The Baby Boomer rockers of the 1960s and 1970s will clearly never die — they just become more popular and more profitable every year. In the wake of Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen storming Glastonbury, the Eagles returned to Britain this week, playing more dates in their latest lucrative reunion tour to promote their first new album in 28 years, Long Road Out of Eden. At the first of two Birmingham shows, these laidback LA veterans gave a masterclass in polished professionalism that veered between the sublime and the soporific.

Uniformly dressed in dark business suits, the four principal members resembled a corporate board of directors rocking out at a company sales conference. All they lacked was a PowerPoint pie chart depicting third-quarter profit projections on the gigantic video screen behind them.

The 61-year-old Don Henley, a dead ringer for the actor Alec Baldwin nowadays, alternated between drums and guitars as he tackled the more bluesy, bittersweet vocals. Glenn Frey, a spookily boyish 60-year-old Dale Winton lookalike, crooned the more mellifluous country-folk numbers. Both were impeccably slick, even recycling the same wry one-liners about ex-wives and encroaching old age that they first used more than a year ago.

Only Joe Walsh, disturbingly reminiscent of a punch-drunk Harvey Keitel, brought the faintest whiff of loose-cannon rock-star attitude to his bellowed vocals and feverish guitar solos. With his wild blond mane and thousand-yard stare, Walsh looks like he never quite checked out of the Hotel California during the band’s notoriously hedonistic 1970s heyday.

Speaking of which, Hotel California was a pleasingly early highlight. Heralded by a hot-blooded trumpet overture, the band’s biggest hit remains one of their most impressively weird creations, from its quasi-reggae rhythm to its baroque, hydra-headed, multi-guitar finale. Henley sang this Faustian fable about trouble in Paradise in a husky croak, as if the paint had begun to peel from the walls of his luxury prison.

The Eagles played two sets, each more than an hour, but failed to excite much reaction from a largely inert and middle-aged crowd. The blow-dried Bee Gees harmonies of No More Walks in the Woods and Waiting in the Weeds were pleasant enough, but a little bland. A raunchy Long Road Out of Eden was better, as Henley drew pointedly political parallels between US gas guzzlers and the Iraqi oil fields.

This kind of sunshine noir is what the Eagles do best, teasing out the darkness and despair behind the American Dream. Alas, mellow escapism was the dominant motif in Birmingham, epitomised by the pipe-and-slippers pastoral Peaceful Easy Feeling and the banal gospel-pop optimism of Take it to the Limit.

They may acknowledge the occasional cloudy sky, but these Baby Boomer balladeers will always prefer silver linings and Hollywood endings.

MEN Arena, Manchester, on Saturday and Sunday

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