It wasn't all that long ago that Ed Sheeran's dream was to headline Shepherd's Bush Empire. Last night he headlined the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. That, my friends, is what they call progress.
What's more, he made it look easy. Against all logic for a man armed with just a loop pedal and an acoustic guitar, the bigger the venue, the more his songs make sense. Indeed, opener Castle On The Hill sounds like it was written for this very occasion (in fairness, it probably was), while The A Team sets up the now customary mobile phone light show (the firmly established successor to the lighter in the air as a music crowd's prop of choice) and Sing gets the whole field bouncing giddily.
It's the towering coda of Bloodstream - not Sheeran's greatest song by any means - that provides the best showcase for his virtuoso talents though, both in vocal range and technical wizardry. Make no mistake, this is a genius at work.
Not that the plaudits appear to have gone to the 26-year-old's head. Introducing the polarising Galway Girl, he grins: "I'm gonna play a song that you might not like but I'm pretty sure you know the words." Upon its conclusion, he pleads: "It's a great song!," with tongue at least partly planted in cheek.
Lego House, conspicuously absent from his recent arena tour, is resurrected for a festival-appropriate set that largely ignores Divide's album tracks (though technically all are Top 20 singles), but there are no special guests (save for Galway Girl collaborators Beoga), no alarms and no surprises; just the satisfaction of a job well done.
With an arena tour done and dusted, a stadium tour booked for next year and Glastonbury the latest addition to the Sheeran win column, there will soon be no worlds left for him to conquer. Yet somehow, it still feels like just the start.
