Pop music: Saturday night's all riotous

Softly seems to be the hardest word for a Wembley performance.

Elton John

Wembley Stadium

The man in front of me wore ear plugs. Sensible chap. , the star of Saturday night's entertainment at Wembley Stadium, had the advantage of a seat at the piano, between and slightly behind two mountains of loud speakers, shaded from the bellowing sound. The bass notes, in particular, throbbed through your frame with the subtlety of a heavy duty cardiac resuscitation unit.

The concert had been billed as " and Billy Joel - Face to Face", but the American had sent his apologies for a throat infection and flown back to New York to spend more time with his doctors. None of the huge crowd seemed to mind very much, as announced, in a curious turn of phrase, that he would endeavour to give us "mega bucks for your money".

Curiously, there was a good deal of movement among sections of the crowd for about the first 20 minutes, when many were moved from areas where apparently it was not loud enough for them, to seats directly in the flight path of the sound waves from the loudspeakers. These are hardy folk. "pounds 40.50 I paid to see ," I heard one woman say on the Tube to Wembley Park. "That's pounds 81. You normally pay pounds 17."

After the traditional pre-concert Mexican waves - I was interested to note that they start in the cheapest seats, then move anticlockwise around the entire stadium, taking between 45 and 60 seconds for a complete revolution - the band appeared on stage about half an hour after the scheduled start. is a podgy Hobbit of a man, with a curiously thatched head, but he has a pleasant enough voice and remarkable fluency at the piano. I had been impressed when he performed at the funeral of the Princess of Wales last year, singing a mawkish song about candles in the wind, but with such genuine emotion and obvious musicality that it was quite a moving experience.

Sentimental ballads, however, are not best served by being belted out through some 150 speakers, and the noise level, which sometimes drowned the singing, together with Mr John's tendency to swallow final consonants, if not entire syllables, made the opening songs unintelligible. The vastness of Wembley Stadium needed something different, and got it with a number called, if I heard him correctly, "Honky Cat", which was played and sung with keyboard thumping verve. That's when the crowd really started bopping in the aisles and when, several cans of Diet Coke later, he got to old favourites such as "Crocodile Rock", most of the audience had joined in, though a great many of them should have been old enough to know better. When a silly-looking man in a sleeveless orange shirt with a cardboard box on his head makes a fool of himself by gyrating unathletically to the music, it is scarcely surprising, but the breadth of 's appeal became apparent when two elderly and demure Sikhs rose from their seats late in the programme to join him.

Perhaps the biggest cheer of the evening greeted a Billy Joel song, "Uptown Girl", showing that 's performance had earned the audience's forgiveness for the American. By the time he sang "Great Balls of Fire" as the third encore, everyone going home on the Tube felt they had had their pounds 40.50 worth of entertainment.