Where and when: Pyramid stage, 6pm Sunday

Dress code: Onstage, some Sunday casuals in the form of jeans, a plaid button-up and trainers. In the crowd, florals, various animal prints and a disturbing number of fedoras.

What happened: A whole lot of singalongs. Sheeran strides out beaming, greeting the expansive crowd with a quick hello before slinging on his guitar and launching into You Need Me, I Don’t Need You. Four large LED screens fill the otherwise empty stage behind him, and after flashing the album artwork for his latest record, X, they beam out a multiple-angle video feed of the gig itself. Fancy. Sheeran whips out his loop pedal skills at the start of the set, layering various guitar lines over each other. He taps and thumps percussively on the guitar to create a faux kick-drum effect – at points, it sounds full enough to fool listeners into thinking there might be more than just one musician onstage.

Then the rapping starts. Sheeran’s poppy R&B vocal sits well somewhere between Justin Timberlake, Omarion and Robin Thicke, but his rap bar delivery sounds more like a battle you might overhear in a sixth-form common room. Then again, this all may change by the time his double album with rapper The Game comes out. Whether singing or rapping, his lyrics remain as confessional and personal as on his first album. Sheeran plays with confidence, working hard to win over the crowd with one call-and-response chorus after the next. Here stands a man who believes firmly in audience participation and will do whatever it takes to get it. He asks enthusiastically for a “hell yeah” a few times, before moving from dynamic builds centred on his loop pedal in several songs to the quiet balladry of I See Fire. Latest single Sing ends with, unsurprisingly, a big audience singalong and plenty of Sheeran-driven clapping. For one guy all alone on the festival’s biggest stage, he’s commanded the crowd’s attention well.

High point: Nailing those falsetto notes in Sing.

Low point: Throwing the vocal hook from Chris Brown’s single, Loyal, into track Don’t. It all smacks of too much bruised-pride, defensive bitterness.

In a tweet: Okay, but srsly why didn’t @Pharrell come out for Sing? #DashedHopes