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Ed Sheeran returned to the stage at Capital’s Jingle Bell Ball with Barclaycard on Saturday night after the truth about rumours of his marital strife were revealed by Daily Mail.
The A Team singer, 34, who is married to childhood sweetheart Cherry Seaborn, 33, and shares two daughters Lyra and Jupiter together, recently admitted that he needs to prioritise his family after fans feared his marriage could soon be over.
And taking to the stage for the first time after the rumours began, Ed played a number of his slow romantic hits including Perfect, which celebrates his journey with wife Cherry from childhood friends to soulmates.
However, the Shape Of You hitmaker was said to be ‘avoiding speaking’ to the crowd between songs in a hope of not saying ‘the wrong thing’.
A source told Daily Mail: ‘Ed was the headline act of this years annual concert, the buzz in the arena was high for him to come on to close the four-and-a-half-hour concert.
‘But as soon as he hit the stage, he seemed to be lacking his usual high energy and big smile as it was a quick wave and straight into his first track Castle On The Hill.
‘Surprisingly, Ed played a series of his slow romantic songs including Perfect, which is about wife Cherry, as well as Thinking Out Loud which was beautiful to listen to.’
They added: ‘It was obvious Ed was trying to avoid speaking to the sold-out crowd during the 30-minute set as he kept transitions between songs very brief.
‘The crowd did have a chuckle at one point as Ed forgot the words to his Christmas hit, Merry Christmas as he awkwardly hummed along before singing the chorus’.
Daily Mail have contacted Ed’s representatives for comment.
Ed and Cherry met at the Thomas Mills High School in Framlingham, Suffolk, and became friends. However, they lost touch when Cherry went to study in the US at Duke University in North Carolina.
But in 2015, the year Ed was named the most played pop act in the UK, they reconnected and began dating.
Three years later they married at their local church, close to his sprawling estate in Suffolk.
Despite Ed’s eye-watering wealth and place at showbusiness’s top table, Cherry has avoided glitzy parties and held down a consulting job at Deloitte until March last year, working in the nature, climate and sustainability team.
Friends are adamant there are no issues with the Sheerans’ marriage. Next year will see them move their family to Nashville, Tennessee, for much of 2026 while Ed tours the US, to avoid long separations.
As his children start school next year, the artist is reportedly planning to build a state-of-the-art venue near his home in Suffolk, where he intends to play a long-running residency.
He told The Sun: ‘I wrote down a list the other day of things that matter to me and one is my family, one is songwriting, one is doing shows.
‘If I can get to a point where I’m playing shows, writing songs and hanging out with my family, then you can cut the noise out around that, however that noise might present itself.
‘I looked into the idea of building a venue in my hometown and doing a residency there.
‘That then cuts out the travel and being away from my family.
‘I’ve built a studio nearby that I can use. I feel that’s the model you can adopt.’
Ed’s last tour, the Mathematics Tour, saw the star perform at 188 shows across five different continents to 8.8million fans between April 2022 and September this year.
This banked £655.8million, following his Divide tour between 2017 and 2019, which made £581.3million.
In his latest album, there are many references to desperately wanting to make things work and an honest account of how he and his wife have previously split and worked things out.
Probably the most telling track is Skeletons, which references drunken late-night arguments, with Ed begging Cherry to put their feud to one side until the morning.
He sings: ‘We know how to stick the knife in / Took a word to change the course of the night / Saw a cliff and we kept drivin’ / Here pouring gasoline onto the fire / Don’t wanna make an enemy of you.’
The song Technicolor sees Ed admit his ‘attention’s been divided’.
And Satellite shows his wish to make peace: ‘Spent the whole day in my head, just stressed out / Are we alright? / I know I say the wrong things sometimes / I’m a letdown / But we gave sometimes / And I fly too close to the sun with you now.’
In Crashing, he sings: ‘So here we are again / Side by side, a thousand miles away / Lost for words to say / Why are the hearts we love the ones we break? / We split, we stall, we fail, we fall / We snap and then mend / I know it seems we’re foldin’ in / But let’s not pretend.’
In Rapture, he croons about his wish to make amends as he says: ‘I’d give anything for us.’
The lyrics read: ‘No one at this bar knows we’ve been goin’ through some things / Fall out tonight, then work it out tomorrow / Even when we heal, it stings / Is this just a phase? Well, I hope so.’
In 2023, Ed described how he felt like he was ‘drowning’ after doctors found a tumour in his wife’s arm.
He described how Cherry was diagnosed with cancer in February 2022 while she was six months pregnant with their second child.
