‘Working with Ed made me a better writer’ - Foy Vance on collaborating with Ed Sheeran and trading rhymes with Jay Z

Foy Vance, The Wild Swan. (Image: Archant)

Foy Vance knows how to write a song. It's a naturally-born but dedicatedly-finessed skill that has led him to collaborate with artists as diverse as Plan B, Sheryl Crow and Rudimental, and seen his music feature in numerous films and TV shows, including the Oscar-winner The Shore.

He has also caught the ear of some of the biggest players in music, including Elton John with whom he toured earlier this year. He has also written songs with Ed Sheeran and provided the vocals for electronic dance band Rudimental's hit single Never Let You Go.

The Irishman, whose place of his birth is Bangor, Northern Ireland, but who now resides in Aberfeldy in Scotland, next week arrives in Norwich on his own solo tour, playing from his latest album The Wild Swan.

The album was recorded at Blackbird Studios in Nashville, Tennessee, where Roy Orbison to Hank Williams, Bruce Springsteen to The White Stripes have all laid down their tracks.

Ed Sheeran makes a surprise appearance at Latitude 2016 with Foy Vance on the BBC 6 Music stage. Photo: Paul John Bayfield (Image: Timesniper Photography)

For additional production duties Vance enlisted the help of Jacquire King, the producer of one of his favourite albums, Tom Waits' Mule Variations.

But recording the album threw up a dilemma — fro someone who has collaborated with so many people, he found he preferred to work alone for his own material. 'I'm not snobby about it, but I wouldn't feel comfortable writing with other people for myself,' he explains. 'That feels like it's my own private joy.

'And I used to steer clear of writing with other people altogether until I started doing it just by chance. And then I realised that even when it goes shit, it's still a learning curve,' Vance notes with a smile. 'Every wrong path is a way to the right path. I keep it pretty lean. But when good people come up, I give it a go.'

One of those good people is Framlingham lad turned global superstar Ed Sheeran. Vance co-wrote Tenerife Sea and Afire Love from 2014's multi-million-selling X, and he wrote Make It Rain, which Sheeran sang over the final episode of cult TV biker drama Sons of Anarchy.

'Ed's like a wee song machine,' Vance notes approvingly. 'He would always go places lyrically that I wouldn't go myself, so he makes me think about the lyrical choices I make. Working with Ed made me a better writer.'

Now, with the impassioned, rootsy, rousing The Wild Swan – an album that makes nods to, and takes cues from, proper heroes ranging from Noam Chomsky to Ziggy Stardust to WB Yeats – the pair's relationship moves to another level. Sheeran has signed Vance to Gingerbread Man Records, the label he launched in 2015 with Jamie Lawson and his self-titled, chart-topping debut album.

But in fact, Vance and Sheeran's relationship goes back way further than that.

'Ed's dad used to bring him to my gigs when he was 13,' begins Vance, a born hobo-raconteur (and he has the storyteller's hat and showman's moustache to prove it). 'He only told me this after we'd done a couple of gigs together, but he'd been to something like 48 gigs of mine before we'd ever met.'

As an up-and-coming artist always keen to honour his formative influences, as soon as he started to have some success, Sheeran sought to pay it back.

'He reached out and said, 'do you want to come on tour with me?' And I'm thinking: 'When else is a thirty-something, white, baldy Irishman single father who lives up in the mountains gonna get to on a bona fide pop tour?' So I said, 'yeah, I'll go and do it.'

'And that tour was tough! I thought I'd just go in and do my own show. But I realised very quickly that, even though he hadn't fully broken through at that time, his crowd of screaming teenage girls was ferocious – I spent more time bombing than I did anything else,' laughs Vance. 'They just looked at me as if I was Ed's demented uncle wheeled on for the craic, singing about heartache and cancer.'

Still, the Sheeran/Vance relationship flourished, with the pair emailing each other works-in-progress songs and Vance supporting Sheeran on the closing, Antipodean leg of the mammoth X tour. There was even a night trading riffs and rhymes with Sheeran, Jay Z and Beyoncé in the basement of Snow Patrol's New York bar. But that's another story.

One of the impetuses behind Sheeran founding Gingerbread Man Records was to give musicians he truly believes in complete artistic freedom, and so he made his friend an incredible offer: the chance to make a new album with an artist-led record company.

'Ed's a fan and said, 'go and make the record you want to make.'' Vance took him at his word.

There's no denying the infectious beauty of The Wild Swan. Which ranges from Noam Chomsky Is A Soft Revolution, a rock'n'blues celebration of a roll-call of musical, philosophical, literary and polemical insurrectionists to The Wild Swans On The Lake, a stop-you-in-your-tracks breath of Celtic balladry inspired by WB Yeats' poem The Wild Swans At Coole.

The album's penultimate song, the antsy, agit-folk Fire It Up, sees the troubador set straight his goals. 'It just has to be real. You go back to ancient Irish music, or Native American music, or people out on the plains of Africa…every single night the drums are out, and they're singing around the fire.

'That tells you something about what music actually is. Whereas we've turned into a commodity – it's become something to sell, a vehicle to get money or fame,' Vance says with cheerful distaste. 'That's not what has ever interested me. It's the music itself that matters. It has to be real.'

• Foy Vance plays Norwich Arts Centre on November 15, 8pm, returns only, 01603 660352, www.norwichartscentre.co.uk