Let the music speak
Genius, inspiration and lots of hard work separate our biggest superstars from other so-called talents
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Ed Sheeran didn’t get to where he is without a parfumier’s nose for the zeitgeist. His new Netflix documentary – an hour long and filmed in one take by Philip Barantini, director of the hit drama Adolescence – sees him wandering the sunlit streets of Manhattan, strumming his guitar and singing the songs that have made him millions. It’s packed with heartwarming moments, from a surprise proposal to an open-bus singalong, but the slick production would count for nothing without, at its core, this modern troubadour’s skill in connecting with other people through music. How does he do it?
For me, the best part of all of the “intimate” superstar documentaries – from Sheeran to Taylor Swift and Beyoncé to Coldplay – is when they show us the effort and inspiration involved. In an empty stadium before a gig, Sheeran explains the loop pedal he has made his own: “The key is timing, getting it on the one is the most important thing… then you add the keys…” The result: Shape of You, the first song to reach two billion streams on Spotify. Back in his home studio, he tells his producers that his wife told him off for taking their daughter out of her cot – “She’ll stop being trained to sleep, it’s a bad habit…” The result: Bad Habits, another two billion streams.
Similarly, in Swift’s Miss Americana doc, the songstress is seen pouring her heart out, singing lyrics she’s written into her phone. She stands, hand in the air, ad-libbing as she goes, before shouting in amazed delight, “Did we just do a whole verse and chorus?”
Musical superstars generate something out of nothing
Sheeran says the initial spark of a good song is an unmatchable feeling. In Apple’s Beatles film, cameras catch the moment Paul McCartney plays around on his bass guitar and pulls Get Back (the song that gives the doc its title) out of the universe – it’s spine-tingling stuff.
The Greatest Night in Pop charts how Lionel Richie herded dozens of the world’s greatest singers into musical cohesion to record We Are the World and it becomes clear that the star wattage of Michael Jackson or Bob Dylan is matched by the dazzling vocal skills of Darryl Hall and Steve Perry.
As is usual for me, all roads lead to George Michael, but not to wade again through the tumult of his personal life. Instead, I picture him rehearsing in Paris, asking his backing singers to “come in half a beat earlier”. And his shyness at the Band Aid recording in 1984, until he stepped up to the mic, told producer Midge Ure, “That line is hard for me to sing powerfully, if you wanted to change the notation to start off higher…” and forever changed the whole song.
George Michael transformed Band Aid in 1984.
None of this means these people aren’t capable of being monsters, capable of hurting others and/or themselves. Burt Bacharach once wrote a song with wife Carole Bayer Sager without realising the lyrics were about him, while one of George’s people once told me, “Don’t interview him, it’ll break your heart. Go back to the tunes.”
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The best of these people might be in their music. Such moments reveal the difference between them and other so-called “talents”, who increasingly inhabit the same showbusiness space. It’s time to invent another word: unlike reality TV types who require the oxygen of a camera to exist, musical superstars spend most of their time generating something out of nothing, an exercise demanding solitude, honesty and courage. As Sheeran explains, “It’s scary putting out your deepest, darkest thoughts to the world.” We’re just lucky that they do.
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