Two guys in the row in front went scrabbling for their mobile phones the moment "the Quo" launched into Whatever You Want. You could understand their excitement - it's not every day you get to hear the music from Argos's Christmas TV advert played live. But they weren't phoning pals to share this seminal moment of fusion between rock music, cut-price garden furniture and power tools. Instead, they lit up their phones, held them aloft candle-fashion and swayed emotionally - in ecstasy, no doubt, at the thought of all those great bargains.
It was good to have a diversion. Status Quo may have been going for four decades but they don't seem to have picked up much in the way of stagecraft. Playing a set that had all the visual panache of a bus-stop, the super-annuated rockers kicked off with Caroline, The Wanderer, then Something 'Bout You Baby I Like. By that stage - gagging for something more stimulating than the remorseless diet of guitars going chung-ka, chung-ka, chung-ka, chung - you realise the importance of white trainers to the band. They're the only "visual" they really have. Madonna traverses stages like a cross between a bullet and a ballet dancer. Ozzy Osbourne bites the heads off bats. But the Quo wear old denims and stick to a sort of pared-down hokey cokey: left leg in, left leg out, with the occasional heel-spin or mini-leap. If it wasn't for the white trainers, much of the impact of such pyrotechnics would be lost.
So on the band rollicked, with a shuffle here and a shuffle there, carrying the crowd along: Down, Down, Roll Over Lay Down and In the Army Now, that strange and unexpected outburst of social conscience that, if nothing else, at least brought a change of pace before a Chas'n'Dave-style blast on the synthesisers propelled us into Rockin' All Over the World.
It was a performance devoid of surprises but then that's kind of the point with Quo. They are to rock what Sunny Delight is to fruit juice: insipid in large doses, offering little in the way of "the real thing", but still hugely popular. You can knock the big songs all you want but they do have an anthem-like ability to stick around, rather like a bit of old chewing gum.
From time to time amid the barrage of 12-bar blues, Francis Rossi (the band's waistcoat-wearing frontman) would stop to talk - an exercise that seemed designed to show that a man can spend his life addressing giant crowds and still not develop the gift of the gab. "Put that sheep down!" he said at one point, bafflingly, before going on to reveal: "Our drummer's an alien!"
And the near-capacity crowd lapped it up. By the time Quo had begun their numerous encores, the two mobile phone-wavers had progressed to playing synchronised air guitar. They then untied the jumpers from their waists and played them instead. Imagine - wool guitar! Meanwhile, near the front, a grown man was brandishing an inflatable yellow and purple plastic guitar. The rest of the crowd were in similar high spirits and kept it going all night - right down to the last chung-ka, chung-ka, chung-ka, chung.
