A street performance by singer Ed Sheeran in Bengaluru, India, came to an abrupt end this weekend when a police officer unplugged his microphone mid-song.
Footage of the moment shows the Suffolk-based singer standing at the side of a roadway, performing his popular song Shape of You as vehicles and motorcycles pass by, with a crowd of fans singing along.
A police officer walks up, and after a brief conversation with another man who tries to stop him, the officer bends down and unplugs Sheeran’s microphone.
“We had permission to do this, but this policeman is shutting it down,” Sheeran said in a video of the incident, shortly after the officer interrupted him mid-song. “But we’ll see you later.”
Pop superstar Ed Sheeran was playing a street performance in Bengaluru, India, on Sunday when police halted the performance.
Another video, seemingly taken before Sheeran started playing, shows him telling the small crowd that he’d planned on performing more than one song, but that they’d been “asked to play only one song.”
He reiterated that it was a planned appearance in an Instagram story later, writing that they had permission to play “in that exact spot.
“It wasn’t just us randomly turning up,” he wrote. “All good though. See you at the show tonight.”
Shekar T Tekkannanavar, deputy commissioner of police for central Bengaluru, told news agency ANI that one of the event organizers had met with him to seek permission for the street performance.
“I refused to give permission because Church Street gets very crowded. That is the reason he was asked to vacate the place,” he told ANI.
The incident happened just hours before the singer performed a concert at NICE Grounds.
Sheeran is in the middle of the six-city India leg of his Mathematics tour, playing many cities, including Bengaluru, for the first time. He has brought popular Indian artists onstage as guest performers at several concerts, including at Sunday’s concert, where Grammy-nominated Shilpa Rao joined him for a cover performance of the Telugu song Chuttamalle.
Sheeran will be making stops in Shillong and Delhi NCR before heading off to the next leg of the tour in China.
