Ed Sheeran, 02 Academy Brixton - review - Music - Arts

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Certainly, the 20-year-old's chutzpah is impossible to fault. For almost two hours, the half-man, half-satsuma ginger prince was alone (bar two rapper cameos), strumming his guitar, deploying countless tape loops, stretching himself every which way. He was an intermittent revelation, full of ideas on the thrillingly extended Give Me Love and the similarly lengthy but equally exhilaratingly primal You Need Me, I Don't Need You, which somehow incorporated KRS-1's Sound Of Da Police. And if the otherwise giddy crowd grew restless during covers of the ancient spiritual The Wayfaring Stranger and Nina Simone's Be My Husband, they showed there's a genuinely soulful, spine-tingling singer in there too.

Yet while two hours may be good value (for £17.50; for my £66 I expected him in my living room), it's a long time to stare at one man with a slender back catalogue: a band might mean improvement rather than compromise. At his most simpering on Kiss Me it was as if a shorn Rebekah Brooks was channelling the blander aspects of James Blunt, but even so, Sheeran requires fine-tuning rather than wholesale renovation.

Ed Sheeran
O2 Academy Brixton
211 Stockwell Road
SW9 9SL