ROCK / Hello? Is anybody out there?: Chris Rea: Wembley Arena

AS CHRIS REA struck up the opening bars of 'Shine Your Light On Me' halfway through his concert at Wembley, you might have thought this was a cue for someone - anyone - to, well, shine their light on him. Unfortunately, Rea's lighting man appeared to have left his bulbs at home; bright lights remained, as they did throughout the performance, unemployed. Never in the field of paparazzi battle have photographers had to train their lenses through such a murk to get their snaps as they did here. Dressed in a black boiler suit, the great Geordie guitarist melted into a gloaming, thickened by a fog of dry ice, of a kind normally encountered on a mucky January night on the M11.

If you had the look of the dodgy Mexican gun-slinger from a spaghetti western, you too might not want the harsh glare of halogen in your face. But the lighting no-show was merely symptomatic: Chris Rea is as keen on understatement as some of his contemporaries are on pharmaceuticals. He is not, his concert made clear, a man who likes to make a song and dance.

Well, certainly not a dance. George Michael he isn't. He may have employed a drummer and two percussionists, but his personal concession to rhythm consisted of lifting the heel of his right boot about two centimetres from the ground in time to the off-beat. When he wasn't standing to rigid attention behind his microphone stand, he would sit on a simple wooden kitchen chair stage centre and gently nod his head as his band took up the duties.

It could be said that all this modesty suited the music, which is clean, sparse and admirably lacking in any unnecessary flourish. Rea arrives at his material from eclectic directions - blues, rock, Ry Cooder slide. Sometimes his guitar phraseology could have been lifted from George Benson's jazzier moments. 'On the Beach', in particular, is real Benson territory: the precise, picked guitar phrases, the synthesiser chords giving an orchestral undercurrent, the voice - a deep, dark thing - coming in to take up the melody.

He played with unimpeachable skill and through a public address system that was so clear that the sound of his fingers stretching across the strings could have been picked up on the back row. But it wasn't long before you started to wonder what the point of a concert is.

Take, for instance, 'Soft Top, Hard Shoulder', the theme he wrote for the recent movie. You don't have to have seen the film to believe it was more visually exciting than a bunch of black- suited musos diligently picking their way through its score, however many clouds scooted past on the back projection screens. And 'I'm Going Fishing', too, might sound wonderful whispered through Walkman headphones as you settle down for the afternoon on the river bank, but it couldn't have been less interesting in concert if Rea had sat on a hamper and got out his reel and line.

This was not so much a concert as a seminar. Around the stage his band sat, their work spaces lit by the narrow strip of light from Anglepoise lamps, as if they were in a library engaged in a bit of arcane musical research. My neighbour commented that if you shut your eyes it sounded absolutely brilliant. This was true, but it seemed an odd thing to do if you had spent pounds 18.50 for the best view in the house.

The result was that the audience - however appreciative the applause - was almost as impassive as the man himself. During 'The Road to Hell' three brave women in the stalls did stand up and try out a shuffle, but everyone else, Rea included, decided not to join in.

As if in an attempt to shift the audience by physical means, for the last couple of numbers the sound was turned up well beyond Spinal Tap's mythical 11. The extraordinary noise, which would have had them tapping their toes several boroughs away, had the opposite effect, pinning the grey hairs in the front row into their seats, the bass rattling knee-bones, Rea's voice sounding capable of digging the tunnels of the new Jubilee Line unaided.

In the end it was a bit of old-fashioned rock-speak that livened up the proceedings. Just before the encore - appropriately, 'Let's Dance' - Rea told us we were 'allowed to stand up, you know'. At which point we did, and for one number Wembley resembled the scene of a rock concert.

It was not to last. He finished with another moody piece called 'Set Me Free'. The audience sank back into its seats, he disappeared behind a haze of dry ice, tinged purple by the spotlights, and everyone seemed much happier.

(Photograph omitted)