Superstar opens Loop tour in Sydney
Kate Prendergast
MUSIC
ED SHEERAN: LOOP TOUR
Accor Stadium, 13 February
until February 15
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★½
Britain’s biggest male pop star opens his new store Loop tour with You need me, I don’t need You. Despite the passive-aggressive shade, the crowd takes sides from the get-go. “Look, I’m real, I do it all, it’s all me,” he boasts. (One of many genre swashbucklers wishes he’d avoided rap.)
It takes you a second to realize Ed Sheeran has made his entrance: He suddenly appears on a circular pedestal on the arena floor. Against the high-definition, highly immersive and stylistically eclectic on-screen visuals tailored to the stylistically eclectic set list, it can be easy to overlook the relative Homunculus, a ginger-topped, one-man band with its magic layering loop pedal and trusty acoustic guitar.
Fireworks (for example, timed Sapphire), flame jets (I See Fire etc.) and the glittering, retractable bridge connecting the proscenium to the center stage add even more glamor to this blockbuster event. (With tickets starting at $150, better wait for the pyrotechnics.)
Sheeran is a phenomenon; He’s built this, he’s got a pretty catchy voice for it, and he knows it. In the lyrics and production, the sheer power of his stardom as “one of those kids who made himself a king” looms and imposes.
Over two and a half hours, he is joined by a small army of digital doppelgangers: futuristic Russian Doll Sheerans, disintegrating Sheerans, collaged livestream Sheerans.
IRL Sheeran largely sticks to his publicly available 29-track set list, with a few requests thrown in in the middle. Only six are from 2025 Playa drug relapse, except Sapphire And my dearIrresistibly catchy with its Eastern-influenced rhythms.
For all the spectacle and emotion, the dissonance still rattles.
The 70,000 fans gathered – mothers and daughters, couples and families – are guaranteed to tick off multiple favorites from a chart-topping canon.
However, despite all the spectacle and emotion, the dissonance still continues to rattle. Sonically, this gets very intense when Sheeran briefly greets a live band and begins with a silly applause. Galway Girl. The instruments frequently churn in confusion, the stadium roaring like a huge, juicy heart.
Then there’s the moment when Sheeran asks us to take a flash photo with the words: “I don’t need a camera to capture this moment.”
And of course, there’s the dissonance in the fact that one of the world’s most famous singer-songwriters opens his ballads with “When your legs don’t work like they used to.” But this is a very old grinder. For LoopWe came, we felt, we queued up for the return trains.
