Loop Tour. Adelaide Oval. 5 Mar 2026
On a warm late-summer evening, more than 50,000 fans stream into Adelaide Oval for Ed Sheeran’s return to Adelaide, this time with his Loop Tour. The stage design speaks immediately to the scale of the night: a vast curved screen and stage anchor the set, a raised central platform at its centre from which a telescopic bridge extends to a small circular stage in the heart of the stadium. It is a setting built for spectacle, yet its centrepiece remains a single performer with a guitar and a suite of loop pedals.
In the intro, Sheeran gestures to a looping rig beside him, explaining the philosophy of the show. “Everything you hear tonight is played live,” he says. “There are no backing tracks.”
Sheeran wastes no time demonstrating that premise. You Need Me, I Don’t Need You explodes out as the opener, its rapid-fire lyrics punctuated by bursts of live scatting while he layers rhythm, percussion, and guitar through the looper. The technique—building a song piece by piece in real time—remains the defining magic trick of Sheeran’s live show. Watching him construct the groove from scratch is a thrill, even for seasoned audiences.
Between songs Sheeran grins at the sea of faces and announces that Adelaide marks the seventeenth and final show of the Australia and New Zealand run. “Let’s make it the loudest,” he urges—a challenge the crowd takes seriously all night.
Sapphire follows, the stage in a wash of saturated reds and blues on the giant screen behind him. When the chorus hits, fireworks streak into the sky above as tens of thousands of voices shout the word ‘sapphire’ back at the stage. It is a moment of pure pop theatre.
The energy surges again with Castle on the Hill, the folk-pop anthem transforming into a gallop. Its driving beat and nostalgic storytelling feel tailor-made for a crowd this size, with fireworks punctuating each chorus like exclamation points.
But Sheeran knows when to pivot from bombast to intimacy. By the fourth song, The A Team, the tempo drops and the stadium dims to near darkness as the sun finally sets. One by one, phone torches begin to glow until roughly 50,000 tiny lights shimmer across the stands. In a venue designed for sport and spectacle, the effect is strangely delicate—a moment of quiet solidarity between performer and audience.
Sheeran uses the lull to chat. “It’s amazing to see so many young faces in his audience,” he notes. As a child, he tells the crowd, he’d seen Green Day with his father at age ten. It is one of the experiences that first made him dream about playing arenas himself.
Shivers is up next, a dance-pop track reconstructed layer by layer through the looper until the beat thumps across the stadium. Then comes Don’t, during which the telescopic bridge extends towards the central platform, Sheeran striding across it to the smaller circular stage surrounded by fans, leading a call-and-response chorus that echoes through the oval.
Some of the night’s most powerful moments come when the show slows down. Introducing Eyes Closed, Sheeran speaks of grief and the loss of his friend Jamal Edwards. The song, he explains, was written during a period of mourning. When the chorus arrives, Sheeran steps back from the microphone and lets the audience sing the words themselves—a communal release that hangs in the air long after the final note.
The mood lifts when an audience vote (via QR codes) prompts for the next track. The choice is Sing, and it flips the atmosphere into full party mode. Sheeran bounces between loop pedals and guitar, testing the edges of his falsetto while the crowd fills the choruses with elongated whoa-ohs.
I’m a Mess follows with thousands clapping the rhythm in sync, before the evening dips again into reflection. Visiting Hours, one of Sheeran’s most poignant songs about loss, is delivered with a visible emotional weight. Once again the torches are aloft, transforming the stadium into a field of flickering lights.
Give Me Love builds slowly from gentle guitar to soaring climax. As the chorus swells, jets of flame burst from towers flanking the stage, bathing the performance in heat and light. Sheeran then splits the crowd into two halves, conducting them in a surprisingly tight two-part harmony.
By this point the show has reached a point where the scale of the venue threatens to dwarf the solitary performer. The arrival of Irish folk group Beoga—collaborators on Galway Girl—provides a welcome shift. The band’s fiddle, bodhrán, and accordion inject a rush of Celtic energy into the set.
Galway Girl erupts into a dancefloor jig, complete with green fireworks overhead. Nancy Mulligan and I Don’t Care kept the tempo high, the additional musicians giving the music a fullness that carries easily across the enormous space. On Old Phone the fiddle stands out, weaving an agile melody that showcases the instrument’s virtuosity.
Perhaps the most visually striking moment comes during Camera. As Sheeran sings the line “I don’t need a camera to catch this moment,” he asks the audience to take out their phones and snap a picture with the flash on. In an instant, roughly 52,000 flashes glitter in the dark like a constellation of stars. The effect is equal parts remarkable and moving.
The band’s final number, Celestial, has the entire stadium jumping in rhythm before they depart, leaving Sheeran alone again with his guitar for Photograph. Stripped back to its simplest form, the ballad hushes the crowd into attentive silence.
Another extended storytelling interlude follows. At seventeen, Sheeran says, he left his small hometown and moved to London with little more than determination and a guitar. The music industry didn’t immediately welcome him, he shares; he spent years writing songs for others before finding his own voice as an artist.
To illustrate the point, he launches into a medley of hits he has written for other performers: Eastside, originally recorded by Halsey and Khalid; 2002 by Anne-Marie; Cold Water by Major Lazer; and the ubiquitous Love Yourself, made famous by Justin Bieber. It is a reminder that Sheeran’s influence extends far beyond his own catalogue.
From there the set rolls into a pair of crowd-pleasing classics. Thinking Out Loud ignites one of the night’s biggest singalongs, while Perfect has the entire stadium swaying together under the lights.
The final stretch leans again on Sheeran’s looping prowess. I See Fire builds from a pulsing rhythm tapped onto the guitar body, its layered beat vibrating through the stadium with accompanying imagery from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Symmetry, typically a collaboration with Karan Aujla, emerges here as a solo showcase of looping wizardry, its tribal rhythms marking a stylistic departure from his usual pop-folk comfort zone.
Then comes Bloodstream, arguably the night’s most explosive performance. Lasers slice through the darkness while the song’s rhythm expands into a massive electronic pulse. Each chorus is punctuated by bursts of flame from the towers, turning the stage into a furnace of light and sound.
Afterglow brings the pace down again before Sheeran thanks the crowd and slips offstage. The audience response is immediate and deafening as we demand an encore.
The encore wastes no time delivering what everyone wants. As the opening chords of Shape of You ring out, the entire stadium leaps to its feet. Azizam follows with a thick looped beat that has the crowd bouncing once more, and by the time Bad Habits arrives the night has fully returned to party mode.
For all its highlights, the concert reveals an intriguing tension at the heart of Sheeran’s live concept. His looping technique remains a marvel—a one-man orchestra built in real time—and his storytelling between songs makes him one of pop’s most endearing stage personalities. Yet in a venue as enormous as Adelaide Oval, the intimacy that makes his music so appealing can sometimes feel diluted by sheer scale.
When Beoga joined the stage, the music suddenly fills the space with greater ease. Their presence hints at how powerful the show could be with more instrumental support. Alone, Sheeran commands attention through sheer charisma and craft, but a stadium occasionally asks for something bigger than one man and a pedalboard.
Still, the night proves why Sheeran continues to connect so deeply with audiences around the world. He performs with a sincerity that doesn’t feel manufactured, and when the crowd sings along—as they did repeatedly throughout this performance—the distance between artist and audience dissolves.
As the final notes fade and 52,000 fans file out into the Adelaide night, the verdict is clear. The Loop Tour may be built on technological ingenuity, but its real engine is something far simpler: a songwriter, a guitar, and a crowd willing to sing every word back.
Paul Rodda
When: 5 Mar
Where: Adelaide Oval
Bookings: Closed
