Ed Sheeran
Go Media Stadium, Auckland
Friday, January 16th
For how global his music has become, Ed Sheeran has yet to find a more suitable stage than that of the dusty corner pub. But when performing for tens of thousands is the norm, how does one still deliver that same struggling-artist authenticity?
The solution is simple: take a gift hat’s been with you from the very start and put it at the forefront of your world tour. In Sheeran’s case, that gift is his mastery of loop pedals — the very inspiration behind the ‘Loop Tour’ that kickstarted in Auckland last night.
“I found the loop pedal when I was 14 years old,” he told the Go Media Stadium crowd early in the night. “I saw an artist named Gary Dunne open for Nizlopi, I asked him to come to my house to teach me and I’ve used it ever since.”
His performance began as intimately as possible on a small circular platform separate from the main stage, where he performed “You Need Me, I Don’t Need You” from his debut album, +.
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“It’s the first time I’ve ever opened a tour in New Zealand, this feels exciting,” he told the crowd. “I’m gonna be playing a bunch of songs… some I haven’t played in 10 years or so.”
Ed Sheeran Loop Tour 2026 concert at Go Media Stadium, Auckland, New Zealand on Friday 16th January 2026.
Photo: Tom Grut / Photosport
As he blasted through the opener, two technical marvels quickly became apparent. Firstly, the mammoth screen at the main stage, reportedly the largest screen ever built in New Zealand, where, amongst other stunning visuals supporting each song, a gelatinous sea of bright pink particles sporting a scribbly play button bathed the display throughout the night, a soft tribute to Play, his eighth studio album released last year.
The second engineering feat came as a surprise to all: a protruding metal bridge that extended to and from the main stage, stretched at minimum 50 metres over the crowd, meeting the artist at his raised platform.
“I’m glad the bridge works,” he laughed, having now walked to the other side. “Wasn’t sure if it would work, but now seeing it work it’s like, ‘Alright, cool.’”
From there, Sheeran began a marathon run of reconstructing old and new hits rom scratch, including “Sapphire” from his latest album, “Castle on the Hill” from ÷, and his breakout 2011 hit “The A Team”, the latter being “the one song I wanted people to know because I didn’t know I’d still be playing 15 years later with fireworks coming out of the stage.”
Following “Shivers”, Sheeran’s preferred song “to show the use of the loop pedal,” the largest open mic night of his career truly took shape as he began playing songs requested by fans via QR code mere minutes before picking up his guitar.
Ed Sheeran Loop Tour 2026 concert at Go Media Stadium, Auckland, New Zealand on Friday 16th January 2026.
Photo: Tom Grut / Photosport
“This is the first time I’ve been nervous in a long time,” he shared, “I want to make each show original, mistakes happen… I’ve written around 250 songs and actively perform about 30 of them.”
He strummed through deep cuts like “Sofa” and “Little Bird”, which he wrote after his girlfriend’s chicken died “and I felt dreadful,” as well as the emotionally raw songs “Tenerife Sea”, “Give Me Love”, and his tribute to his late grandmother, “Supermarket Flowers”.
Solely captivating the crowd alone to this point, Sheeran needed the support of Irish folk band Beoga to accomplish more complex sounds for songs like “I Don’t Care”, “Old Phone”, and “Heaven”.
“Wherever you go in the world, there’s always one Irish person who loses their shit to this,” he laughed before they broke into the Ireland-inspired and utterly infectious “Galway Girl” and “Nancy Mulligan”.
@allaccessss @Ed Sheeran new loop tour stage in Auckland New Zealand #edsheeran #auckland #newzealand
Sheeran often mirrored pub singalongs on a larger scale by harmonising separate halves of the crowd, convincing everyone — including patrolling police — to jump during “Celestial”, and, in his own words, outpace Coldplay’s light-up bracelets by having fans flash their phone lights in time with the chorus to “Camera”.
In true small gig fashion, Sheeran also broke into a medley of covers, mainly songs he wrote for other artists, including Benny Blanco, Halsey and Khalid’s “Eastside”, Anne-Marie’s “2002”, One Direction’s “Little Things”, and Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself”.
Between aural love letters like “Thinking Out Loud” and “Perfect”, he admitted his own affinity for New Zealand by not only playing “I See Fire”, a song he made here for 2013’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, but by also revisiting Aotearoa less than two years later — something very few international acts do.
“I’m not kidding when I say this, if I didn’t meet my wife in my hometown and live 10 minutes from my parents, I would live in New Zealand,” he admitted to loud approval.
After visually stunning, thunderous performances of “Symmetry” and “Bloodstream”, Sheeran pulled a fake-out closing with “Afterglow” and returned for a rousing encore: “Shape of You”, “Azizam”, and “Bad Habits”.
H finished by wishing Auckland goodnight, pledging to come back both the following night and in the coming years.
Sheeran has truly found his stride by embracing his humble roots — covers, song requests, and freestyle sampling – and instilling them into his existing formula. On this tour, he’s the closest to his early self as he has been in a long time — and as a result, fans have never felt closer to him.
Check out the remaining tour dates on Sheeran’s Australia and New Zealand tour here.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source au.rollingstone.com ’
