Who’s the worst pop star of modern times? Some might say that Adele sounds like a moose with PMT – and Sam Smith certainly has his knockers. But I’d be tempted to plump for Ed Sheeran.

The 32-year-old is the most successful pop star of our time, with a voice best described as pasteurised ‘urban’ delivered with an insistent, hollow enthusiasm. Sheeran makes background music which has been inexplicably pushed to the foreground, elevator music elevated to a ludicrous degree. He has sold more than 150 million records; two of his albums are in the list of best-selling albums of all time. In 2019, he was named Artist of the Decade, with the most combined success in the UK album and singles charts in the 2010s. His 2017–2019 world tour became the highest-grossing of all time; this year, for the sixth time in eight years, he was named the UK’s most-played artist. He has a net worth of around £300 million; unsurprisingly, for a man who makes such cautious, bourgeoise music, a lot of it is tied up in ‘property.’ It’s hard to imagine him blowing the lot on wine, women and schlong as caution could be his middle name, were it not Christopher. But has this garden-gnome-shaped bubble finally burst?

Sheeran is as unlikely to have teenage girls screaming with desire as a Tellytubby

Although Sheeran’s new album Autumn Variations went to number one, it didn’t stop there long compared to the exhaustive presence of the previous six. It wasn’t long before it crashed out of the top 40. Even the Guardian and the i paper have had enough, the latter’s reviewer described the first half of his show – showcasing this latest venture – as ‘near irredeemable’ and ‘robotic, like ChatGPT doing an impression of human feeling without quite understanding how emotions work’. The new record’s lyrics really do sound shockingly bad:

‘I can’t help but be destructive right now. It’s been weeks since I saw your outline.’ (Outline!)

‘I can’t help it but I love you so. I can’t take this letting go. I still feel like we could work it out or something.’ (Or something!)

‘This is not the end of our lives, this is just a bump in the ride. I know that it’ll be alright.’ (Alright!)

The weirdly inappropriate ‘England’ seems to illustrate how out of touch being really rich makes you:

‘There’s a peace and a quiet in this island of ours / That can’t be mirrored by anywhere else.’ Sing that by the Cenotaph on a Saturday afternoon.

Mind you, the old stuff – which the i‘s critic said was the good bit, in the second half – was awful too. In my recent play Awful People, co-written with Daniel Raven, a middle-aged and middle-class songwriter tries to move with the times and ends up being inspired by Sheeran to write:

‘Took her to a Nando’s, mates like Han and Lando

But something in her eyes just tells me I’m her man, though

The waiter Piri-Piris us and things start getting serious

I’m layin’ on the charm in a way that’s not mysterious

We flirt till it hurts, eat some frozen yogurts

And have a good laugh when I spill some on my sweatshirt

Then it’s time to split the cheque – her equal rights and status are things I respeck…’

This is actually a good deal too skilful for the mewling muppet, whose mania for being seen as a Normal Bloke gave rise to the grim ghastliness of songs such as Galway Girl. Authenticity is surely at the root of Sheeran’s mediocrity: the erroneous belief that it’s better to be honestly dull than to deceive and inspire.

Ed Sheeran poses with fans in Australia (Credit: Getty images)

I once wrote that pop stars should either be sexy or profound – ideally both, as with Debbie Harry, but such wonders are rare – and if Sheeran is shallow intellectually, sexually he’s like a bucket of cold bromide. He’s what a rock-and-roll-hating parent would have done to Elvis, given half a chance; taken away all the bumping and grinding and wiggling and leering until what was left was as unlikely to have teenage girls screaming with desire as a Tellytubby. (Which he reminds me of, come to think of it – and his fans would be around the right age to have come under the influence of the cuddly quartet and their crooning inanities.) Yes, I get that something magical happens when a young man, however unsightly, picks up a guitar, allowing him access to a quantity and quality of women undreamt of when he was just walking and talking like a normie; two words – ‘Mick’ and ‘Hucknall.’ But hearing Sheeran sing about sex is like having a supply teacher instruct one on the finer points of fellatio: it’s just wrong.

Politically, Sheeran is a predictable product of his class. The child of an arts curator and a jewellery designer, privately educated, he was opposed to Brexit and – along with Sting – signed a letter drafted by bitter multi-millionaire Bob Geldof warning of the damage done by leaving the EU. This loss to the Brains Trust also described himself as a ‘fan’ of Jeremy Corbyn, opining in 2017 ‘I love Corbyn. I love everything Corbyn is about…he cares about all classes, races and generations’ – shortly before receiving an MBE from Prince Charles. He is, of course, a believer in ‘rewilding’, announcing awhile back that he planned to purchase farmland to plant ‘as many trees as possible’ to offset his carbon footprint after years of flying.

I get that it’s somewhat comedic when we sexagenarians try to understand what gets Modern Youth going. And I admit I’ve been spoilt; I was lucky enough to be young when pop titans – Bolan, Bowie, Bryan Ferry – ruled the airwaves and bedroom walls alike. But modern music is rubbish; this isn’t a pensioner peeve, it’s a fact, unless you’re a Magical Thinker who believes that women can have penises. In the decade of my teens, the 1970s, I was lucky enough to experience the glory days of – deep breath – glam rock, Philly, Motown, disco and punk. The biggest male and female acts of the 1970s – if you combined sales, cred and sheer star quality – were David Bowie and Diana Ross. Now? Sheeran and Adele. You’d have to be certifiable to say that the latter compare.

Of course music goes through the doldrums, like anything else. But the crucial element of Woke-scolding is what makes this slump different and probably permanent. For the first time, young people are having less sex and consuming fewer stimulants than their elders. Instead they are spending long periods of time crouched over their keyboards, glumly interfering with themselves. Wokeness and Covid between them have created Generation Killjoy; punk, disco and glam would all be *problematic* in some way now – too white, not the ‘right’ kind of black, too light-hearted about gender-bending. Gareth Roberts sums up Sheeran well, if over-generously; ‘He’s *all right* which nowadays makes him a megastar. If he’d been about in 1973, he’d have four minor hits and disappeared.’

But most of all, Sheeran exemplifies everything that’s gone wrong with popular music since the middle-classes got their plump pink hands on it; the colonising of rock – previously the best escape route for ambitious and gifted proletarian youth – by privileged poltroons.