Aerosmith, Hard Rock Café, London

Mika, Akon, and the Kaiser Chiefs are all very well, but as Van Halen singer/ mountaineering enthusiast David Lee Roth once put it, nothing gets a yak over a crevasse quicker than Aerosmith's "Back in the Saddle". It's an event, too, when an act that has sold in excess of 150 million albums opts to play their first UK gig in eight years in a glorified diner. "When did Aerosmith last appear in a venue this size?" says the Hard Rock's pleased big cheese introducing them. "Never."

The "secret" gig is to cement the announcement that Aerosmith will headline a major rock event in London's Hyde Park this June, but tonight they are just feet away. There is something magically cartoonish about their charisma; nail-varnished, heavily bejewelled singer Steven Tyler like a lascivious Peter Pan who holds the key to Seventies' hard rock's seminal Neverland.

"Love in an Elevator" is magnificently uplifting, its swaggering riffs transporting us to classic rock's penthouse suite. Further in, the choruses of "Don't Want to Miss a Thing" are executed with an authority and poise power ballads in other hands routinely lack.

Watching Joe Perry, it is clear that finger strength and skilled vibratoare the qualities that separate the men from the boys where rock-guitar prowess is concerned. Your Snow Patrols and Coldplays don't know how to execute a liquid bend and apply a searing, sustained caress. But Perry? Man, he wrote the book.

Though (mostly) rhythm guitarist Brad Whitford has the greying look of your typical fifty-something rocker, Tyler and Perry are still far better preserved than a duo whose excesses earned them the epithet "the Toxic Twins" have any right to. The tanned Perry looks as sculpted as the presidents on Mount Rushmore, while Tyler twists his tiny frame into shapes that suggest any joint replacements are a long way off. "When I first saw this band I said, if you don't let me join, I'm going to have to break in," he confides ahead of a thrillingly visceral "Rattlesnake Shake". "This is the song that made me feel that way."

Aerosmith could always groove as well as rock, so it is a cinch for them to drop into the late James Brown's "Mother Popcorn". Funky as hell, it is the perfect conduit to "Walk this Way", the rock/rap crossover that became a huge hit after Aerosmith re-recorded it with Run DMC. As Tyler applies his formidable larynx to the song's chorus, the sense of privilege is immense. Rock bands of Aerosmith's pedigree are an increasingly endangered species. Seeing them up close was sublime.

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