Rod Stewart at the O2 Arena

Watching the swaying, singing audience at the O2 arena, it struck me that Rod Stewart would make the greatest wedding singer of all time. He’s a genial entertainer with a great set of pipes who gives the audience exactly what they want: the hits, some standards, a bit of soul, disco, rock ’n’ roll, romantic ballads and arms-linked singalongs. There’s even cheeky banter and interval time built in for toilet breaks.

“Is there anyone here from Essex?” Stewart asks, with a wink, before strapping 6ft-plus English model Penny Lancaster appears on stage in a red mini- dress, grinning and dancing rather gormlessly to his lively version of the Sam Cook classic Twisting the Night Away. “That’s the wife,” quips Stewart. “I actually told her to stay in the van.” And where else but at a wedding or a Rod Stewart concert could you expect to see a 65-year-old man with his jacket off, shirt tails hanging out, shaking his bony behind beneath a glitterball and asking if we think he’s sexy?

After 30 years as a world- beating superstar, Stewart knows how to put on a show. There is nothing cool about him any more, if there ever was.

The stage is so bright and clean, it is like a Sixties set from American Bandstand blown up for The X Factor, and the versatile band are constrained in tight suits, with backing vocalists in matching sexy mini-dresses. It looks and feels like a cheesy review show, not dissimilar to the kind of thing Cliff Richard puts on, although there is a time those two would have been at the opposite ends of the rock spectrum. The thing that raises the bar is Stewart himself. His hoarse, soulful voice has always been a distinctive instrument: there’s sensitivity in his delivery and there’s a way that he closes his eyes and delicately sways when he sings that suggests he still gets lost in these songs.

And what songs. His voice always sounded old; now when he sings Handbags and Gladrags he really could be the disappointed grandfather reprimanding his wayward granddaughter. After all these years, and all these hits, and all the albums of cover versions, there’s never a dull or self-indulgent moment. The 20,000-plus audience belt out his classics with him, and when he leads them through a mass choral version of Sailing, it is impossible not to be swept overboard.