Ash London to Smallzy: “NO MATE. NO.”

Which Australian radio station ‘broke’ Ed Sheeran? Certainly not Nova if you’re reading between the Tweets on Ash London‘s Twitter account yesterday.

The host of the Hit network’s Ash London Live is on the offensive. It follows a Sunday Telegraph interview with Nova’s Kent ‘Smallzy’ Small, where he implied that Nova had perhaps the greatest hand in breaking Sheeran in Australia.

“I really enjoy breaking new artists, like we did with Ed Sheeran,” Smallzy said to Home writer Catherine Nikas-Boulos. “We got his stuff on the show five years ago, and that has paid dividends.”

It appears this one paragraph of Sunday’s interview has got under London’s skin, who Retweeted the article and shot down the claim writing, “NO MATE. NO.”

Back in 2011, it was triple j that gave Sheeran his first play in Australia with You Need Me, I Don’t Need You which was also added to the j’s rotation, at least according to a Tweet from Sheeran in August 2011. MD Richard Kingsmill later spun The A Team in November 2011.

Sheeran then went on to commercial success which included airplay from all the radio networks.

Sheeran’s first three commercial radio spins were from K-Rock Geelong, Hot Tomato on the Gold Coast and Wave FM Wollongong, according to airplay data provided to Radio Today.

Since then The A Team has clocked 14,662 spins locally, with most of those coming from 97.3FM Brisbane, KIIS 1065 Sydney and KIIS 101 Melbourne.

This week on the ARIA single chart, Sheeran holds the top three positions with Shape of You, his new single How Would You Feel and Castle on the Hill, respectively.