STACK NZ Mar #82

FEATURE MUSIC

and make everyone feel part of it. And that’s as much in a huge arena as in the tiniest room.

Do you think it was simple recognition of talent that endeared him to the enormous musical personalities who first decided to champion him – Elton John, Jamie Foxx and so on? No. That really helps – he writes great songs for them too which helps with people like Bieber and One Direction. But he has an amazing ability to make everyone feel like they are with a very normal person and to feel comfortable. And I assume that works with the ‘celebrities’ too. You always feel like you are with your mate, and he remembers people like retailers and radio people and details about them. Like your mate would. I liked very much Ed’s understanding of the opening slots he performed for Taylor Swift – that she was opening the doors but he had to walk through them himself. Do you think it’s a reflection of an innate attitude or something he had to learn very quickly? I can’t answer for him but it sounds like he’d say that! To me, he’s a guy [for whom] everything is a door and his has a full conviction that if he can open it one inch he will kick it over. It seems to me that he sees the world as an index of possibility! I do know that not everyone around Ed felt that the Taylor stint was a good idea, but that he and his manager felt it was. And they were right! It made his reach far bigger. Tell us how Ed’s first promo tour to Australia came together – why did you think Australia was the right place to break Ed outside of the UK? It was a risk but we believed. As I said, I’d seen Ed and I felt he had the ability to sell a crowd, and that would work in Australia. And I went to see him in London and saw that the crowd was the sort of kids who liked One Direction, and I felt we could work that angle. And I felt he had enough larrikin sense of humour about him to appeal here and win people over. That’s important. There was a short clip of Ed singing on a canal boat in London that resonated with us all here, and won our team over. It was so real. So we asked for a visit and put a couple of showcases around it, one

story at so many levels – personal and real.

Tell us a little bit about Gingerbread Man Records; is there a solid affiliation with Warner? Ed is a man who recognises the debts he owes, and this was a platform he wanted to [use to] introduce talent he believes in, that he felt wasn’t recognised as the talent it was for surface reasons. So he gave people like Jamie Lawson a chance, and had #1 records. Many artists seems to establish their own label and then rock it alone, as a platform only for themselves. Ed clearly wants to use his label to discover/nurture artists. Why has he gone this route do you think? I think it’s early days for the label. So far he’s used it to support mates he felt were unsung. In the future and when he has time I believe he might use it to break artists. When he does, watch out! I saw him do great things to help Jamie [Lawson] and Foy [Vance] – even put the CD into an on-air DJs hands and demand a play! As a label boss he has a lot of contacts and influence and he’s very motivated for his venture to succeed. And he’s not bad at songwriting either. So somewhere there is something dangerous coming! What do you think Ed’s future career is going to look like?Will he go into hiding, take a hiatus, become ever more prolific, build his label into a mentorship powerhouse? I have no idea because I don’t have enough imagination about what could happen – except that I can’t imagine it being anything other than a success. I just can’t imagine that the songs and ideas will ever dry up. They just seem to keep coming. I think he admires artists with longevity like Van Morrison, Elton, and Eric Clapton, and I feel you are looking at the early days of a career like that – probably with all the variety and ambition those guys have achieved.

÷ (divide) by Ed Sheeran is out March 3 via Warner.

was the koala tattoo to remind me to fulfill my promise to break him here first!

What did it mean to you when Ed dedicated his Sydney Concert Hall (Opera House) show to you? He revealed that you’d promised he’d make it here, and shortly after he had his first #1 on the ARIA chart. It meant a lot and it doesn’t mean anything. I do this job for music. What it meant really was that Ed had reached a point where he could fill an Opera House with contest winners at will and keep them all hanging on every word. And since we’d always talked about playing the Opera House and he’d personally made and given me a Lego Opera House after his first visit, it felt like we’d all achieved something huge and completed some kind of cycle. But it wasn’t more special than when we first walked out at the Sydney Entertainment Centre and realised it was sold out to the back, or

when he did stadiums in Melbourne. Or the fact that he loves Australia now and came here on his break, or the day he popped in at our Christmas party just to say 'Hi' to the whole team. It’s a success

in Melbourne and one in Sydney. And

of course on that trip we did a few of the ‘Aussie’ things like the photo with the koala, and the seafood platter at Doyle's, and there

Tony Harlow is President of Warner's global artist and label services arm.

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