Review: Ed Sheeran - Picture House, Edinburgh

YOU’D think nobody had ever heard a singer-songwriter before. Twenty-year-old Suffolk lad Ed Sheeran is an artist with musicianly skill and songwriting ability, not to mention an unlikely USP in the amount of incongruous rap diversions which find their way into his music.

But for all the acclaim and commercial success he’s been enjoying recently, you’d think Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley and John Martyn had all been reincarnated as the one man.

So what does he have going for him? A creditable voice for a start, which is lived-in enough to sing Nina Simone’s Be My Husband without sounding embarrassingly out of its depth and raw enough to punch out the downbeat, bluesy R’n’B lines of This City with a certain honesty. He also turns an imagination-grabbing lyric, as on Drunk’s upbeat but cynical paean to dousing your sorrows or Kiss Me’s naked emotion (written in a deliberately serious mood for his godparents’ wedding, says Sheeran, as all his other songs are “about Lego”).

Despite the expensive arrangement of video cubes scattered like dice behind him, this wasn’t a natural born arena show. In fact, Sheeran even lost a little intimacy in a venue of this size, his between-song chatter often being absorbed by the hubbub of a young and excitable crowd. Yet in his most rousing moments – a version of The A Team featuring guest rapper Mikill Pane, Lego House, the extended, hard-edged blues-rap of closer You Need Me, I Don’t Need You – there were phones and hands in the air, and full-voiced choruses from the crowd. It’s early days and Sheeran seems to have only won over his own age group so far, but you wouldn’t bet against his career exploding as the year goes on.

RATING: ***