If there’s a sub-genre of popular music currently less fashionable than American AOR, I’d like to hear about it - Acid Skiffle, possibly.

Journey is the band that did commercial stadium rock better than any other through the 80s and 90s by the simple expedient of writing better songs and playing them better than anyone else in the field.

Watching them perform in front of a large audience of the long-term converted, it is clear how they’ve managed to shift albums and concert tickets in their millions over 30 years. Pop rock classics from the squillion-selling Escape album, melodic hard rockers and the kind of power ballads only an American would have the chutzpah to write had Hammersmith man on his feet, singing along and hugging his neighbour.

Looking trim and possessed of magnificently Californian hair the band are as tight as any on the road, each member contributing to immaculate close vocal harmonies, with the whole energised by the fluid virtuoso fretwork of Neil Schon, a man who was holding his own in Carlos Santana’s band at the age of 15. The transformation of ‘Stone In Love’s’ radio-friendly boy-meets-girl sing-along to the screaming solo that ends the track has never sounded better to these ears, and charismatic newbie vocalist Arnel Pineda made sure that Steve Perry wasn’t missed - no mean feat.

It’s easy to write-off bands like Journey as corporate ciphers because they wear clean jeans and don’t ‘do’ angst. And perhaps ‘corporate’ is what they are, but then, today, so are the Arctic Monkeys and any band with a record contract or a slot at a summer festival.

Journey need be a guilty pleasure no longer, so all together now: ‘Lying beside you / here in the dark / feeling your heart beat with mine...’

Richard Hodkinson
Pic: londontourpix