James Blunt is no longer the ubiquitous musical presence of yore. His last two albums have not shifted a fraction of the units of his 2004 debut Back to Bedlam, which sold a staggering 12m copies around the globe and in Britain was the best-selling album of the last decade.

It's tempting to speculate that the majority of his followers got bored and drifted away, because Blunt remains a catastrophically uncharismatic performer. At this show, which focused heavily on that blockbuster debut and the recent album Some Kind of Trouble, his self-conscious, diffident demeanour was suggestive of the human tragedy that would ensue were Tim Henman to attempt to become a rock star.

The songs on his new album are well crafted but mind-numbing in their banality. Blunt is not afraid of cliche. On the misleadingly named Dangerous, he is "wrapped around her finger"; on the plodding These Are the Words he's "dancing with a broken heart".

The live experience is made unbearable by his excruciating attempts to rock out, which are reminiscent of Cliff Richard, and by the puppy-dog eagerness with which he attempts to sing of dark nights of the soul. The nadir is the hypnotically weedy Turn Me On, possibly the least convincing evocation of carnal abandon ever committed to music, while Superstar could be the Eagles going disco, and is every bit as grisly as that phrase suggests.