The question that poses itself for most of Bryan Adams's sprawling show is: why him? His 20-year dominance of soft rock has never been satisfactorily explained. Those 16 weeks at number one with Everything I Do (I Do it for You) back in 1991 could be written off as a fluke, but that doesn't account for someone of his average abilities still filling big rooms years later.

Even more baffling is the audience's depth of feeling for the 44-year-old Canadian Everydude. The female reaction surely can't be attributed to his being a composite of every male in the house - where's the fun in fancying someone who looks like the guy you're already married to?

Yet you can smell the pheromones on their one-way trip from the audience to the stage. At the front, a pair of girls identically dressed in black and white have taken the trouble to make cue cards that they display at appropriate moments. When Adams bawls "The only thing that looks good on me is . . . " there's a card duly reading "You!"

What Adams does have is a winningly self-deprecating manner ("Wembley Arena! I can't believe it," he marvels, as if it weren't the 20th time he's played it) and a handful of tunes that wear down resistance and tease out the rock chick in the least rocking. For me, it's the infidelity saga Run to You, which is all the more touching for being sandwiched between a jollification called Friday Night in London and the plodding ballad Flying, dedicated to "all the British troops in Iraq".

The other stirring moment is, amazingly, Everything I Do, which sounds quite innocent now it's safely of another decade. Adams does it as a grande dame of a number - but anti-smoking regulations prevent lighters being produced during a song that, more than any other in his repertoire, begs for them. Still, as he sings: "You can't tell me it's not worth fighting for," Everydude sounds almost, well, majestic.

· At Cardiff Arena tonight. Box office: 029-2022 4488.