and there'll be no thought process. It'll just be get a guitar and just write a song. And that will be, you know, twelve out of a hundred might be good. And that's all you really need for an album. So yeah, I write a bunch and scrap a bunch.
Presenter asks
3:18If something has happened to you deeply, do you need to write about it?
Yeah, I think it's a form of therapy, to be honest. I think any time I've ever got down or ever felt low, the one thing that picks me up from that is writing a song about it, because at least you've got a positive experience out of a bad experience or something really happy. You know, you can write a really happy song and that's an even better thing. … I've never dwelled on anything too much. As soon as it's out of me on a song, I kind of move on.
The keepsakes
The book
Philip Pullman
I personally think that's the greatest love story ever told. I don't care what anyone says, I absolutely love it.
The luxury
it's very trivial, but it's a bottle of ketchup. And that is 100% the only thing that I would need to survive.
Presenter asks
8:13Given the intensity of what you're going through [being a solo artist], how do you deal?
Yeah, I don't think I did deal very well with it. I think it's a really weird thing, you know, playing a venue like Wembley Stadium or or similar venues like that worldwide and playing in front of like 87,000 people and walking off and sitting in a dressing room afterwards with nothing but an air conditioning sound, and you're sitting there, but you don't really know how to come down from there. … I will admit I did lose myself for a bit. Like, you can't really not go mental in that setting. But I've quickly realized that sort of my real schoolmates had always been the sort of constant threat of sanity.
Presenter asks
9:18When you said you lost yourself, how did that manifest itself? What did you do?
All of the checkpoints that are on the list for you know, as I said earlier, the things that I said wouldn't surprise me about fame, all of those checkpoints. But I realized my like proper school, I have about 12 really, really close schoolmates that we've kind of been in the same group since we were about 11. And that's been the constant thread of sanity. So I now employ four of them and they work on my tour.
Presenter asks
10:07Was it somebody saying to you, Ed, get a grip, mate, you want to stop it with the girls and the drugs and the booze, you want to actually get back on track here? Or was it yourself saying it to yourself?
Uh yeah, it was my cousin actually, my cousin who worked on the tour and he basically said he was leaving if it didn't calm down.
Presenter asks
12:58What did it feel like to be the little boy in that life with those things [the birthmark, the stammer, the glasses, the red hair]?
Do you know what, up until the age of eleven, I really didn't feel like I fit in anywhere. … I was always the tag along.
Presenter asks
43:24What do you miss about the old life, the non-fame life?
Um, I don't know if I do. I'm lit, you know, I we were talking earlier about pitfalls of fame and kind of like falling into things, but I'm honestly in like such a wonderful place right now, and there's nothing that I would take away from it at all. I'm loving it. I'm now at an age where I get taken seriously musically, which has always been sort of like a burden on my shoulder that no one's ever really taken it seriously. But now, like, even if you don't like it, you still have to kind of respect that other people do. You know, when I first said I wanted to play Wembley Stadium, everyone was like, You're never gonna do that. And now it's got to a point because I did that, no one ever laughs at my dreams anymore.
“My songs are not my songs as soon as they're out there. A song like Thinking Out Loud, for instance, when I wrote it, very personal, and then I released it, and suddenly it's no longer my song. It belongs to Stacey, who got married here, or Kevin, who proposed to it, or Dave, who had his first kiss on it.”
“I will admit I did lose myself for a bit. Like, you can't really not go mental in that setting. But I've quickly realized that sort of my real schoolmates had always been the sort of constant threat of sanity.”
“I had huge blue NHS specs. Had a huge like port wine stain birthmark on my eye that's subsequently gone, and a stammer. Really, really bad stammer.”
“Up until the age of eleven, I really didn't feel like I fit in anywhere. … I was always the tag along.”
“I'd got to a point where it was turning into a job. … I was getting to a point where I was kind of going through the motions with it and taking time off and not really having the chance to be on stage and watching everyone else be on stage. It really makes you want to really get back at it. Having a year off made me really hungry for it again and really want to do it.”