Ed Sheeran has lost a lot of weight recently. Is that justified because he was/is massively fat, or was he just overreacting? Don’t the public love a porker, anyway? I guess there’s only way to find out: Invent two journalists and get them to argue about it.
ED SHEERAN IS TOO THIN
by Barry sh*tpeace-Thackeray
Videos by VICE
Photo via
Ed Sheeran is the popstar we all love to love. He seems to have it all. A fantastic, chart-smashing album with an interestingly kooky title. A cheeky-chappy line in wry observation. A brace of BRIT Award nominations. A loving family. A well-pressed wardrobe of hooded tops.
Yet recent shots of Ed suggest that all is not well in the land of Sheeran. His emaciated figure now grins at us from a series of new press pictures. What does that grin remind you of? That’s right. A skull. A dead Ed. In a coffin. After being killed by his eating disorder. Yup. Correct. True. Uh-huh.
Ed Sheeran has lost a reputed 20kg in the past few months. How long will it be before we find plastic bags filled with his furtively stashed vomit above the ceiling tiles in his Surrey home? How long before Ed’s manager and booking agent knock on the dressing room door and find their only source of income slumped on the toilet, trying to sh*t out the pieces of wet paper he ate earlier to stop his stomach from cramping?
With his formerly big and jolly frame, Ed ought to have been a role model to body-positive plus-sized popstars everywhere. He was a cheery doughboy who visibly said: “BLT please mate – easy on the lettuce and tomato.” He held out a glimmer of hope to the 36 waists. Yet now he too has been seduced by the mythology of size-zero. He has fallen under the Medusa spell of airbrushed celebrity magazines. Ed, I’ve got news for you: Jennifer Aniston’s thighs are not real and Lana Del Rey only looks that way in real life if you fold her down the middle. Sophie Dahl – now there’s a celebrity we can all believe in. But Holly Vallance? Holly-Gram, more like.
Of course, the greatest irony is perhaps that Ed was meant to be the popstar who brought us ‘reality’. He was supposed to be the guy who reflected life as it is lived by all of us: be it with his classic depiction of the real life of crack prostitutes in “The A Team”, or the simple joys of building a Lego™ house in “Lego House”. Now, he has succumbed to the unreality of the food-toxic body-dysmorphic society in which we live. In which a young man can’t eat a roast chicken dinner with all the trimmings without being made to feel that he has no worth to society. In which a lad with a perfectly healthy appetite for Walnut Whips can’t have that sated by eating three in one sitting without being told he should eat fewer Walnut Whips. Now, sadly, Ed is starting to take on Dorian Gray-like shades of a character he has written about:
But lately her face seems
Slowly sinking, wasting
Crumbling like pastries
And they scream
The worst things in life come free to us
Cos we’re just under the upperhand
Go mad for a couple of grams
And she don’t want to go outside tonight
And in a pipe she flies to the Motherland
Or sells love to another man
Recognise that, Ed? The comfortably roly-poly Sheeran we once knew is now selling his ‘love’ to another man: the thin man he has become. Don’t do it, Old Ed. Don’t sell your soul to New Ed. Don’t become the Karen Carpenter of cheeky ska-pop. We need you too much. We’ve only just begun, and six months after Amy, we can’t afford to lose another hero.
Are you pro thin-Ed? Go to page two to read Ed argue the case for himself.
ED SHEERAN IS NOT THIN ENOUGH
by Ed Sheeran
Now look here. If I am ever found by my manager and booking agent sh*tting out soggy balls of paper that I swallowed in order to stop my stomach from cramping up, there will obviously be a problem. And obviously, that problem will be that I forgot to lock the door of my dressing room. Believe me, that won’t be happening any time soon.
I’ve lost a bit of weight recently, yeah. And I’ve bought some clothes that are a size too small for me to encourage myself to trim down ahead of my BRITs show appearance. True. But really I’ve only just tipped the iceberg of my lardy buttocks. There’s still a big wobble of flesh around the bottom of my ears. There’s that ghastly puppy fat on my nose. And then there’s a lot of unsightly loose skin around my penis that just won’t go no matter how hard I diet. Some people are trying to tell me that this is simply the way a scrotum is and it won’t be moved by three day’s worth of laxatives, but there’s really got to be a way to rein it in, even if it’s surgery – honestly, it makes me feel like an oil tanker chock-full of lard when I’m on the beach.
And yes, some people have been saying that the stuff on my rider implies that I have a problem. They just don’t understand how the music industry works. I know loads of other artists who request five plastic bags, bleach for the sink, 16 moist sheets of paper, an enema kit, three packs of chewing gum and 60 cigarettes. It’s pretty much standard issue for large parts of the industry. In fact, at a lot of venues in the West Midlands, you have to opt OUT of having all that on your rider.
Frank Turner, The King Blues, Olly Murs: most of them won’t even go onstage if there isn’t a crisp white towel and a king-size pack of Mini-Thins waiting for them when they return. Personally, I think they’re idiots: do you know how many calories there are in an average Mini-Thins tablet? You’d have to spend an hour on the treadmill to work off just four – and let’s face it, who just takes four?
So please, stop telling me I’m a negative role model, because the public response to my new look has been nothing short of brilliant. Already, I’m getting fanmail from teenagers who have heard the internet demos of my next album Nothing Tastes As Good As Skinny Feels, and it’s all been really positive. Kids who are fat – and some of these junior whales weigh as much as 50kg – are seeing in me the chance to take control of their eating habits once and for all. I tell them: “Start young. The eating habits you make now will stay with you for a lifetime. So make not-eating your habit of choice.” They send me their fingernails. I send them signed pictures of Calista Flockhart. It’s nice to be able to give something back.
Previously: Let’s All Argue About Julian Assange’s TV Show
