If Ed Sheeran wants to quit music, that’s fine by me

The ‘Thinking Out Loud’ singer says he’ll hang up his guitar if he’s found guilty of plagiarism. Music to my ears

As one king ascends to the throne this weekend, another altogether more fed-up pop monarch is threatening to abdicate from his. Equally as fond of a crowd-courting world tour and possibly just as polarising, it’s not a trial by public opinion that Ed Sheeran’s next moves depend on, however, but a good old-fashioned US federal one.

For those unaware of recent developments in the multi-million-selling musician’s life, a longstanding copyright lawsuit filed in 2017 against Sheeran’s mega-hit “Thinking Out Loud” is currently being argued over in a Manhattan court. In one corner, the heirs of songwriter Ed Townshend, composer of Marvin Gaye’s saucy slow jam “Let’s Get It On”, and their claim that the singer knowingly ripped the track off; in the other, Sheeran’s argument that, essentially, all songs sound a bit like other songs – a theory that, listening to his back catalogue, it would be hard to disagree with.

This isn’t Sheeran’s first legal rodeo. The same year that the Townshends filed their grievance, Ed also settled out of court over claims that his song “Photograph” was a “note for note copy” of X Factor winner Matt Cardle’s “Amazing”. A continuation on a theme, last year he won a similar plagiarism lawsuit over his “Shape Of You”. Cross him thrice, however, and Sheeran has clearly had enough. “If that happens, I’m done,” he said in response to the possibility of the jury finding against him. “I’m stopping.”

Should it happen, you can imagine the public reaction to Ed’s bow out as a pretty manageable clean-up: news stories of fans howling down dedicated helplines in abject grief replaced with reports of Ticketmaster shares dropping overnight. You would probably get between one and three links to the news on a family WhatsApp group accompanied by a sad face emoji. Magic FM would up their rotation to three tracks per hour.

I, for one, would not shed a tear. That it’s difficult to truly picture a seismic cultural fallout to a musical landscape shorn of Sheeran is why maybe it’s about time. We’re not saying it’s entirely Everyman Ed’s fault that the 1980s had David Bowie whereas, for years now, the modus operandi of any aspiring British male pop star has been to be as thoroughly, unprovocatively normal as possible. But in the shadows of Sheeran's chart supremacy it seems like, to be a bestseller, your brand must go bland.

Look, it’s not his fault that steady Eddy bores me to my core. If Sheeran had been, say, the exception not the rule, I could have forgiven him for the tedium he’s inflicted. A tear in the fabric of the megawatt charismatic popstar galaxy that allowed that nice lad from down the road to ascend to the top of the podium might have been fun. Instead, he's a yardstick against which all artists in his demographic must be judged forevermore. From George Ezra to Tom Walker, some of the biggest names of the past half decade have been the sort of blokes you'd struggle to pin a more zealous adjective to other than “nice”. Take the cheeky interview bants away from Lewis Capaldi and even his music is overtly nan-friendly.

So, the jury is out. Topple the king and, perhaps, you begin to topple the system. Or, perhaps, let us indulge in another fantasy. Sheeran comes out victorious as songwriters across the world breathe a sigh of relief that the chord combination of G, A and D is still – phew! – up for grabs. As he settles down for a congratulatory pint, grateful that all this has blown over, Sheeran thinks to himself that this will never happen to him again. He calls his manager and requests a theremin, a lute and a tin whistle, and smiles: “Try saying I borrowed this.”