Canadian music writer Ben Rayner made it clear how he felt about Ed Sheeran’s concert last Friday night at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre.
“Boring,” he wrote in the Toronto Star.
Rayner opened his review by declaring that “Ed Sheeran is boring” but conceded that there is “nothing at all ostensibly wrong” with the singer-songwriter.
“My god, though, is it boring,” he added. “Boring, boring, boring.”
Rayner concluded that Sheeran’s show was “a straight trip down the middle of the road with scarcely a nod to variety or innovation along the way.”
While his review has undoubtedly offended Sheeran’s diehard fans, Rayner is not the first person to use the b-word to describe the singer.
A March 2017 article at Belfast Live declared: “Ed Sheeran may be successful but he's boring.”
Three years earlier, UK newspaper The Times said Sheeran’s concert at O2 Arena “got very boring” and “fell flat.”
That same year, famed music festival organizer John Giddings warned: “If boring acts like Ed Sheeran are the future then we’re all screwed!” (He later insisted the comment was “tongue-in-cheek.”)
And earlier this year, a survey of adults in the UK, commissioned by an online gaming company, put Sheeran at No. 45 on a list of 50 things British people found boring.
Sheeran, though, doesn’t seem to care.
“A lot of people think I’m boring,” he told the UK’s Metro in 2014. “I think other people are boring.
“It’s fine and that’s a normal thing to think.”