The sun is beginning to set and the excitable predominantly young female crowd is getting antsy. Before the performance begins we get a super brief glimpse of the man of the night arriving onto our floating barge via a super cool speedboat and that sets off the crowd even more.
Ed Sheeran manages to squeeze his way through the crowd and hop up onstage and he immediately launches into “You Need Me, I Don’t Need You”. This song is all kinds of a jam, Sheeran raps his way through so many lyrics and his loop pedal cops a beating of a workout as he gets us all throwing our hands in the air. Once the song finishes he thanks us all for coming, “It’s a bit wobbly innit?”, he chuckles as he tries to steady himself on our bumpy barge and introduces the next song as a new-ish track and begins to play “I See Fire”, the theme song from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug film soundtrack. Even after a bit of a false start due to a finicky loop pedal, he starts over and it’s goose-bump inducing right to the final strum. After a little bit more tweaking of his pedal, he explains to us that his previous one that he had for years decided to die and even though his new one has a stack of new features, he’s still getting the hang of using them all.
As soon as he starts singing “Lego House”, he has the entire crowd singing along with him and you can see the repeated little smirks on his face as he laps up the crowd interaction. One of his new songs off his forthcoming second album X (Multiply) gets a run and it sounds fantastic and comfortably fits in with the rest of his rapping singer-songwriter aesthetic. “The next song is a sad song, but it’s also a bit of a happy song, it kinda has that double entendre thing going on”, and we can all guess that “The A Team” is up next. To finish off his all too short set his first single off his new album closes us out with “Sing” and we’re all shouting along “Oh ohhhh ohh” with him and then he’s gone.
Interestingly, Sheeran manages to win over a varied demographic; not only the young teenage girls with his boyish charm and vibrant smile, but a lot of the guys in the crowd, with his effortless style. He can rap with the best of the urban artists, but also has impressive guitar skills and writes intricate and meaningful songs. You can say he’s a full package and even though we only got to hear two new songs it’s a safe bet that his next record X will contain some solid hits.
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