Gig review: Ed Sheeran at Etihad Stadium, Manchester

His cry to action is hardly a necessary one – even only a few songs in, the Yorkshire-born, Suffolk-raised singer-songwriter has a fifty-thousand-pus crowd eating out of the palm of his hand.

Sheeran is no stranger to venues of this size now – he was here on his last tour for a multi-night stand four years ago, sandwiched in-between a confirmatory Glastonbury headline slot and a slew of quasi-hometown gigs, including two rain-soaked celebrations at Leeds’s Roundhay Park. This show, under a warm Mancunian sunset, is the second of four sold-out performances stretching into the weekend; similar-sized stadia follow across Europe and Australia.

Perhaps in tacit admission to the increasingly slicked beefiness of his music though, this is the first time he has brought along a band for the ride, albeit as sporadic guests in support. Stationed at the fringes of the in-the-round rotating stage that dominates proceedings, they chime in for additional ballast, with some curious results; an electric shred-heavy run through BLOW, the Don Henley-esque chimes of Overpass Graffiti and a full-schmaltz wedding makeover for Thinking Out Loud are among the most cavernously impressive cuts of the night.

But otherwise, it is business as usual for British pop’s most endemic everyman – just him, his guitar, a loop pedal and several thousand backing voices around him. Even in the middle of a football field, the setup plays to his disarming strengths and more obvious weaknesses; for every sharply observed gem, like the tragi-folk of The A Team or the nostalgia rush of Castle on the Hill, an insipid earworm is ballooned to corpulent levels, like the self-penned Justin Bieber cover Love Yourself, or the ruthlessly calculated Sing.

But Sheeran could have put the phone book, a pub menu or his tax returns to a tune and people would still bellow back. It’s a testament to his omnipresence in music that he can’t even squeeze all of his hits into a two-hour show, and that a selection of his many collaborations have to be crammed into a medley. Regardless, they’re all bellowed back with fever-pitch screams, with a last quarter chock-a-block with hit bangers – Perfect, Shape of You, Bad Habits – threatening to produce spontaneous combustion. “Manchester!” Sheeran shouts at one point, and the holler he receives in response borders on the biblical. The love-in remains apparently, firmly mutual.