The A Team
“It was December 29th, 2009 and I was at an event in a big warehouse for ‘Crisis the homeless charity in London. I was wandering around playing songs for people – whatever they wanted to hear, you know Guns n Roses, Bob Marley. All around the place there were posters with ‘Angel’s Rules: No Drinking, No Fighting, No Fornicating…’ The reason these posters were up, pretty much the only woman in this homeless shelter was this girl, ‘Angel’, and she’d been acting up and breaking the rules so they said, “You can police the whole venue, you can stop people from doing these things, you just have to not do them yourself.” So she took it upon herself to be the policewoman of the house and had all these posters up. So I sat down with her and played a couple of songs and at the end of the gig we had this massive jam thing. I started packing up my stuff and it was the end of December and London was very cold with lots of snow. The guy who had booked me told me where Angel was going back to and where she came from, how she made her money and how she spent it. I wrote this on the train back.”Ed Sheeran (703)
Lego House
“I had a girlfriend at the time and she gave me a Lego set. I built it and put it on the mantelpiece. The day we broke up it fell off the mantelpiece and fell on the floor. I looked at it and going through my head were all sorts of feelings and metaphors. Isn’t it funny that you send so long putting Lego together, just like a relationship and within an instant it can break apart and there’s no instruction manual for it left so it’s just there and you’re going to put it back together and it’s not the same. So I wrote a song based on those concepts.”Ed Sheeran (703)