Rod Stewart
London O2 Arena
Maybe the last of his generation of Great Entertainers shows his class.
★“You know I’ve been doing this job for fiftyseven years?!” a grinning Sir Rod Stewart says incredulously at this rammed London mega-show. Cue huge cheers from the ageing audience, who gratefully lap up every reference the 77-year-old rock legend makes to bygone decades, dearly departed friends and long-demolished London landmarks. In fairness, Rod is a genius at this kind of senior-friendly feelgood mood, a one-man Royal Variety Show.
Tonight we get the full Rod bingo checklist. Garish zebra-print blouses and age-inappropriate trousers? Yep. Young dollybird backing singers in figurehugging dresses? Inevitably. Football, bagpipes and self-mocking cockney banter? Hell yeah. But we also get some of the finest Celtic-lite, folk-tinged, rock’n’soul anthems ever written, from a wistfully jangling Maggie May to the Springsteen-meets-newwave heart-tugger Young Turks and the buttockwiggling disco silliness of Do Ya Think I’m Sexy? Not to mention mighty versions of I Would Rather Go Blind and the towering Civil Rights hymn People Get Ready.
This hit-heavy show is pure Vegas-level populist spectacle, deeply conservative and hilariously naff, but still a glorious feast of evergreen jukebox anthems. Stewart also peppers the set with heartfelt salutes: to war-torn Ukraine, to Martin Luther King, even to Queen Elizabeth II, who was apparently fond of his inevitable choice of encore, Sailing.
Stephen Dalton
Skids / TV Smith And The Bored Teenagers
London Hammersmith Apollo
The class of ’77 reunited.
It’s amazing how music-press words still echo in your head 45 years later when particularly well chosen. Watching ex-Adverts vocalist TV Smith deliver a non-stop blur of vintage hits (Gary alongside flawless Spanish Adverts tribute band Bored Teenagers,
