— WEMBLEY ARENA, LONDON, 1 OCTOBER 2011 —
It was about three years after I first met Ed at The Enterprise in Camden that I ran into him again, totally unexpectedly. I was still freelancing at that time, building up my portfolio and shooting as many gigs as I could get my hands on. By now I often contributed to Redferns/Getty Images, an editorial photo agency that supplies concert and other editorial photos to the media.
On Saturday, 1 October 2011, I was assigned to cover the annual Girl Guides Big Gig for Getty Images at Wembley Arena in London. The Big Gig is always a good one to shoot because they consistently have a good line-up of young acts well on their way to the top. As per usual, the Big Gig consisted of two shows in one day, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. I was shooting the afternoon show. I hadn’t paid much attention to the line-up aside from the slightly bigger names at that time, like The Wanted, Olly Murs and Pixie Lott. I wasn’t aware that Ed was performing that afternoon.
The routine shooting the Big Gig was that each act would perform a couple of songs, which I would shoot from the pit. After their performance the act would pop up backstage in the media room where press photographers could shoot a couple of quick portraits in front of a branding board, before they would be absorbed by bloggers and journalists doing interviews with them. As a photographer covering this type of event you have to run yourself silly, and you know in advance you’ll never get it all covered. There are two flights of stairs and a couple of corridors between the pit and the branding board. I couldn’t be in two places at once, so occasionally I had to set priorities. For my portfolio, I was after the performance shots. But as I was shooting for press that afternoon I knew I definitely had to get the portraits, as agencies like to push those more than live shots. You see my dilemma? I was especially keen to get a good portrait of Olly Murs. He had been making some waves since performing on the UK’s The X-Factor in 2009.
After Olly’s performance, I was dashing back to the media room when I got blocked by catering staff coming down the stairs carrying large crates of wine glasses. There was simply no way through; they were taking up the whole width of the staircase. I had to wait patiently for them to arrive at the bottom of the stairs before I could rush my way up. It had cost me only about a minute, but it was enough. As I reached the media room completely out of breath, Olly had already finished his portrait session at the board. I scanned the room and found Olly cozied up on a sofa giving an interview to one of the bloggers. I was gutted!
People who know me will tell you that when I want something I am like a bulldog, so I definitely wasn’t going to throw in the towel just yet. I resolved to wait it out and be ready for the moment Olly rotated from one interview to another interview, then I would jump in and ask him if I could still have a quick shot looking into my camera. So, I parked myself on a sofa opposite him and watched him like a hawk. I got distracted when from the side of my eye I saw flashes firing from the direction of the branding board. I leaned over to try and get a glimpse of who the photographers were shooting. And there he was – Ed Sheeran.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Ed had just released his first album and it had gone straight to number one. And now he was here promoting himself. And so, another dilemma. Should I abandon my chase to get that shot of Olly and go over to say hi to Ed, or should I just stay put and keep my eyes on the prize?
While I deliberated my next move, the flashguns stopped firing and I saw Ed walking away from the board. For a moment, he was just standing there all by himself and it was apparent that he was waiting for a journalist to become available to interview him. Meanwhile, opposite me sat Olly, still happily chatting to the blogger, and that didn’t seem to be ending any time soon. So, I got up and walked over to Ed and reintroduced myself. I didn’t really think he would remember me. It had been quite a long three years since we first met, and that encounter had been such a short one as well. I politely stretched out my hand and said, “Hi there, you might not remember me but I shot you a couple of years ago in Camden.” He totally ignored my outstretched hand and instead just swung his arms around me and gave me a big hug. “Of course I remember you and Patrick. It was at The Enterprise.” Well, that sure broke the ice. We had a bit of small talk and I seized the opportunity to take a quick portrait shot of him against the board because I had missed my opportunity earlier while I was waiting for Olly. He gallantly obliged, I thanked him, we hugged again. Before I left, Ed said, “We should have another shoot. Have Patrick drop me an email.”
And Olly? Well, I never got that shot of Olly looking into my camera that afternoon. When I left Ed at the board, I looked back to where Olly had been sitting. He had already gone. Most likely he had finished his interviews and had been escorted back to the dressing rooms. You can’t win them all, and while I was gutted about missing Olly, I felt quite good about reconnecting with Ed. And he was true to his word: we’d have another shoot, in fact more than one, in the years that followed.
And in the end I did get my portraits of Olly, too. In 2015 Olly hired me to go on tour with him for the behind-the-scenes photos in his book On the Road, and he has been a returning client ever since. I suppose there’s a lesson in there somewhere. Never give up hope. One day everything will fall into place, as long as you’re determined enough.