By Chris Hook
Superstar troubadour Ed Sheeran is to return Down Under next year for a run of stadium shows as part of his Loop Tour.
They will be his first shows in Australia since his 2023 tour, and the visit will come off the back of his upcoming album, Play, which drops on September 12.
Ed Sheeran at the MCG in March 2023. Credit: Rick Clifford
“New stage, new tricks, new set-up, new songs and all the classics added in … I can’t wait to be back,” Sheeran said in an Instagram post announcing the tour.
In May, he said on Facebook that Play was “an album that was made as a direct response to the darkest period of my life”.
“I made this record all over the world, finished it in Goa, India, and had some of the most fun, explorative creative days of my life.
“It’s a real roller coaster of emotions from start to finish, it encapsulates everything that I love about music, and the fun in it, but also where I am in life as a human, a partner, a father. Going into this album campaign, I said to myself: ‘I just want everything I do to be fun and playful’.”
Sheeran has released three singles from the album, which has influences from the Indian and Persian musical traditions: Azizam (a word that means “my darling” in Farsi) in April, then Old Phone in May and Sapphire in June.
The tour begins in New Zealand in January before heading across the Ditch for the Australian dates.
The Australian leg will kick off at Optus Stadium in Perth on January 31, before heading to Sydney’s Accor Stadium on February 13 and 14, Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane on February 20 and 21, and Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium on February 26 and 27. Sheeran will play the Adelaide Oval on March 5.
During the 2023 Mathematics Tour – which finally wraps up with shows in Germany in September 3½ years after it began – Sheeran set an Australian record for the number of tickets sold to a single performance when he played to more than 107,000 people at the MCG.
And his previous tour in 2018 smashed Dire Straits’ decades-old record for the number of tickets for a tour, with more than 1 million tickets sold.
All up, he has sold more than 2.5 million tickets across Australia and New Zealand.
Tickets for the Loop Tour shows range from $109.90 to $249.90 and go on sale next Tuesday, July 29.
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