Ed Sheeran
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★☆
Ed Sheeran returns to Dublin at the end of an up-and-down year. His latest album, Play, has clocked up nearly a billion streams since its release in September, but it has also endured the now-traditional pasting from critics who remain baffled by the popularity of, as they see it, a beiger-than-beige mega-star busker.
Just this month, meanwhile, the release of a new tune, Problems, has sparked (an entirely baseless) feeding frenzy over the state of Sheeran’s six-year marriage to Cherry Seaborn. The lines “flowers in our garden are drying/ when did the water run dry” have fuelled a mini-industry of Ed Sheeran relationship analysis – though, as Sheeran has felt obliged to point out, as a musician it is his job to use artistic license to articulate heightened emotions. It’s a song, not real life.
He talks about Cherry and his marriage towards the end of his agreeably epic 2½ hour set at the 3Arena, explaining that another recent tune, The Vow, is a sequel of sorts to his woebegone weepie, Perfect.
“That song went on to become a big love song that a lot of people have connected to ... I’m sure there are a lot of people in the room who have connected to that song. After 10 years together, you evolve, you change, you fall deeper in love, you get through tough parts of life, and get stronger – I wrote this song as a sort of 10-year update on Perfect,” he says.
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He is full of chat – though sometimes you struggle to make out what he is saying over a highly talkative audience (you can see why David Gray flipped out several months ago over the 3Arena and its pinting punters). One of his anecdotes concerns his doing the rounds of London record labels as a bushy-tailed 17-year-old, and the many doors slammed in his face. “Whatever they were looking for, this wasn’t it,” he says.
More fools them – it turns out that Sheeran’s bloke-next-door persona is one of his most appealing qualities, as he demonstrates throughout this matey and avuncular evening. He tells the audience his voice is going (it sounds fine) and insists that they likewise sing until they have nothing left to give. He is generous, too, towards his support acts – appearing for the encore wearing a T-shirt of 11-piece Irish trad collective Biird and recalling how folk duo Nizlopi gave him his first break in the industry by hiring him as a roadie.
The show is a big-hearted mix of hits and new tracks. It is also a reminder of why Sheeran is both a streaming behemoth and a popular punching bag. Nobody in 2025 writes a better banger, as he proves with the half-rapped opener You Need Me, I Don’t Need You. It’s one of his angriest numbers – two fingers to everyone in the industry and media who told him he wouldn’t make it (“I’m not fake / don’t ever call me lazy”).
But if he’s a great pop star, things go off the rails during a reckless foray into faux trad with the appalling Galway Girl, which he delivers with his sometime backing band Beogo (from Derry by way of Kerry). His ballads, meanwhile, all sound like Eric Clapton’s Wonderful Tonight hosed down with treacle and wallpapered with Love Hearts.
Still, he has enough good songs to compensate for the dross: new tune Sapphire and oldie Bad Habits are pedal-to-the-floor belters while a whooping take of his Pokémon theme, Celestial, proves an unexpected highlight.
The encore is Christmassy with all the trimmings. He performs Merry Christmas – his tinsel-strewn collaboration with Elton John that tries hard to be a slowed-down, Millennial version of Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody. Then it’s Fairytale of New York, the beloved/dread seasonal dirge for which Beogo’s Niamh Dunne sings the Kirsty MacColl part (skipping the “f-word” line). It’s a fittingly festive conclusion to a fun concert from the everyday superstar who continues to enjoy extraordinary success.
