Fleetwood Mac
MEN Arena, Manchester
THREE STARS

Diana Krall
Royal Albert Hall, London
TWO STARS

When it comes to old rockers, how old is too old? It all depends on how well they have aged. Leonard Cohen was on storming form last year at 74. The members of Fleetwood Mac are mere 60-somethings, but they wear it less well. The longest-serving members, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, come on stage in caps and white beards, like a pair of Captain Birdseyes.

Christine McVie has retired, leaving Stevie Nicks as the lone female voice. At 61 she is still blonde and striking, but she moves stiffly: perhaps all the bed-hopping that Fleetwood Mac went in for wasn’t good for the joints. Only her ex Lindsey Buckingham, just 60, exudes vigour. Slim-hipped, grey-haired and wearing a leather jacket, he looks like Lou Reed’s slightly less angry younger brother.

Buckingham, not Nicks, turns out to be the central figure of the show. He sings lead on the first two songs – the mediocre Monday Morning, from the 1975 album Fleetwood Mac, and the better The Chain, from its successor, Rumours. And he wields his guitar like a man who is determined to get more than his share of the solos.

Buckingham certainly brings energy to what could be a sleepy evening, but Fleetwood Mac at their best were not about solos or even energy. In their patch of music, unjustly dismissed as AOR, the thrill lay not in the sound or the fury, but in soft textures, subtle layering and emotional intelligence. That was why Rumours sold 33 million copies.

To see them perform now is to see how right the record-buying public could be, even in the mid-Seventies. In their quiet way, the soft-rock tracks tower over most of the rest. Dreams, Go Your Own Way and Don’t Stop are exemplary pop songs, succinct and soulful. Somehow, these disparate individuals who had endured bitter break-ups from one another buried their differences in disciplined teamwork.

This makes Buckingham’s grandstanding all the more jarring. But his performance goes down well with the fans – the wisdom of crowds tends to falter when it comes to solos – and it does get this chilly arena going. Those in the stalls have been allowed down the front from the start, and after about an hour, more than a few of them are finally ready to take up the invitation.

Rhiannon, which preceded Rumours, and Sara, which came later, show the same controlled gorgeousness. Sara was on the follow-up album, Tusk, and it comes in a package with the title track, which was an inspired solution to the problem of how you follow a monster-seller: Buckingham managed to add tribal drums and a new-wave edge without wrecking the Rumours template.

There is something missing now: Christine McVie’s vocals, and some of her best songs (You Make Loving Fun, Everywhere, Little Lies). Nicks’s voice is still fitfully lovely, and far preferable to Buckingham’s group-therapy whine, but she doesn’t have the presence of a front person. Mick Fleetwood does, with his giant frame and actorish voice, but he is stuck behind the drums.

So you can see why Buckingham thrusts himself forward, but one of his guitar solos last as long as my packet of MEN crisps, and has a lot less bite. Next time, if there is a next time, Fleetwood Mac should book theatres rather than arenas, lure Christine McVie out of retirement, and play Rumours in full.

Diana Krall, the Candian jazz-pop singer, is now big enough to fill the Albert Hall, if not quite able to thrill it. Krall has a majestic voice, rich and full with tremendous phrasing, but she is forever falling silent to play the piano and join her jazz trio in prolonged bouts of noodling.

At the microphone, she’s a star; at the piano, she’s a journeywoman; and between songs, chatting away, she’s an amiable windbag. As a producer, she has just got the best out of Barbra Streisand, which can’t be easy, but only on a nonchalant version of Burt Bacharach’s Walk On By did she get the best out of herself.