Morten Harket looks really small.

That was the first thing I thought The second thing that struck me is that a-ha have been around for yonks. It's 21 years since Take On Me entered the public's consciousness with an animated Harket trying to escape a man with a spanner. Certainly he was more animated than he is tonight, striking a series of rock poses and fiddling around with his earpiece. It's something of a surprise whenever he starts belting out his peculiarly brilliant voice, with seemingly no effort.

Alas, that perennial enemy of the casual gig-goer - the spectre of New Material - rears its ugly head a few times, and several songs of their lesser known albums are also inlcuded but, interspersed with the likes of Stay On These Roads, Crying In The Rain and Summer Moved On, it's no hardship.

Hunting High and Low - one of the sweetest songs I've ever heard gets a welcome airing accompanied by what seems like a well-practised singalong routine, while Mags entreats us to 'do it for Kevin Keegan!'.

a-ha have always had a strange knack of marrying rather beautiful, bittersweet melodies with lyrical, slightly surreal, almost metaphysical, storytelling in their songs. It's often a scintillating combination, and enough to clearly delineate them from any other vacuous 80s outifts or boyband MOR dross, with which they are often unfairly lumped. It's a clever, affecting trick later learned by the likes of Mansun, with whom I don't expect a-ha have ever been compared.

The notion of a Norwegian adolescent writing a lyric like "The Sun Always Shines On TV" has always drawn me to a-ha and glorious renditions of that song, Take On Me and The Living Daylights raise the roof. Thankfully Touchy! is saved for another day, but the power of the Nordic trio's oevre is undeniable.

Occasionally somewhat stadium in nature, the gig overall can only be judged a success, with the band delivering what the near-capacity crowd were expecting to hear. In many ways they're a peculiar band - it's hardly clear where they fit in terms of their stature or their genre, but their rather haunting fairytale songwriting coupled with glorious power-pop is a knockout one-two tonight.

Gordon Cook