Before Ed Sheeran sets foot on stage, his origin story is already rolling. A pre-recorded video looms across the giant screen, as he narrates his own ascent: “I just pushed and pushed. I was so focused on seeing how far I could take being an acoustic singer-songwriter from Suffolk.”
Then the screen cuts. A hidden platform rises from the centre of the audience and Sheeran appears, charging into his 2011 track You Need Me, I Don’t Need You.
It’s a pointed opener: not a ballad or a pop spectacle, but the scrappy, self-made manifesto, in which he raps about writing his own tunes, selling CDs from his rucksack and being different from other, more manufactured pop stars.
It also speaks to the premise of the Loop tour: a new stadium show opening in Australia and New Zealand before heading to North America. Sheeran plays alone using a loop pedal, a favoured technique since he was a teen, layering guitar, percussion and vocals in real time. It’s part of the charm, and part of the challenge: watching him build a song is one thing, but keeping 55,000 people riveted to that process is another.
Across a two-hour-and-45-minute set, Sheeran powers through 29 songs, drawing on material from his 2025 album Play and his 15-year career. He moves between the main stage and a separate platform connected by a retractable bridge. A large screen floods the main stage with hyperactive visuals – balloons, dragons, even Justin Bieber in a monkey suit – plus the odd pyrotechnic flourish.
After the opener, Sheeran runs through a stretch of familiar terrain. Sapphire, from Play, arrives early, followed by the pogoing nostalgia of Castle on the Hill – during which he invites the audience to get up and jump to the beat.
“Every time I’ve come to Australia everyone is nuts in the first city,” Sheeran addresses the crowd. “Perth and Brisbane are particularly nuts … you set the tone for the rest of the tour.”
It’s genuinely impressive watching him use the loop station to assemble a song live. But the limits of the room soon make themselves felt. When he strips things back for The A Team, the stadium becomes an echo chamber, vocals bouncing back with a heavy delay that muddies what should be one of the night’s most intimate moments.
At times it feels as though the audience has inadvertently signed up for a looped soundscape of its own – an issue that proves particularly distracting during quieter songs and between-song banter.
To his credit, Sheeran looks for ways to loosen the format. A QR code shared before the show invites audience requests, which he later folds into the set, pulling out deeper cuts such as The City (2011), Visiting Hours (2021) and Supermarket Flowers (2017).
The show lifts most noticeably when Sheeran is joined by Irish folk band Beoga, who burst on to the stage with fiddle, accordion and percussion, giving the looping rig a welcome rest. Galway Girl and Nancy Mulligan suddenly feel loose and airborne, the crowd cheering as Sheeran clocks Irish flags and delights in a sign from a fan which reads, “I busked to afford a ticket”.
A brisk medley of songs he has written for other artists follows, a reminder of his vast songwriting reach, before the night settles into its romantic core. Thinking Out Loud and Perfect prompt sing-alongs and at least one on-the-spot proposal, Sheeran slipping comfortably into a role he has long since mastered – even if the sound occasionally blunts the intimacy these songs rely on.
He remains an engaging presence throughout, but there are small wobbles: missed cues, a faulty pedal, stretches that feel oddly flat for a show of this scale. For a performance so dependent on precision, those lapses stand out.
The encore leans into familiarity and spectacle. The crowd is ecstatic when he bursts into Shape of You, the 2025 track Azizam has the stadium dancing, and the bouncy hit Bad Habits ends with a pyro display. It’s a big, noisy signoff, though the Loop tour’s quieter ambitions remain harder to pull off in a room this size.
