Peter Gabriel, Wembley Arena, London

We should, I suppose, take what occurs on the stage of Peter Gabriel's Growing Up tour as an analogue of the contents of his brain. In which case it's a fastidiously organised brain, hygienically neat, smooth in operation and engineered to work to the finest tolerances. We might also observe that it's a brain governed by a shivery taste for patterns, metaphors, analogues, fractals; the way the big is an inextricable property of the little and vice versa. It's a brain that enjoys a hole and a protrusion. And bicycles, bubblewrap, apes, boats, plankton, eggs, things going backwards...

Not your average pub-rocker's brain, then, but we knew that. The last tour, Secret World, also arose from the joint brainstorming of Gabriel and his favourite collaborator, the Canadian Robert Lepage, and like this one, took the basic format of the hangar-based rock show as the starting point for a... well, what exactly? Life on Earth on Ice, without the ice?

It's best not to think in terms of what it all means but what it all does. And what it does above all is give you a warm, included feeling inside. So the show with two brains has plenty in common with the West End musical. It has songs in it, it has drama, it has coups de theatre that stun and amuse, and you care terribly about how it all turns out in the end. In the case of Growing Up, you might even argue that it's a subtle rewiring for the Age of Leisure of The Tempest. It has a Miranda, an Ariel and a Caliban. It's an island on which the Primitive gets in an awful tangle with the Magical, and Love must be tested - all to be resolved at the controlling whim of its wizened Prospero. But that would be going too far. One of the cooler things about Gabriel is that, actually, he doesn't go too far. He has keen intellectual discipline for one who appears to enjoy nothing better than rolling around in public in a gigantic bubblewrap ovum, singing.

It's a great voice, even thickened and coarsened with cold. This is what I go for really. I love to hear him sing. He may not have a vast range - and the voice itself may not be conventionally lovely in texture - but it is endowed with that very rare and magical ability to make you "get" the contents of the song before you register anything else. This may be the only thing Gabriel has in common with Ella Fitzgerald.

He sang on the move, except when standing still to do a solo "Here Comes the Flood" to open the show and to close with a slightly perfunctory "Father Son", by which time his voice had gone the way of the cheese grater. In between he ran out a fairly judicious mix of new and old material. "Big Sky" saw the Blind Boys of Alabama arising magnificently from the navel of the stage. "Downside Up" involved Gabriel walking his daughter around the gantry of his Close Encounters set, upside down, head 10 feet off the floor. The big funk kicker/ moaner "The Barry Williams Show" had Prospero behind the camera on the gravity side of the gantry walkway. "Solsbury Hill" was Monsieur Hulot's Cycling Tour of a Huge Rotating Cheese. "Mercy Street" was simply beautiful. Drummer Ged Lynch was Caliban, which is presumably why he had to be kept in a greenhouse for a while.

One was amused, comforted, startled and then, when things sagged slightly under the burden of the pervading mid-paced stomp tempo and the continuous expectation of more coups, briefly distracted by the things that stand outside the compass of Great Thought - such as the audience and the little pot of honey nestling stickily among the lights and graphic displays of Prospero's smooth and shining keyboard console.