Only at one moment in the documentary Songwriter does Ed Sheeran bare his teeth. He’s on the verge of releasing his album ÷ (“Divide”), and admits to being in a competitive mood: “If you don’t want to be bigger than Adele, you’re in the wrong business.” For the rest of Songwriter, however, while we see his teeth a lot, it’s only in that permanent not-quite-in-the-room grin that’s the trademark of this bafflingly successful performer.
Directed by the singer’s cousin Murray Cummings, this uncritical and stylistically meat-and-potatoes study doesn’t do much to explain the mystique of a performer whose rise to international celebrity is oddly reminiscent of the vacant gardener Chance becoming a contender for the White House in the Peter Sellers film Being There. Something between a home movie and a “making of”, Cummings’s film documents the writing rather than the recording of the album. With some major performers, this approach might have been revelatory, showing the thunderbolts of inspiration behind the poetry. But with songs containing lines like “I’m dancing in the dark with you between my arms” or “When I was six years old I broke my leg … I was younger then,” we’re not exactly in the realm of Parnassian transcendence.
Still, Sheeran and his colleagues clearly had a jolly time writing this stuff, whether lolling around a Malibu retreat or locked in a shipboard studio while crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2. It’s not always clear exactly how Sheeran and his team of writers put the songs together, or exactly who’s in control of the process, but at the centre of much of the action is defiantly hirsute writer-producer Benny Blanco, whose irrepressible goofiness Cummings indulges something rotten – just as well, given the utter blankness of his central subject. With his uninflected speaking voice and utterly reasonable manner, Sheeran comes across as the John Major of pop. “Yesterday was good,” he comments at one point. After another session: “Really fun. I enjoyed it.” In one scene, he almost theorises about his art. “Songs are weird things.” “How so?” asks Cummings. Sheeran replies, “They just come and go and never let you know” – which is as close as he comes to being an enigmatic Dylanesque sage. In one session, he unleashes an intense foghorn rasp while singing, and you think he’s in touch with some deep inner demons; then he quips “there’s that pain right thurr,” and gives that big dopey beam.
There is one glimmer of articulate insight when Sheeran returns to his school to affably advise some sixth-formers on the secrets of his craft, and compares songwriting to an old tap: the dirt and grit come pouring out first before you get the clear water, the good stuff that you can use. It’s a nice metaphor, except that his songs only give us the tepid clear water, and little of the grit.
Fans will appreciate that the film shows the real Sheeran fitting his image as an out-and-out bloke, unpretentious and seemingly ego-free. We get some video clips of his childhood, including a prepubescent Ed recording his first song – a punkish number that goes “Regular average teen, you know what I mean” – and it’s about the most spirited thing here. There’s also a montage showing his off-duty exploits, such as skiing, skydiving, trying on kimonos in Japan: it’s like a deluxe gap-year Instagram feed.
He seems a pleasant enough young man, although you might choose to make polite excuses rather than rush to spend time in his company. But while we learn little of interest about Sheeran himself, the film is arguably a thoroughgoing demystification of the industrial process behind the modern pop song. The end credits reveal it took up to six people to write some of Sheeran’s numbers – and in the case of Galway Girl, a full nine. You have to wonder: is that the best they could come up with?
