He is the star of the 2010s, the one who in ten years has written songs for just about everyone, from BTS to Justin Bieber to Elton John. Ed Sheeran, 32, 150 million records sold, four albums and a fifth due out in May, hits the headlines for a documentary about his life, The sum of it all, which will be available on May 3 on Disney+ and in which he reveals how he overcame his addiction to drugs and strong alcohol.
Surprising revelations at first glance, because Ed Sheeran is the embodiment of the perfect little guy, the one who could be our former classmate, our wedding witness, the nice colleague who is always well, hardworking and above all simple, without artifice or pretense, the one that you don’t suspect that deep down, it’s not going well.
But, as he says himself,sometimes everything changes.“He says that his changeover happened in 2015, when he was already at the peak of his career.I was 24he explains to the magazine RollingStone: “I was doing a festival, and looking at my friends, I said to myself, if they take it, there is no reason for it to hurt me, and then I sank, I took it every week, then every day, then several times a day by mixing it with strong alcohol“. Ed Sheeran refuses to specify what drug it is so as not to shock his children in the future, but we guess that it is rather white and rather powder and that he married that with a lot of vodka.
After five years, in 2020, it was his wife Cherry, pregnant with their first daughter, who put him in front of himself. “She said to me, ‘if my water breaks, do you really want someone other than you to drive me to the maternity ward?‘” And that was the trigger phrase, the one he clung to in order to stop and be able to drive two months later and drive her to the hospital. Growing up, taming his flaws, sometimes crying about it, talking about it above all, this is what the singer repeated to himself so as not to relapse, even when his best friend Jamal died suddenly last year, even when he learned that his wife was suffering from a malignant tumor, even when fate brought him face to face with himself.”life is unpredictablerepeats Ed Sheeran, Falling down happens to everyone, getting up too.”