Cod Almighty!

Whether you agree with me or not is a matter of complete irrelevance. It doesn’t change a thing. Ed Sheeran needs to shush. The critics that favour his style of insipid, pop-pants inconsequence may rave about how he builds up loops of sound using his special peddle as a foundation for his next set of soul searching (read unintentionally distressing) lyrics detailing the confused elation he felt that time he kissed a girl, or had a late night out, or held hands with Jay-Z as the sun rose, or woke up in a puddle of his own wee, but I don’t buy that crap for a minute. If his music had come out in the mid 70’s he would have been laughed out of every building – not because he’d be too ahead of his time but because he couldn’t even give The Bay City Rollers a run for their money. What he has created in his musical universe is so limp it would have made Cat Stevens look like Ozzy Osbourne; I’m not even that big a fan of either but I’d sooner have them any day over Ed. And as for all the gizmos, well, John Martyn was forty years ahead of him and still sold peanuts – so much for his sacrifice to true artistic greatness. Ed Sheeran is, however and undoubtedly, perfect for the age in which he makes music, and it is notable that his fan base is constructed primarily from people who don’t have a clue about the legacy and depth of what has come before him. He is the third testament; the one that has learned nothing from a past that his listening audience don’t even realise exists. Put bluntly: if you’d have ever heard music by almost anyone other than Ed Sheeran you just wouldn’t bother with him.

But that doesn’t really matter right now because Ed doesn’t just make music, he also talks. And it turns out he talks an awful lot of awful rubbish when the mood takes him. At the moment he is in big trouble with the fish and chip industry, the sort of trouble that had him in the news the other night. The sort of news you can only watch with a pronounced slump of the lower jaw. The sort of news that you couldn’t really make up. It’s possible that he already regrets what he said, given that he clearly didn’t think it through first, because surely no-one, not even Ed Sheeran, with his down-to-earth lifestyle and famous friends and uniformly flaccid back catalogue could say something so stupid and mean it. And, because I can sense you can wait no longer, what he said was this: when asked in an Instagram interview what he thought was London’s “most overrated” restaurant he replied “One of my beliefs is that you should always be able to see the sea when you have fish and chips, so anywhere that does traditional fish and chips in London. It’s like getting sushi in Alabama”.

It’s the sort of quote you have to read quite a few times to really get to grips with. It has more layers of stupidity than a particularly thick onion. To say it hasn’t been thought through properly would be to suggest that there was even the slightest hint of thought involved to start with. It’s the kind of thing that only an out-of-touch multi-millionaire would say. For starters, he must realise that he already has a huge fanbase that hang on his every word and that a large number of them will have paused for a moment and decided that from this day onwards they would adopt exactly the same stance when it comes to eating fish and chips – and that is an absurd yet also a plausible reality. If one extended the logic further there would be no reason to eat any kind of seafood unless you were sitting by the sea. No fish fingers, no calamari, no smoked salmon. Not even a tuna sandwich. Taken to such extremes the fishing industry would collapse altogether or seaside towns would be inundated and stripped bare by fish-hungry Ed Sheeran-worshipping idiots, all brainwashed by the unrestrained stupidity of his sense-free “beliefs”.

Of course, I don’t need to explain to you that the poor chip would also take a hit, but then we have to remember that in the science books Ed Sheeran read as a child potatoes were grown underwater, by the sea, and harvested regularly by SpongeBob SquarePants and his salty chums. Did he never pause for a second, in between recording his awful string of calculations albums to think how uncontrollably daft he sounds? Obviously, clearly, emphatically not. But then I keep forgetting that Sheeran still acts like he is barely out of his teens and has lived in a bubble of his own making for far too long. For him the real world is just something that other people have to live with. Apparently he is a big sushi fan but quite why sushi in Alabama has to be singled out as a gastronomic anomaly is anyone’s guess. Does he know something we don’t? Is Alabama littered with angry mobs, moving from town to town petrol bombing every Japanese fish outlet they can find? Is Ed really suggesting that all food must from now on be consumed in an environment immediately associated with its origin? Should we accept a complete end to global food imports and exports and just go back to subsistence farming, an economic activity which gets very tricky if you live on the twelfth floor of a tower block or in a Nigerian slum. Will it one day become illegal to eat a banana in Finland? Or a pizza in Thailand. Or noodles in any formerly confederate state? Because that’s what I’m getting from Ed Sheeran and those pesky “beliefs” of his. It’s bad enough that his music grinds on with a grim, relentless inevitability when it really should be stopped, but even worse that we must now listen to him toss his low-grade opinions around like shitty confetti without pausing for a second to consider just how galactically simple he sounds. You never know, maybe he was just joking, but if he was then he forgot to be funny. In a stroke he may well have done every fish and chip owner in London a massive disservice, which for someone who frequently bellyaches about the state of his mental health seems more than a little lacking in empathy. Better to keep your beliefs to yourself, Ed, before you go and say something that’s actually worth listening to.

G B Burton. 20.04.2024