Blockbuster in busker style: Ed Sheeran opens Australian run with swagger and pyrotechnics

MUSIC
ED SHEERAN: LOOP TOUR
Accor Stadium, February 13
Until February 15
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★½

Britain’s biggest male pop star opens his new Loop tour with You Need Me, I Don’t Need You. Despite the passive-aggressive shade, the crowd gets on side from the get-go. “See, I’m real, I do it all, it’s all me,” he brags. (Of his many genre dalliances, one wishes he’d avoid rap.)

It takes a second to realise Ed Sheeran has made his entrance: he’s popped up on a circular plinth on the arena floor. Against the screen visuals – high-definition, wildly immersive and stylistically adaptive to the eclectic set list – it can be easy to overlook the relative homunculus, a ginger-topped, one-man band with his magical layering loop pedal and trusty acoustic guitar.

Fireworks (timed with, for example, Sapphire), flame jets (I See Fire etc) and a glittering retractable bridge connecting front to centre stage add further swagger to this blockbuster event. (With tickets from $150 up, you’d better hope for pyrotechnics.)

Sheeran is a phenomenon – he’s built it, he’s got the widely appealing voice for it, and he knows it. In lyrics and production, the sheer force of his stardom as “one of the lads turned self-made king” looms and imposes.

Over two-and-a-half hours, he’s joined by a small army of digital doppelgangers: futuristic Russian Doll Sheerans, disintegrating Sheerans, collaging live-streamed Sheerans.

IRL Sheeran sticks largely to the public 29-track set list, with a few requests added in the middle. Just six come from 2025’s Play, an anodyne rehashing, with the exception of Sapphire and Azizam, irresistibly catchy in their Eastern-influenced beats.

For all the spectacle and sentiment, dissonance keeps a-jangling.

The 70,000 assembled fans – mums and daughters, couples and families – are guaranteed to tick off multiple faves from a chart-topping canon.

However, for all the spectacle and sentiment, dissonance keeps a-jangling. Sonically, this is most acute when Sheeran briefly welcomes a live band, starting with the diddly stomp-clap Galway Girl. The instruments frequently slosh in confusion, the stadium roaring like a huge watery heart.

There’s also the moment Sheeran asks us to take a flash photograph in time with the very lyric: “I don’t need a camera to capture this moment.”

And, of course, there’s dissonance in the fact that one of the world’s most famous singer-songwriters opens ballads with “When your legs don’t work like they used to before”. But that’s well-worn grist. For Loop, we came, we felt, we got queue-jammed on the return trains.