From touring with Ed Sheeran to multiple UK top 10 singles to her name, there’s no stopping Zara Larsson, says Craig McLean

ANOTHER day, another stop on the never-ending Ed Sheeran cash-generating machine, AKA the are-we-there-yet?, twoyears-and-counting Divide world tour. If it’s mid-June it must be the southern European leg of a global trek that with box office receipts of $600 million is now the all-time highest grossing concert run by a solo artist. By the time the show rolls home with four shows in Ipswich next month, The Troubadour Terminator may well have surpassed U2 for the most lucrative tour ever.

Right now, though, that’s a long way from the mind of the young woman currently charged with getting the

show on the road. Zara Larsson sits in a fiercely air-conditioned mobile dressing room at Firenze Rocks in Florence, insulated from both the “stupid hot” Tuscan summer heat and from wherever and whatever is happening outside.

“I don’t really know what it’s like out there,” says the pint-sized pop star with six UK top 10 singles to her name. “Is it a day festival,” she wonders, “Or are people camping?”

It looks like it’s a race track, I tell the young Swede who’s first on stage today.

“Oh,” she replies unfazed, her pinkpedied toes flexing in sparkly bejewelled sandals an inch or so from the floor. The last time I saw Larsson perform was in another capacious European sports facility. At the Stade de France in June 2016, the singer burst onto the middle of the pitch, in the company of David Guetta, to open the Euro 2016 football championships. “I don’t even know if I’d turned 18 yet,” she says, frowning, recalling a gig that launched This One’s For You, her single with the French superstar DJ that was the tournament’s official theme song.

“I wasn’t nervous, because it wasn’t real. It was just a wall of people.”

Larsson i s a yo u n g- o l d p ro ye t refreshingly, well, real with it. She is, natch, massively engaged on her