Entering a Barry Manilow concert can be a strangely unnerving experience. There's the huge red velvet curtain, draped across the entire stage and emblazoned with a heart. There's the choice of entrance music – somewhat unexpectedly, Manilow emerges to the relentless thud of Underworld's Born Slippy. And then there are the "fanilows" – an army of screaming admirers, all waving glowsticks. It goes to prove the adage: you can wait a lifetime hoping to meet a Barry Manilow fan and then 20,000 come along at once.
They're all gathered here to see the septuagenarian survivor from Brooklyn who – resplendent in a cerise smoking jacket – looks uncannily like Michael Douglas playing Liberace. It's fitting, as Manilow's whole trick is to take pure Vegas kitsch and retune it for an arena show. There are hits galore – from Could It Be Magic to a cover of Dancing In The Street. There are incredibly obvious visuals – during Can't Smile Without You, a huge smiley emoticon is projected on to the back wall. And there's the knowing stage patter, such as when he describes himself as a "sex god in a red jacket".
Things reach a self-referential high point during Mandy: with Manilow offstage, 1970s footage of him playing the song is broadcast until – one minute in - he reappears at the side of the stage, now in a white dinner jacket, watching his younger self play his best-known hit before joining in. The effect is strangely tragic, as if we are watching Manilow play out his Rosebud moment in front of us.
The irony is that Manilow is actually at his best when he strips away the artifice and you remember his place in a rich, New York musical tradition that goes back to greats such as Stephen Sondheim and Burt Bacharach. He is, at heart, still the honest boy from Brooklyn who made it through talent and hard work, and when he breaks into Looks Like We Made It the whole crowd reacts as though they've made it with him.
At the beginning of Even Now, he sits alone at the piano and for a minute you get the feeling that Rick Rubin could consider trying a late-era, Johnny Cash-type reinvention, getting him to pare it all down and sing about mortality and regret. Then, just as you're lost in this daydream, the band kicks in and we're back in the room with the glowstick-waving fanilows, all singing along to his version of Memory from Cats.
