“This is not usually how I would open the show,” Ed Sheeran told the crowd at Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field on Saturday night, a humble preamble to a three-plus-minute speech addressing the greatest controversy of his career. Shaky-voiced and stealing glances at the monitor at his feet, he looked every bit the chastened superstar.
“I have tried in my career not to be a political commentator of any kind, because I want my music and shows to be about unity, not division, about humanity, not politics, but this is a humanitarian issue and I cannot hide how I feel about it any more,” Sheeran said. He described the Hamas-led attack at the Nova music festival in Israel on 7 October 2023 as “horrific”, and expressed heartbreak over civilian deaths in Gaza and the West Bank, describing the situation as “catastrophic and unjustified and disproportionate”.
