Greeted by a tumultuous wave of adulation, John Mayer arrived on stage looking like an all-American college freshman; pale trousers, trainers, clean-cut, preppy hairstyle. Halfway through the show he removed the shirt to reveal muscular arms so heavily tattooed that they could have belonged to someone from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was a good visual metaphor for the slippery, chameleon-like appeal of the 32-year-old man and his music.
On record, Mayer comes across as a smooth soft-rock, mainstream maestro, but in concert he performed with considerably more aggression and at a volume that was certainly not subtle. Backed by a five-man band of top-of-the-range hired hands, including the drummer Steve Jordan and the guitarist Robbie McIntosh, together with two female backing singers, Mayer sang and played guitar with supreme skill and an almost unnerving confidence.
Beginning with the typically leisurely groove of Heartbreak Warfare, he reeled off a string of songs that combined a yearning, soulful vocal touch with searing virtuoso guitar solos. The obvious comparisons with the young Eric Clapton were underlined by a version of the Robert Johnson song Crossroads (popularised by Clapton), which Mayer took at a sprightly canter.
Although he is an established superstar in America, where his fourth solo album, Battle Studies, topped the chart at the end of last year, Mayer tends to be more widely known in Britain for his romances with celebrities, including Jennifer Aniston and Jessica Simpson, than for his music per se, a situation that understandably drives him to distraction.
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His speedy, highly-strung banter between songs had a slightly hectoring quality about it. “I play guitar,” he announced stridently and superfluously before launching into the sublime Hendrix-meets-Stax-soul opening riff of Perfectly Lonely.
There were sequences of transcendental grace, none of them more striking than the beautiful, languid delivery of the closing number, Gravity. But there were also long stretches of muso meandering, and the set suffered in general from a rather indulgent presentational style that seemed to belong to a bygone era.
The support group Codeine Velvet Club opened the show with a gaudy homage to the bygone era of 1960s orchestral pop. The group is the extra-curricular project of Jon Lawler, the singer and guitarist of the Fratellis, who, together with his fellow Glaswegian singer Lou Hickey, flung himself into elaborately arranged songs such as Vanity Kills and Hollywood with studious attention to period detail and spirited abandon.