It has been 30 years since David Gilmour could be considered remotely cutting-edge, yet his pulling power among his peers has not waned. Tonight's rare solo show by the Pink Floyd major-domo resembles a Who's Who of 1970s arena rock, right up to the surprise second encore appearance of a grinning, reliably dapper David Bowie.
Gilmour is plugging a new album, On an Island, his first solo set for 22 years. Largely co-written with his wife, Polly Samson, it's a well-crafted yet unremarkable set of mildly cosmic soft rock, and a collective sigh undermines the polite applause that greets his announcement that he is to play it in full in the first half of the evening.
Flanked by original Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright and Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera, Gilmour remains a fantastically dextrous guitarist. For the album's title track he is joined on stage by David Crosby and Graham Nash, yet even they can't lift this languid, diffident paean to romantic bliss above the merely pedestrian.
Gilmour's new music suggests a rich man's hobby - which it is - and it is hard to imagine anyone returning eagerly to Red Sky at Night, a lounge jazz instrumental on which he plays a poignant sax. The acid folk-tinged Then I Close My Eyes is better, Gilmour twanging a banjo before being usurped by Robert Wyatt blowing a mournful, valedictory cornet.
Expectations rise as he opens the Floyd part of the evening, harmonising with Crosby and Nash on Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Floyd's tribute to their great lost, maverick genius Syd Barrett. Yet the Wright-sung Wearing the Inside Out from 1994's The Division Bell is merely dreary, as is the same album's deliberately opaque Coming Back to Life.
Gilmour locates a killer melody - not always his strong suit - on the touchingly ingenuous Wish You Were Here, another homage to Barrett. Yet the night's jaw-dropping moment is the arrival of Bowie to croon Arnold Layne, the Barrett-penned 1967 exercise in pop whimsy that was Floyd's debut single and - for its sins - inspired Bowie to write The Laughing Gnome.
Bowie provides backing vocals on the opiate serenity of Comfortably Numb from Floyd's 1979 quasi-symphonic magnum opus The Wall, then Gilmour bids the rapt audience a plummy farewell in his engagingly patrician manner. It's been a patchy, highly variable evening, but London's greying baby boomers climb into their SUVs and set their sat-navs for the heart of the suburbs very, very happy indeed.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 020-7589 8212
