The Hear And Now tour name is ironic. The audience and former pop stars on it hark back to the there and then of their Eighties heydays.
Apart from being a bit conservative, there's nothing wrong with dipping into the honeypot of nostalgia - as long as it's done rarely because, of course, the past is over.
The performers seemed to know this more than the audience and regarded proceedings as an amiable joke. Nik Kershaw, minus trademark feather-duster mullet, joked, "Now for a song from my latest album" to a suddenly-silent audience, before admitting "only joking - I know what you want" and beginning The Riddle to general relief nothing contemporary could intervene in the born-again Christian holiday-camp atmosphere.
Belinda Carlyle, shimmying like your best friend's sexy mum, confided that when she'd heard Circle In The Sand in Safeway recently, she knew she'd made it.
Frenetic Kim Wilde, with blonde hair and black leather cat-suit, stole the show. The forward-moving throwback was irreconcilable with the gardening journalist she now is, dibbing cabbages in a silent vegetable patch.
But the benefits of fresh air and vitamins were obvious. With a new career, Wilde has moved on. You wonder if the audience had.
Had Midge Ure not urged them to buy a copy of Do They Know It's Christmas?, a sing-along version of the charity single could have been just another anthem of doomed youth. But reliving your teenhood in your 30s is disconcertingly good fun.
By Tom Allen
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