Ed Sheeran does the crowd-pleasing math to perfection

Ed Sheeran

At Rogers Centre, June 17

Ed Sheeran concerts are rarely newsworthy events, but Saturday night’s performance at the Rogers Centre was an exception.

That’s because about three-quarters of the way through his two-hour-plus set, the ginger-haired wonder coyly asked the estimated 50,000 in attendance if they would mind him performing a song he hadn’t done in a while.

And after completing a verse and a chorus of “Lego House” from his debut album “+”, he introduced the Pickering prince of pop, Shawn Mendes, who joined him on stage to finish the song as a duet.

This marked the first time local hero Mendes stepped on a stage anywhere since cancelling the remainder of his “Wonder” world tour in July 2022 to take a break and focus on his mental health.

And if the popular Canadian had any concerns about his welcome back into the public eye, they were erased by the explosion of excitement greeting him as they sung at the top of their lungs along to the Mendes hit “There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Back,” again performed as a duet by the impromptu duo.

After Mendes, who looked healthy and happy, left the stage, Sheeran then took up the position for his next song and quipped to the crowd, “How can I follow that?”

Not to worry, Ed, you did fine: in the dozen years since he first graced our shores, he’s evolved from promising talent to mega superstar, selling more than 100 million records and doing so pretty much as a solo performer with an interesting niche as the king of loop-driven music.

For the uninitiated, he even offered a tutorial following his first solo performance, “I’m A Mess.”

“If you’re coming to see me live for the very first time, I would like to explain,” he told his attentive fans. “This thing at my feet here is called a loop station. Everything you hear tonight is completely live — there is no backing track whatsoever. It’s all made live on the spot. It’s controlled by my feet. At the end, it’s deleted — and it will not be the same tomorrow.”

He pointed to a black contraption that had a green circle and a red circle placed on the floor, and demonstrated by strumming a chord on his guitar, which began to repeat itself as Sheeran then added the word “Hey” — forming an impromptu rhythm track — before he killed the sequence.

“I’m going to do that a lot,” he added, later exhibiting the technique with such mesmerizing numbers as his hits “Give Me Love” and “Photograph.”

While he’s mastered this sonic trademark, from which he’s generated such massive hits as “Shape of You” and “Sing” — both performed with full gusto on Saturday night, the second of three Toronto shows set over the weekend — he’s also amped up his production values to Hollywood standards, complete with fireworks, fireballs and an elaborate set of rotating stage that brought back fond memories of the Ontario Place Forum.

Spoiler alert for those attending Sunday’s Father’s Day concert: skip the next few paragraphs if you wish to remain surprised.

The sumptuous circle-in-the-round stage design is, in context, a summation and a closure on Sheeran’s “Mathematics” series of six albums: 2011’s “+,” 2014’s “x,” 2017’s “÷:,” 2019’s “No.6 Collaborations Project,” 2021’s “=” and 2023’s “-.”

Located at the middle of Rogers Centre, the set consisted of a main stage and then a ring of a main stage, which six cranelike “arms” suspending guitar pick-shaped video screens that surrounded a circular screen and light trestle that housed Sheeran himself.

This time around, Sheeran brought a band that he employed for nine songs, while performing the remainder of them — except for duets with Mendes, Khalid on “Beautiful People” and a fiddler named Alicia Entrom on “Galway Girl” — solo.

And when he performed solo, Sheeran was quite literally on the move for much of it, energetically prancing around the stage, which was spinning at quite a clip, so that everyone in the ballpark could get a good luck at him.

Visually, it was a very imaginative and stunning colourful enterprise that underscored Sheeran’s immense talent as a multi-tasker. And if you need further proof of his skill set on that front, take note that he’s concurrently conducting two tours at once: on Friday, he played his “Subtract” tour at the 2,500-capacity History (Get it? Smaller venue = subtract?), before settling into two Rogers Centre appearances that would draw approximately 100,000 by the time the smoke cleared.

For the record, this is the 32-year-old Sheeran’s sixth venue appearance (four as a headliner, two opening for Taylor Swift’s “Red” tour), and it’s easy to see why he’s become a household name based on performance alone.

He’s a talkative host and a down-to-earth bloke whose gratitude and humility shine through his personality. Sheeran, wearing a T-shirt with the monogram “Toronto” on it, endeared himself to the crowd by speaking about how important the city has been at key times of his life, both as a career marker and creatively.

And then, of course, there’s the music: slices of relatable, universal reality that speak of love (“Perfect”) and loss (”Eyes Closed”), maturity and realization.

“I have grown up/I am a father now/Everything has changed, but I am still the same somehow,” — the first couplets from “Tides” and the show’s opening, rocking salvo performed with his full band, pretty much set the tone in terms of the life lessons that Sheeran is so good at articulating.

He’s also a talented enough writer to authentically adapt to numerous styles: hip hop (“You Need Me, I Don’t Need You”), Celtic reels (”Galway Girl”), pop (the Justin Bieber hit, “Love Yourself,” which Sheeran wrote), dance (”Overpass Graffiti) and quite a few other musical vernaculars as well.

Sheeran is also as fun as hell, using his host stature to encourage sing-a-longs and inciting the crowd to “jump” whenever the appropriate rhythm circumstances required it.

So it was difficult to walk away from this show without liking him even more — and now that this musical concept of his is over, Ed Sheeran’s fans will be curious to see where his creativity takes him next.

After all, he’s already done the crowd-pleasing math … to perfection.

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