Ed Sheeran’s traumatic plane journey

P12

Ed Sheeran is the biggest male pop star in the world. His three albums, entitled +, × and ÷, have all been global bestsellers, he currently occupies nine of the top ten places in the UK singles chart, and last year alone he earned £26.78m. How does a 26-year-old Suffolk boy handle such massive success? “I did what any bloke would do,” he told Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. “Sorted my family out, bought a sports car that I never drive because I look like a tit in it, bought a house and built a pub in my garden.” The only downside of being rich, he says, is that some friends start seeing you as a cash machine rather than a mate… I remember being in a club with a couple of friends, we ran up a hefty bar bill – it was 700 quid or something – and I sorted it at the end of the night then left. I got a call the next morning from the bar: ‘Oh, your mates came back later and they ran up another 600-quid bill and they just said to charge it to you.’” Fame has its drawbacks, too. Sheeran is traumatised by an experience he had on a flight to London, “on my own, no friends, no security, at two in the morning, on easyjet with all the pissed Benidorm lot. Couldn’t even wear a hood because it was so f***ing hot, so I was just out there in the open.” He won’t describe what happened, but it was “horrendous. The worst experience of my life. Like so bad, I started getting panic attacks… I just don’t like groups of people that I don’t know any more.”