Gig review: Ed Sheeran, 3Arena, Dublin

Ed Sheeran reminds us the best pop stars are often a jumble of contradictions. 

The English musician combines a lad-next-door persona with the chutzpah required to headline Croke Park armed simply with a guitar and some effects pedals.

His songs, meanwhile, splice campfire strumming with beatboxing and semi-rapped lyrics. He’s one of the biggest earners in music yet appears to have been dressed by somebody’s mum.

All these incongruities were on display as he returned to Dublin. Sheeran wore baggy jeans and a t-shirt emblazoned with the word Hoax even as he projected the aura of a superstar entirely at ease before a crowd that responded to his every gesture with a scream or swoon.

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As a writer, Sheeran walks the tight-rope between vulnerability and supreme confidence. He laid his heart on a platter on the unapologetically emotional ‘A-Team’, a lip-wobbler that belied cheesy references to soaring angels to deliver a sustained gut-punch.

And he achieved the theoretically impossible feat of maintaining his dignity while simultaneously rapping and toting on acoustic guitar on ‘Don’t’ /’New Man’ — a mash-up valentine to an ex -girlfriend taken up with a dude with better tattoos.

It was just Sheeran for much of the night and the barebones framing brought out the best in the 26-year-old. Indeed, it was telling that the evening took a wobble towards the mawkish as a keyboardist was pulled out for the weepy ‘I’m A Mess’.

However, Sheeran steadied things as he turned into the closing stretch with the Northern Ireland traditional group Beoga joining him for ‘Galway Girl’, his homage to folk music and childhood summers on his cousins’s farm in the old country.

“I always say Dublin is the best audience and I really mean it,” he said at one point. It was a folksy sentiment delivered passionately and sincerely — a statement equally applicable to Sheeran’s music.