How does this even happen?
Imagine this scenario: you’re an entertainer and you’re booked to play the famous Pyramid stage at Glastonbury. The crowd in attendance is 80,000 strong and yet somehow you manage to spot someone in the audience that you had no idea was there.
For George Ezra this was a reality back in 2015. And it wasn’t just any old person he knew that he picked out, it was his ex-girlfriend.
Talking to us in Hertfordshire, his home county, on the beautiful grounds of the Manor House that overlooks Standon Calling festival (get tickets for 2019 here), George starts off by answering a question about his career highlight so far.
“It’s hard to pick a highlight,” he explains.
We throw a few ideas at him we think he might choose, including his first UK number one single (“Shotgun”), supporting Robert Plant on tour, or two number one albums, but he chooses something else instead.
“I think playing on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury might be it, because to me it’s the World Cup of music,” he says. “I considered retiring after that. It gets no better than that. It’s all downhill after that no matter what happens.”
The memory didn’t stop there though.
“That year was just mad. Do you know what the maddest thing was?” he asks. “There were 80,000 people there that day, and the only reason I say that is to give this next bit context. I hadn’t even sung the first word of the first song and I saw my ex-girlfriend in the audience.”
Quite an unbelievable feat, George had to sort his head out pretty quickly.
“I had to say to myself, ‘George, there’s a bigger job at hand here. You need to put that to the back of your mind.’ And it was great, the gig was brilliant. But it was just like, how does that happen?
“I think I met up with her afterwards because she was working in a food van with some of my other friends, they were all there.”
George Ezra’s new album Staying at Tamara’s is out now and can be streamed below:
Photo credit: Giles Smith
