The things that are liked by both myself and teenage girls is a happily small pool.
Broadly speaking, things they like - One Direction, sexting, excessive make-up usage,teenage boys - are very different to the things I enjoy - FIFA 15, decent cider, writing and sleeping.
So, given lots of the crowd at the o2 Arena on Monday night were females aged between 11 and 19 wearing lots of eyeliner, perhaps the fair conclusion was to say either myself or all of them had got our dates and times hideously wrong and were at the wrong gig.
Don't get me wrong, I like a bit of Ed Sheeran - even more so reading up on his backstory prior to the gig (yeah I read to get a narrative before a gig as opposed to, I don't know, listening to the artist's entire back catalogue) - and he can write a good tune with actual proper lyrics.
But, I kind of thought, can a guy with a guitar really dominate an arena - keeping 12,000 people in the palm of his hand for 90 minutes, owning a rather large stage?
Well, the answer was quite emphatically, reject that thought Dan.
Sheeran was utterly superb - an enthralling watch from start to finish.
His slow, female-targeting songs were all well and nice, gentle strumming, nice lyrics and all that but his craftmanship is the truly astonishing thing.
Using perhaps a double figures amount of effects pedals, Sheeran makes it sound as if there are a band of four on stage rather than just one ginger fella younger than me (grrrrr) confident enough to play around with his tunes and engage with the audience off-the-cuff (with marriage proposals in the crown for example, lame!).
Recording a guitar rhythm section first off and then layering over a beat (smacked out on his guitar) and backing vocals together live on stage in front of a huge audience requires massive balls, to put it one way.
Then, with all that sorted, he bursts into a cutting mixture of clever, witty lyrics, extreme guitar shredding and occasional very adept rapping (I know what adept rapping sounds like of course...). In what surely lasted at least eight minutes, the mashup of 'You Need Me I Don't Need You' and a cover of Laid Blak's My Eyes Are Red' was a perfect example of this combination- it was truly astounding and thrilling.
I'm far from being a musical connoisseur, but it seems so innovative to use effects pedals so often, intelligently and properly to actually add to his offering rather than for the mere sake of it.
Ultimately, a fantastic evening with an appeal for a wide variety of people.
