13 January 2017
Welcome to 2017, the year Ed Sheeran broke the Irish singles charts and they had to change the rules. It’s also the year that, aside from a week’s carry-over of ‘Rockabye’ from the end of 2016, only eight songs went to number one in Ireland; since three of them are his that’s partly Ed’s doing too. And one of those eight is one of the most derided songs ever to top the Irish charts; again Ed will be helping us with our enquiries on that. So: a lot to get through here in the company of Ed.
It wouldn’t be an Ed Sheeran chart-topper if it didn’t have some attendant legal hoo-hah. The writers of a previous Irish number one, the fantastic ‘No Scrubs’, get co-writing credits on ‘Shape Of You’, apparently because of the melodic similarity of the former’s chorus with the latter’s pre-chorus of “Boy, let’s not talk too much”. By contrast, Sheeran saw off a claim of plagiarism from another set of songwriters, with his “there’s only twelve notes” quote afterwards similar to his “common building blocks” line from the ‘Thinking Out Loud’ case.
Evidently there’s a lot fewer than twelve musical styles, as ‘Shape Of You’ has the same tropical-house sound as most of the chart-topping hits of the previous year and a half. Ed’s brand of basic naffness, though, is all his own; lyrically ‘Shape Of You’ is about getting seduced by a fresher. The opening player-talk of “A club isn’t the best place to find a lover / So the bar is where I go” and the chorus ick of “We push and pull like a magnet do” followed by “Now my bed sheets smell like you” are bad enough, but in the “relatable” second verse of “You and me are thrifty, so go all-you-can-eat / Fill up your bag and I fill up a plate” he tells us he’s a cheap date and accuses his plus-one of pilfering food from the buffet. In other words, Ed’s a scrub, and we don’t want any of those. I hope this wasn’t the first-dance song at your wedding.
‘Shape Of You’ clocked up 14 weeks at number one in Ireland in 2017, at that time second only to the 18 of ‘Riverdance’ as the song with the most weeks at the top of the Irish charts, though amazingly it’d be surpassed by the end of that year. It was number one in mid-January and still number one into the first week of May. However, halfway through its chart-topping run we get a break from ‘Shape Of You’ when it gets briefly usurped by another track. It’s another Ed Sheeran song, though—one of sixteen of his in that week’s top sixteen chart places—and it’s that much-derided song I mentioned above. Also, it has the same title as a previous Irish number one single; perhaps there’s even fewer song titles than notes. If you know anyone from Galway, tell them there’s something coming up for them.
