It’s easy to supply a punchline to Ed Sheeran’s threat to quit music entirely if he lost his latest copyright court case. So easy, in fact, that on Thursday morning, listeners to Boom Radio – one of those stations aimed at listeners deemed too old for BBC Radio 2, which is big on adverts for retirement homes and not typically a hotbed of biting satire and snark – could have heard their breakfast show DJ doing precisely that, willing on Sheeran’s loss.
It’s also easy to look askance at the aw-shucks tone of Sheeran’s response to his victory in the trial. “I’m just a guy with a guitar who loves writing music for people to enjoy,” he said. While is true it’s also a slightly reductive view of a notoriously driven and competitive artist who has sold 150m records in 12 years, had a vast influence over modern pop and demonstrated an impressively ability to assimilate musical trends from grime to Afrobeats into his immediately recognisable sound.
