Standing on stage at London’s Union Chapel to perform new songs for the first time in public, Ed Sheeran becomes overwhelmed with emotion. “I feel so embarrassed,” he admits, struggling to contain himself. “You can’t sing when you cry.” Then he just about pulls himself together to play his latest number one, Eyes Closed, a ballad about the death of a close friend. As the camera turns to the audience, there is not a dry eye in the house. There certainly wasn’t in mine.
It is Sheeran’s turn to get the up close and personal documentary treatment, with four-part Disney+ series The Sum of it All. Somewhere between a promo movie and reality TV show, such faux fly-on-the-wall documentaries have become a favoured form of celebrity profiling, by which stars can communicate just as much of their inner life as they wish to reveal, with final cut approval eliminating the objectivity key to more serious journalism.
The result of over a year of filming, the show’s appearance this week is part of a meticulously planned campaign building up to the release of Sheeran’s fifth studio album, Subtract (-), on Friday. It is as slick as you might expect from the production team behind Carpool Karaoke and The Kardashians. But, in this case, it seems film-makers and subject got way more than they bargained for, as 2022 turned into Sheeran’s personal annus horribilis.
At the start of 2022, Sheeran’s wife Cherry Seaborn was diagnosed with a cancerous tumour whilst pregnant, making treatment unsafe until after their second daughter was delivered (in May 2022). Meanwhile, Sheeran was facing a stressful court case over allegations of plagiarism (which he eventually won in April 2022). Then in February 2022, his closest friend, SBTV founder Jamal Edwards, died suddenly aged 31 (from cardiac arrhythmia caused by recreational drug use).
It was a sequence of events evoking a maelstrom of emotions and ultimately inspiring an honesty and directness in front of the camera that Sheeran and his wife frankly admit was not part of the plan. “I’d never have agreed to do anything like this before, never, ever, ever,” says Seaborn, opening up about the ways the shadow of death has changed their lives.
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