Glastonbury 2017

Background

Glastonbury has long been the proving ground for artists who want to be taken seriously in British music. When Ed Sheeran stepped onto the Pyramid Stage in 2017, he carried the weight of a global hitmaker and the vulnerability of a man who started out busking on London streets. The Divide era gave him a richer palette—layered production, orchestral swells, R&B-inflected rhythms—and the challenge of translating that density to a live, largely acoustic setting under open skies.

What made the performance resonate so deeply was the duality: the quiet, fingerpicked passages where the crowd fell into a hush, followed by the explosive, sing-along anthems that turned the field into a single breathing organism. The staging leaned into simplicity—Sheeran, his guitar, a small band, and the vast green expanse of Worthy Farm behind him—letting the songs and the audience do the heavy lifting. In the broader narrative of his career, the 2017 Glastonbury set sits at the crossroads between the x (Multiply) era's stripped-back intimacy and the more ambitious, genre-blending world of ÷.

It was the moment the world saw that the bedroom songwriter could fill a festival main stage without losing the thread that made people fall in love with him in the first place.

Did You Know?

• Glastonbury 2017 took place during the same year the ÷ (Divide) album was released, meaning the setlist was essentially the album's first large-scale live test in front of a general festival audience.
• Ed Sheeran has a long history of performing at Glastonbury, making his 2017 set part of a multi-year relationship with the festival that spans different stages and different eras of his catalogue.