As a way to celebrate avoiding a stint in prison, it sure beat going down the pub. A day after receiving his sentence for unfit driving — confined to a ban and community service — George Michael was on stage at Wembley Stadium, in front of 90,000 screaming fans, proving he can still hit the headlines for musical reasons.

However the concert had panned out, Michael had history-making in his hands. Fortuitous delays gave him the dubious honour of being the first artist to shout “Good evening, Wembley” in the revamped venue. The multimillion pound question: how did it sound? The answer: crystal clear, both times he yelled it, although the music fared less well.

An improvement on the old Wembley, certainly, but the sonic sensation was akin to a giant beatbox booming from the corner of the world’s largest living room.

The current leg of Michael’s comeback tour — he played Britain late last year for the first time in a decade and a half — has been christened 25Live, a reference to the quarter century that has passed since the singer first found fame with Wham!. Accordingly, he delved deep in to his back catalogue of pop classics in a show that spanned more than two hours.

His opening gambit, however, was simply bizarre. A sparsely-backed cover of This Mortal Coil’s take on Tim Buckley’s Song For The Siren drifted over an audience eager to catch sight of the star. “Here I am, here I am,” sang Michael softly, but on the high-tech stage, he was nowhere to be seen. Five minutes later, with the intro of Fastlove in full swing, he finally emerged from sliding, Star Trek-style doors near the foot of what may have been pop’s priciest video screen. The stunning centrepiece of the vast set flowed like an electronic waterfall, dropping 40 sheer feet, skirting the floor, then draping down in to a section of the crowd stood inside a semi-circular walkway.

The screen was a prop without which Michael would not have succeeded, although he could have left tired, comedy inflatables of Bush and Blair at home. His enthusiasm was apparent in his attempts at hip-shaking dance steps, his lively interaction with the audience and the sweat that soaked the back of his burgundy jacket before the interval. Yet he is hardly an artist who oozes charisma and his decision to hide his band on tiers of scaffolding and sweep his six backing vocalists to the sides left him with too much ground to cover.

Still, when the songs worked, the crowd was too busy dancing to bemoan the fact that the singer often resembled a dwarf stranded in a frantic video game. Too Funky was fab, and a far better second half packed in uplifting versions of Freedom 90 and Faith, a superb Spin The Wheel and an energetic Outside, in which he donned his cop costume.

Bar a closing Careless Whisper, his ballads were uniformly bad — or at least they didn’t work in such a large setting — but his charm helped to haul him through the slumps. “It’s disconcerting to play in daylight,” he admitted. “In the dark, I can slip to the side, scratch my balls and take a few lines.” What, a George Michael joke? Things must be looking up.

Tour dates: tomorrow, Carrow Road, Norwich; June 15, City of Manchester Stadium; June 17, Hampden Park, Glasgow; June 19 Home Park, Plymouth

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