If there's a more perfect setting in which to hear Bryan Ferry sing Avalon, you'd be hard-pressed to find it. The polite beat, the melancholic sense of lost beauty, the detached, Valiumed vocal were made for this English Heritage event.

The stage is perched on the edge of a lake where geese drift sedately by. On the opposite bank, on picnic blankets and deckchairs, the audience sit in a clutter of cava and M&S dips. After a wet summer's day, the evening sun adds a final flourish - mist.

So we believe the announcer when she tells us that Ferry was particularly keen to play this concert, his first after weeks of cancellations because of laryngitis. But it'll be a shortened set, we're warned, throwing a pall over proceedings, as if the Wimbledon Tannoy had announced that Henman will be rubbish and lose after four sets.

At 14 songs including encore, it isn't long, but it could have been longer had Ferry taken voice-saving tips from James Brown and added more instrumentals (there's one, dinner-jazzy My One and Only Love) and sequinned dancing girls (there's two).

The lack of vocal vigour becomes evident only when the beat gets more robust - Don't Stop the Dance, Love Is the Drug, Slave to Love - and the band more full-on. The Quichestock crowd is still eager to dance and sing along, but the best moments are the ballads: brooding Only Face, pastoral Carrickfergus, moody Tara, languid Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. The elegantly wasted voice, the beautifully subdued strings and the stage reflected in the lake like a wobbly sleeping pill are magical.