Ed Sheeran charms Ipswich, performs in streets and pop-up pub as he films music video - The Boston Globe (2025)

The Old Phone pub, with its faux brick exterior, was put together in typical movie-set fashion in less than a week, but the nearly three-hour performance was completely authentic.

Beoga, which has been playing with Sheeran, 34, almost since the beginning of his career, kept pace with him for a catalog of his big hits: “I Don’t Care,” “Photograph,” “Thinking Out Loud,” “Perfect.”

”I’ve kind of gotten known as the wedding song guy,” Sheeran said at one point, to huge laughs, “and I [expletive] love it.”

He performed songs from the new album, “Azizam,” and “Old Phone,” along with traditional Irish-inflected tunes “Galway Girl” and “Nancy Mulligan,” and unexpected covers including Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.”

The town had been hearing rumblings of a famous visitor for more than a week. Sheeran’s production company posted a website for the project and invited fans to share nostalgic texts and images from their phones (the song, about uncovering memories on an old phone that he’d prefer to have left in the past, was the impetus). A lucky few would score an invite to The Old Phone itself, and that Friday afternoon, it happened: A few hundred people filtered through the pub all afternoon, where, if their timing was right, they might bump into Sheeran himself.

Danielle Murphy from nearby Newburyport was among them. She walked into the pub early that Friday afternoon to find Sheeran performing with just a guitar, before he took a seat cross-legged on the carpet to watch Hayley Reardon, a local artist he’d invited to perform. “It was just so intimate,” Murphy said. “You didn’t have any sense of him as this hugely famous person. He wasn’t a celebrity — he was an artist, enjoying another artist’s work.”

Earlier in the afternoon on the town’s main drag of Market Street, Ashley Kesack was having coffee at Zumi’s, a downtown cafe, when she looked up from her laptop to see Sheeran in the cafe right next to her.

“We’d heard he was in town, so we thought maybe we should try our luck and get in line (for the pub),” she said. “And then he just walks right in the door.”

Kesack said she and her friends followed Sheeran back outside where he “jumped up on a stone wall and did an impromptu performance of “Old Phone.” And he played it so perfectly, so beautifully,” she said. “It was crazy. We hoped we might have a sighting or something, but I had no idea the day would unfold like this.”

Martina Woulfe of North Andover had driven to town to see if she might catch a glimpse of Sheeran, “and then I walked around the corner and it was like, ‘There he is,‘” she said.

Woulfe and throngs of others followed him around town, and then were also treated to an impromptu performance of one of his songs when he grabbed a guitar and hopped on the back of a pickup truck in the parking lot of the Richdale convenience store.

“To go from seeing him on TV on my couch to seeing him in my shop was incredible,” said Julie Siciliano, co-owner of Heart and Soul Café. “I was shaking, but I’d manifested it. I knew he was going to come in.”

She said Sheeran did a shot of espresso with the staff, asked if they had any cakes, and left a $50 tip, even though she’d insisted everything was on the house.

A few doors down at Henry’s Bear Park toy store, they had posted a sign out front that read “Ed Sheeran, Come build a ‘Lego House’ with us,” referencing the title of one of his songs.

Sheeran took the bait and came inside, and bought two Lego sets for his daughters, according to employee Stephen Scarcella.

“He was really chill, and asked a bit about the history of the town,” Scarcella said.

(If you’re wondering which Lego sets he bought, the toy store already has them on display on their counter, next to a sign reading: “Ed Sheeran bought these.”)

By mid-afternoon as the town’s schools let out, word had spread that Sheeran was on the loose. Eighth-grader Cora Joss led a parade of classmates on a Sheeran quest, brandishing an Ipswich Town football club flag, while one of her friends dragged her guitar along hoping he might sign it.

Ipswich Town Hall was rumored to be a location for the video shoot. As a crowd gathered in the parking lot, Sheeran’s motorcade pulled up, and he emerged to screaming fans, whom he greeted with high fives and selfies.

By 9:30 pm, as many as a thousand people had gathered outside The Brewer’s Table, a downtown pub where a projector was throwing giant-sized versions of the old texts and photos Sheeran had requested for the “Old Phone” project. He and crew appeared after the evening concert to film a bit more.

Kesack, who had also managed to see him play inside The Old Phone, had decided to pack it in for the night. “I think I’ll just bask in the afterglow,” she said. “I am still just in disbelief that all this happened in our little town.”

Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte. Billy Baker can be reached at billy.baker@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram @billy_baker.