No bad blood here! Ed Sheeran recently got chummy with fellow pop star Katy Perry. The two got along like old friends when the “Shape of You” crooner, 26, crashed Perry’s Wednesday, February 22, interview with BBC Radio 1 ahead of their performances at the Brit Awards in London. Watch their interaction in the video above!
When Perry, 32, noticed Sheeran standing in the hallway outside the studio, she immediately called him out for knocking her latest single, “Chained to the Rhythm,” from the No. 1 spot on the iTunes chart. “Thanks, babes, for keeping me off the No. 1 spot, thanks,” she jokingly said as she flipped him her middle finger. “Oh, you’re so approachable, oh, you’re everybody’s best friend. Oh, great.”
A smiling Sheeran then made his way into the studio to strike up a conversation with the California Gurl. The duo gave each other a big hug before sitting down to chat about their first meeting years ago.
“The first time I ever met Katy, I played a gig in Toronto and I was sweating so bad and then I saw Katy on the side of the stage and I was like, ‘Oh, God. Katy Perry’s here! This is really embarrassing. I’m really sweaty,’” Sheeran recounted. “I walked up to her and she was like, ‘Hi. I would hug you, but ew.’”
Perry quipped back: “Now that you’re Ed Sheeran, it’s like, ‘Put your ball sack on me!’ It’s like, ‘All of it!’”
The pair also bonded over their previous losses at the Grammys. “I had been nominated for 13 and you were nominated for 13,” Sheeran said, to which Perry replied, “And guess what? We’re in the next Grammy cycle together!”
But what would Taylor Swift think of Perry and Sheeran — one of the many famous faces in the “Blank Space” songstress’ star-studded circle of close friends — palling around? As Swifties and Katycats are well aware, the two superstars are not exactly BFFs. The drama escalated when Swift called out an unnamed mean girl in a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone. (Swift has never outright confirmed the feud is with Perry.)
“For years, I was never sure if we were friends or not,” she told the magazine. “She would come up to me at awards and say something and walk away, and I would think, Are we friends, or did she just give me the harshest insult of my life?”
Swift added: “She tried to hire a bunch of people out from under me. … So now I have to avoid her. It’s awkward, and I don’t like it.”
After Swift released her 2015 music video for “Bad Blood,” in which her BFF Selena Gomez played an evil Perry look-alike, many assumed that the former country starlet’s foe was indeed the “Hot n Cold” singer.
Perry later confirmed that she and Swift were not on good terms when she told a fan that she is still waiting on an apology from the 1989 hitmaker. Asked if she would ever collaborate with Swift, Perry replied, “If she says sorry, sure!”
