Halfway through “Don’t” during Ed Sheeran’s Forest Hill’s stadium concert last night, he was taking the song at such a fast clip I wondered if maybe he had been taking amphetamine, singing so fast he was skipping through words, sputtering and garbling the lyric on a mad dash through the medley including “No Diggity” and “Nina” -neither of which should be taken quickly. At the start of the speeding evening he gave his usual spiel, “I’m here to entertain you, you’re here to be entertained…” I’d heard that three years ago at Mercury Lounge and then it seemed like a reaching out and a benediction, but last night he sputtered it out so fast, it seemed perfunctory. There was something so going through the motions, so I wish I was in bed with Ellie Goulding and not here with you, about Sheeran, it is as if time had drained him of spontaneity the, again by rote, “everything you are hearing is being performed live”, felt taped. Forest Hills Stadium is a beautiful dramatic shed, Sheeran, a one man band plus loop pedal, looked fantastic on LCD screens, everything was in place but Ed Sheeran wasn’t all there, he was running for a train.
There is a lot to admire at Forest Hills Stadium but it is a bitch to get in, a 20 minutes plus line up, and that, along with rush hour subways as the infrastructure crumbles, made me very late for Dubliner Foy Vance’s opening set. I am not a fan, he is like Van Morrison with neither the voice nor the magic. However, the closing song, “Shed A Little Light” had a little of both as Foy left the stage and the audience serenade him with the chorus. It is a great idea and I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen it done.
The sun had yet to set when Ed sauntered on stage with just his guitar and his LCD screens and launched into a way too fast “I’m A Mess”, all ginger hair and scruff folkie 24 year old kid who got lucky. Why “I’m A Mess”?
“See the flames inside my eyes
It burns so bright I wanna’ feel your love
Easy baby maybe I’m a liar
But for tonight I wanna’ fall in love
Put your faith in my stomach”
That’s why. We often go out all night looking for love but we don’t often find it… and Sheeran followed it with the worst “Lego House” I’ve ever heard. Why was he racing through the songs? Was he late for the bus? The man didn’t begin to settle down till “Drunk”, a very good one, and the set didn’t spark till two songs later where a minor track “Bloodstream” went major on him. After that the show settled nicely into its rut, it felt comfortable, well honed, where we know it should be. Ed Sheeran is the Richie Havens of modern pop, a one more band who can feign more in a song, emote more in a song, than he can stand up to. But unlike Richie, who never called in “Freedom” in his life, Ed seemed very distracted, very going through the motions. This is the fifth time I’ve seen Ed, and absolutely the worst, but also, if I had never seen him before, I might have been less bemused by his lack of enthusiasm.
The telltale moment was “The A Team” –a fan fave he has had for years and which he often tells the story as to how he came to write it, often puts it in a social context (it is about a homeless woman), and last night he just smiled his way through it. The audience sang along, though it is sort of inappropriate as a singalong, and Ed just smiled.
The stage was a beauty, the lighting dramatic and the screens like a Greek chorus of Ed’s one moment, and then individual (during “Thinking Out Loud” the music video played on one screen right behind him). The result was a world of Ed’s or only two Ed’s, but always a flux of concepts echoing the songs, which can’t really withstand too much though but still, it was effective. Ed wasn’t static, he is a one man band who can fill a stadium and he moves about the stage with ease –you don’t miss the band either sound or vision. Sometimes he plays his guitar so hard it sounds like he is playing rhythm. A huge star in the UK, X, his sophomore effort, has been in their Top 10 for a year, and over here “Thinking Out Loud” broke all the way through. Only Taylor, Ed and Sam Smith remain in the charts from 2014. And that’s not his only hit, the man has a handful plus of greats songs. What he sings is modern folk, with the occasional rap thrown in, and EDM qualities all over his last album. They aren’t much as stories go, just love and loss for the most part, autobiographical, quasi-rap dick waggling, though with self-effacement, yet he can write a melody when the mood takes him, and he understands the zeitgast, he knows how to pour his heart out to troubled girls.
That makes last nights performance all the more troublesome, Ed performed everything with a received passion, it sounded good, he performed well, it was an OK set and it did the job but it felt simulated and received; he wasn’t into it 100%. Ed is both overstressed and exhausted, it reminded me of a Squeeze gig I once saw in the early 1980s where the band were on the ninth of a ten month tour, and whatever they did, they just couldn’t rev their engines, couldn’t get up the enthusiasm one more time.
Yesterday, it was an uncomfortable, somewhat cold set for all its pleasures.
Maybe Ed needs a vacation, even Richie Haven took a day off.
Grade: B-
