If there’s one thing that Ed Sheeran is known for - aside from his preference for slightly undersized acoustic guitars - it’s his use of looper pedals. They’ve been vital to his growth as a live performer and also, one suspects, had a big influence on his songwriting.
Now, in an interview with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, Sheeran has been explaining how he discovered loopers and demonstrating how he uses his current rig to perform his 2017 number one hit, Shape Of You.
Describing his first exposure to live looping, Sheeran says: “I went to go and see a band that I loved when I was about 14, and the guy who was opening up for them, a guy called Gary Dunne, he was sort of hitting his guitar and recording and it sounded like a drum. And I remember watching it being like, ‘That looks really cool, and also, he doesn't need a band.’ And at the time, I wasn't, like, the coolest kid, and people didn't want to be in a band with me.”
Seizing the moment, Sheeran says that he reached out to Dunne via social media.
“I messaged him on MySpace, and he taught me how to use one, and he's still my mate now,” he explains. “So, that was like the first time - when I was like 14 - I started using one. And then, as my career has progressed and it's gone from, you know, small bars to stadiums, the pedal has sort of grown with us.”
Dunne told his side of the story to the BBC back in 2017, just after Sheeran had headlined Glastonbury and TV viewers were left wondering how he managed to perform the entire set on his own.
"I was playing a gig at Shepherd's Bush Empire and I played solo, with a loop station. At the time I was a struggling musician, so I made a lot of my living through doing concerts in fans' houses,” he said.
As he remembers it, the contact came via an email from Sheeran’s father, who asked if Dunne would be willing to play at Ed’s 15th birthday party.
"Ed and his Dad picked me up from the train station and I did a gig to Ed and his teenage buddies,” he recalled. "Then we stayed up late looking at live looping and the basics of how to use it - and that was the beginning of our friendship. Little did I know he'd become the biggest star in the world."
Such is his synonymity with looper pedals, of course, that Sheeran now has his own range of them, though it looked like own custom model that he used to show Fallon the live cyclical recording ropes. He even got him to sing at one point.
In another part of the interview, Sheeran confirmed that not only Shape Of You but also Love Yourself - a song that eventually went to Justin Bieber - were written with Rihanna in mind.
“Rihanna has the best taste out of anyone,” he says. “She always picks just really, really great songs. So, as songwriters, you know, within the songwriting community, you're always writing songs to pitch to Rihanna. Like, every single album that I've ever done, I've always gone ‘right, on the side, let's try and write a song that we can pitch to Rihanna.’”
Sheeran believes he’s not alone in this, either, and that having the Barbadian star in mind has probably helped others to raise their games, too.
“I promise you, there'll be so many songwriters out there that their best song came from trying to write a Rihanna song,” he says.
Sheeran also confirmed that his new album will be called Play. He was recently spotted debuting what’s believed to be the first single from it, a song called Azizam, as he busked his way around New Orleans.
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