Ed Sheeran has admitted to drinking too much in the past but in a shock revelation on a British chat show, the singer also revealed that he has suffered from substance abuse. Speaking to Jonathan Ross, Sheeran admitted that the pressures of fame lead him to abuse drugs to cope.
‘I think you need to, when you get into the industry, adjust to [fame], and I didn’t adjust because I was constantly working on tour. And all the pitfalls that people read about, I just found myself slipping into all of them. Mostly, like, substance abuse.’ He went on to say that his year’s absence for the music business was so he could recover from his alcohol and drug problems.
After admitting that he can’t write or perform when he is using drugs or drinking, he said that he wasn’t prepared to throw everything away for his addiction. ‘I’ve worked my whole life to get to where I am, and you can’t lose that over something that you do in your spare time.’
Sheeran spoke about how the road to these problems can happen slowly without you even realising. ‘It just started gradually happening, and then some people took me to one side and were like, ‘Calm yourself down.’ It’s all fun to begin with. It all starts off as a party, and then you’re doing it on your own and it’s not, so that was a wake-up call and [I took] a year off.’