They are the gigs that dare not speak their name, an awkward reminder that those who started out playing weddings, bar mitzvahs and parties can end up playing them too. For the rich individuals and corporate sponsors who throw them to impress friends and clients, they are the summit of VIP aspiration. For the performers, they are about cash — and to hell with credibility.

Some of the biggest names in pop have been playing them on the quiet for more than a decade. Before her current farewell tour, Tina Turner made a comfortable living strutting her stuff at corporate events on the continent. At the end of his last European tour, Paul McCartney gave a private show for his tour sponsors, Volvo, which was shrouded in intense secrecy.

His reticence is par for the course. George Michael was appalled earlier this year after his accountants leaked details of his concert earnings between April 2006 and March 2008 to a British tabloid. What bothered him was not just the headline figure — £48,499,893 from the 100-odd shows on his two-year 25 Live world tour. More troublesome were details of the £3.2m Michael collected from two private parties slotted in during gaps in the tour itinerary.

Both were thrown by wealthy entrepreneurs. On New Year’s Eve in 2006, Michael was paid £1.6m to sing at a Moscow shindig thrown by the Russian mining-and-lumber magnate Vladimir Potanin. Months later, in March 2007, Michael pocketed more than £1.5m to entertain revellers at the British billionaire-retailer Sir Philip Green’s 55th birthday party on Soneva Fushi in the Maldives. Jennifer Lopez also performed. After paying his musicians, George made more at each of these shows than he did in a week on the 25 Live tour — and for a lot less aggro.

Compared to the exhausting 2½-hour sets Michael was putting on in public arenas, these party gigs were a doddle. Flown to both destinations in a private jet, along with his boyfriend, Kenny Goss, his band and selected friends — all expenses paid by the host — Michael performed for an hour and a quarter: 13 songs, a gentle jog through the hits, including Careless Whisper and Freedom, at a cost of £120,000 per tune. Since his contract excluded any post-show “meet and greet” with the guests, George jetted out soon after leaving the stage. He was reportedly back in his Highgate home by lunchtime on New Year’s Day after the Moscow bash, and missed the finale firework display at Green’s do in the Maldives, along with the set performed by the party’s other headliner, Jennifer Lopez.

Sir Philip is a leading player in the rent-a-rock-star game. In 2002, he flew 200 friends to Cyprus for his 50th birthday, where Rod Stewart and Tom Jones performed before the Bhs boss, who turned up dressed as Nero. In 2005, he hired the R&B diva Beyoncé Knowles for his son’s bar mitzvah in the south of France.

Lavish as it seemed here at the time, Green’s choice of party entertainment looked almost modest compared to what the corporate hotshots in America were laying on. The rock’n’roll hospitality benchmark there was set in November 2002 by the Texan billionaire financier David Bonderman. To mark his 60th birthday, Bonderman hired the Hard Rock hotel in Las Vegas, where he installed a roster of star turns including the comic actor Robin Williams, John Mellencamp and, to close the evening, the Rolling Stones, who were then touring the States with their 40 Licks show.

For their 90-minute spot, the Stones picked up a reported $6m.

Estimates as to the band’s availability for such events vary. “They earn so much from their normal dates, they can’t really be bothered,” reports one Stones camper, “and Keith isn’t very keen.” This source claims the band has to date only performed one private party and two “corporates”. Another former associate claims that Jagger loves the easy money and puts the figure much higher. All agree on the band’s commitment to such private performances. “The atmosphere was electric and very intimate,” says one Bonderman party-goer. “They were better than I’ve seen them in some public venues.”

Bonderman’s Las Vegas bash outgunned the most rocking party thrown up until then by an American plutocrat — the 1999 wedding of the CEO of Sirius Telecom, Chris Edgecomb, whose $7m reception on his Californian estate starred Rod Stewart, David Crosby and Christopher Cross.

But it was eclipsed in November 2005 when a middle-aged defence contractor from Long Island, David Brooks, decided to blow a large slice of the huge windfall he’d racked up supplying bulletproof vests for use in Iraq. The occasion was his 13-year-old daughter Elizabeth’s bat mitzvah, for which Brooks hired New York’s Rainbow Room and a festival-sized slew of acts. It didn’t appear that Elizabeth had had much say in choosing these. Most were older than her dad: Aerosmith, Don Henley, Stevie Nicks, Kenny G and Tom Petty. The rapper 50 Cent — chosen perhaps for his signature album title Get Rich or Die Tryin’ — flew the flag for the under-thirties. Proof that this was Dad’s night rather than his daughter’s came when a fully pumped Brooks jumped up on stage and cavorted with Aerosmith, clad in a hot-pink, metal-studded suede bodysuit.

Brooks was exhibiting a musical preference not shared by the Russian oligarchs, who are more likely to call on pop smoothies and glamourpusses than grizzled rock legends.

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