Beyond just being a ginger with a flavor for non-Caucasian women (as evidenced by his music videos and past trysts), Ed Sheeran conjures an easy comparison to Prince Harry. Both are hopelessly Anglican white boys with zero dance ability that one, accordingly, would never expect to have much of a “wild” side based on aesthetic alone. Add into that the fact that most of Sheeran’s songs are sappy ballads or pining mid-tempo numbers, and it’s even more difficult to imagine this pasty ex-doughboy letting loose at a club or having much success in taking any woman home.
But, as many can attest, Sheeran was just that before the taming of his penile shrew via marriage and child: the man who could drink all night and could have his pick of any girl he wanted. In a 2015 interview, DJ Khaled, in particular, offered a memorable quote about Sheeran at one of his peak party boy eras, which was, “Ima be real with you: nobody, nobody—I’m telling you now—nobody can party harder than Ed. Not happening. He go hard!” Really though? The guy who cheesily says “Van the Man” to reference Van Morrison in “Shape of You”? It seems so incomprehensible. So mathematically impossible (despite Sheeran’s albums being named after mathematical symbols). Yet with the release of “Bad Habits,” which looks back on the more harrowing drinking binges of his twenties, we are reminded of this person anew.
The person who it was impossible to envision, based on his exterior shell, being capable of going on days-long benders and likely waking up in bed next to one of Taylor Swift’s model “besties” (though the two went on tour together and became close friends, Sheeran was one British boy that Swift herself actually didn’t want to tap). Granted, the man is British and the stereotype about said population being able to knock it back quite easily is not untrue. Even so, Sheeran, with his mild-mannered, boy next door aura remains in direct contrast to this stereotype. Yet most celebrities can attest to the notion that appearances are deceiving. And even with it being impossible to keep much of anything a secret as it was in Old Hollywood days, there’s still so much the public doesn’t know about just how debauched “debauched” can be in the fame underworld.
It was after the release of his party boy anthem, “Shape of You,” in 2017 that Sheeran actually got candid about the extent of his love for the drink that went hand in hand with the night, commenting, “I think you need to, when you get into the industry, adjust to it—and I didn’t adjust because I was constantly working on tour. And all the pitfalls that people read about, I just found myself slipping into all of them. Mostly, like, substance abuse…. I didn’t really notice it was happening.”
It appeared, like bankruptcy, to be a gradual then sudden descent down the rabbit hole, with Sheeran admitting, “It just started gradually happening, and then some people took me to one side and were like, ‘Calm yourself down.’ It’s all fun to begin with, it all starts off as a party, and then you’re doing it on your own and it’s not, so that was a wake-up call.” One that serves as the inspiration behind the lyrical content of “Bad Habits,” well-timed to reinvigorate the public to having their “good time” “in da club” as coronavirus restrictions are lifted (but for how long, one has to wonder). Which is ironic considering the track is all about the inevitable woes of becoming too frequently allured by “the night.”
Sounding a bit like Regina George when he noted of the weight gain his excessive drinking caused, Sheeran also stated back in ‘17, “Sweatpants were the only things that fit and I just thought everything had shrunk in the wash, but it hadn’t.” At the time of “Shape of You” being released, he had also just started dabbling in the monogamy thing with current wife, Cherry Seaborn, admitting that it helped him go melba (read: as bland as he looks) by remarking, “We live together now, and I think that was a real help grounding me. I was a 25-year-old in the music industry on tour, so I just needed someone to balance me out.”
Notice the “someone” word choice makes it sound like it could have been anyone, so long as she was willing to make him toast with ketchup and marmalade in the morning. And if that’s the case, it would seem that the night could end up beckoning Sheeran back to it again someday. For domesticity can turn as boring as the La Dolce Vita life, ergo the constant swinging like a pendulum from one spectrum of an extreme to another.
