“I am a popstar,” admitted the UK’s biggest popstar, before unveiling a new song called Midnight. “But at heart I am a singer-songwriter. So to be able to sing in a room and have people listen… I don’t take that for granted.”
This concert – one of two to mark the late September release of Autumn Variations – was a tale of two hours. In the second, we got the Ed Sheeran everyone knows and loves (or in equal measure loathes). So just him, his miniature guitar, his loop pedal and his bag of inescapable hits (Castle On The Hill, Thinking Out Loud, Don’t segueing into his cover of Blackstreet’s No Diggity).
In the first, by contrast, he did something that, he told us, he will never do again: playing his seventh album in its entirety, backed by a 16-piece band featuring classical musicians. It was, one sensed from semi-apologetic utterances like the above, more for him than for anyone else.
Clearly relishing the hushed reverence that came between each song, he told lots of stories: of how a conversation last Christmas with his dad about Elgar’s Enigma Variations had given him the idea for this record. How he’d met its co-writer and producer Aaron Dessner through Taylor Swift while working on the (Taylor’s Version) re-recording of Red. And why he’d talked activist and writer Scarlett Curtis into doing the illustrations that featured on its sleeve and all around the stage of the Royal Albert Hall tonight.
We learnt, too, that lead single American Town was the story of how he and his now-wife Cherry first got together in New York, with him recalling his days of “trying to be the good boyfriend” by helping her lug boxes up seven flights of stairs to her new apartment.
Normally, when Sheeran’s songs are reinvented live and solo they obtain a ramshackle, rough-around-the-edges uniqueness absent from their recorded guises. But that was not the case tonight. The renditions of the Autumn Variations songs he offered up were so close to the versions his fans have been devouring for the past month that this often felt like the indulgent exercise that any act playing their just-released album in full often is.
In fairness, he did acknowledge this. “If you haven’t listened to Autumn Variations, this is going to be a long hour for you,” he smiled at the outset. “I understand that if you’ve bought a ticket for an artist whose music you like, and they’re like, ‘Here’s the entirety of the new album!’ you might think, ‘Uuuuuuh’,” he said before the band departed and the hits finally arrived, that hushed reverence instantly replaced by everyone-on-their-feet pandemonium.
Not one for the casual observer, then. But Ed Sheeran, you would have to concede, has earned the right to do exactly as he pleases – rather than just people-pleasing – now and again. And he certainly did that at the Albert Hall.
