The stage is surrounded by a giant red-and-gold curtain depicting a mongoose snarling at a snake. Suddenly it lights up from within and the Guns 'n' Roses metal-boogie classic, Welcome to the Jungle, starts playing full blast. The children in the audience look cowed. Eventually Axl fades back into the late 1980s and the curtain lifts to reveal two headbanging guitarists and a violinist in a bog of dry ice, at the centre of which appears to be a giant alien seed pod. The seed pod reveals itself to be a 30ft effigy of a snake's head, which rises to reveal a diminutive Colombian belly-dancing singer in a spangly cavewoman costume. The crowd are quietly awed at the way her groin is slowly describing complex three-dimensional shapes, but burst into Pavlovian cheering at her trademark hell-for-leather hip-shaking.
Shakira is notable among pop princesses first for being a multi-instrumentalist. During this carnival of ragingly melodic Latin rock-pop she straps on a guitar, plays a harmonica solo, and appears seated at a hydraulically rearing drum podium, flailing away at the snare and cymbals like a gorgeously demented muppet. Second, she is a phenomenal singer, with a superbly lazy way of swooping into a breathy upper register, and a wide repertoire of little-girl innocence, nasal determination and lung-busting hollering, often within the same line of a song. Unfortunately, the criminal Wembley acoustic, allied with some unimaginative stadium-rock arrangements - even the delicately barking Underneath Your Clothes is buried in meat-and-potatoes sludge - conspire to mask this mercurial talent.
The show does have a certain sense of theatre, however. At one point, after a huge bang and a flash of flames from the stage, your reviewer was worried that the band had actually exploded. Shakira's costume changes are few but telling: after a video projection has informed us that "Rock'n'roll will never die", she proves the point by reappearing in tartan bondage pants to sing Aerosmith's Dude Looks Like a Lady. During an apparently political-themed Spanish-language number, meanwhile, the screen shows actors in George Bush and Saddam Hussein masks playing chess, before they are revealed to be marionettes operated by a crazed Grim Reaper.
The set's tempo is carefully varied, as big-band anthems such as Objection alternate with small acoustic moments, and if there are too many indulgent heavy-metal solos, Shakira makes sure to writhe pornographically over a handy walkway the while. She would be truly extraordinary with a small tango band in a cabaret venue, but the economy of the music industry has chosen a different fate for her. And yet, by the time the star reappears for the final joyous encore of Whenever, Wherever, rising through a hole in the stage with a chandelier attached to her head, such fantasies seem moot.
