On my way into the booming cavern of Wembley Arena, I bumped into a critic from another paper. I could tell from his glassy-eyed stare and lurching gait that he was upset. "It's fucking terrible!" he fumed. "The entire population of Essex is in there, listening to this stadium crap." He staggered off towards the bar, in search of some of Wembley's famous no-alcohol lager.

It wasn't quite as bad as that, even if the floor of the arena was crammed with fat, balding blokes from Romford clutching armfuls of pints, obviously hell-bent on enjoying a well earned night off from Euro 2000. Not so Carlos Santana, who at 52 seems no less skinny and wiry than he has ever been, even if the former electric-Afro hairdo has now disappeared under a back-to-front pork-pie hat. Surfing joyously on the vast success of his Supernatural album, Santana fronts his sprawling band of percussionists, vocalists, horn and keyboard players with an air of beatific self-satisfaction. He bends over his guitar strings to blow air-kisses to the audience, and makes buddha-like devotional gestures. "Peace! Love! Harmony!" he told us, in conclusion. "One love! A love supreme!"

And the music? At their best, the Santana band can cause mayhem with those steaming Latin grooves, with drummer Rodney Holmes leading the massed percussion onslaught, but it was significant that they did this most convincingly on the old warhorses, Black Magic Woman and Oye Como Va. You can see why the new, Grammy-scooping material works across such a broad canvas - it's like a compilation of current pop trends, hinting at hip-hop, plundering the Latin wave. It's like Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass, digitally upgraded.

At least there was one moment of relative spontaneity, when Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 arrived to sing Smooth, which he co-wrote. Thomas's twitchy, self-conscious performance was in stark contrast to the well-oiled Santana machine raging around him. These days, he is so blissed out he has managed to eradicate human error entirely.