There’s a video on the internet of Ed Sheeran, before he was famous, playing to bemused passers-by in London’s St Pancras station. He was more fresh-faced and less bearded, but was already purveying his now ubiquitous, one-size-fits-all mix of folk, soul, rap and bantz, urging the railway passengers to sing along and “make a circle”. In a staggeringly ironic comment to camera, he says: “My music doesn’t really hit everyone, otherwise I’d be a lucky man.”

Eight years later, he is that lucky man – and then some – and the only real change is the size of the audience. A total of 200,000 people will see the creator of the fastest-selling album by a male artist ever (2017’s ÷, AKA Divide) in Manchester alone, over four nights, on the northern leg of the UK’s biggest ever solo tour. There are huge screens, a camera follows his grinning fizzog from the bowels of the stadium to the stage and there is a bloke on hand to pass him his pre-tuned acoustic guitars. But otherwise, not much has changed since St Pancras. “It’s just me, this guitar and this loop pedal,” explains the everybloke.

Photograph: Zakary Walters

Geezers with guitars (the choir-like noises from the loop pedal are the closest he gets to a backing band) don’t generally headline stadiums, but the 27-year-old Suffolk-raised Yorkshireman has successfully charmed millions of arena-goers as effectively as he did the bystanders at St Pancras. For refuseniks who blame Sheeran (like Coldplay and Phil Collins before him) for everything that’s wrong with music, the mystery is how he’s done it with such ordinary material. Plenty of artists are bland. Plenty write catchy songs. Perhaps nobody else writes songs that are quite so blandly catchy, but he does spin relatable everyday tales into uplifting mainstream anthems.

Here 20 of them feature over 90 minutes. Sheeran’s scruffy charisma turns Castle on the Hill’s market-town youth reminiscence into the first of many singalongs, and his slightly bemused, cheery grin remains gleefully in place during The A-Team’s lyrics about a crack-addicted prostitute. Galway Girl may have been critically mauled as the musical equivalent of a fake Irish-themed pub, but it gets the joint jumping.

As banter inevitably flows, an anecdote about once having played Manchester to a single person reveals the herculean drive behind the chumminess: “He’s now my lawyer. No matter how few people are in a crowd, I’ve always given my best.” He explains that “participation is a big part” – presumably even with a crowd of one – and well-worn routines such as getting the audience to scream are incontrovertibly effective.

A mid-set wobble allows for toilet visits or perhaps an existential moment to ponder how pop became this boring, but as evening descends and volume increases, things liven up and some rawer edges are revealed. There’s a lyrical hint of darkness (well, dusk) to Bloodstream, and Perfect (“Dancing in the dark, with you between my arms”) arrives at the precise moment that the sun goes down and phones light up. Thinking Out Loud may be schmaltzy, but along with the wildly catchy grooves of Sing and the tropical house-ish Shape of You it rightfully generates a sea of swaying arms. Rising artists often claim to play pubs like they’re in Wembley Stadium: Ed Sheeran plays a stadium-sized version of a pub gig, but, undeniably, it works.