After more than 20 years together, Pearl Jam have acquired a certain gravitas. Since emerging from the grunge scene in the early 90s, the Seattle band have overcome a range of traumatic experiences – a deranged fan driving a car into frontman Eddie Vedder's house, and the horror of seeing fans crushed to death at Denmark's Roskilde festival – to emerge with dignity and commitment intact. Perhaps that explains the loyalty of their followers, some of whom have travelled from as far away as Greece to see them in Manchester.
The band's entrance has the air of a battle-weary army returning home: the video screens show the band in grainy black and white, rather than in HD colour. With opener Metamorphosis 2 performed in darkness, an evening with them is set up as part classic old-style rock'n'roll concert, part eerie commemoration – a little like a wake.
Pearl Jam were never really quite a grunge band, owing more to the classic rock of the 70s. Hair, where it hasn't fallen victim to the middle-aged curse of the sensible haircut, is flailed. There are chunky riffs, played with legs apart. But the talismanic Vedder somehow takes things into another, elemental, dimension. With the magnetism of Michael Hutchence and the spirituality of Michael Stipe, he is surely the only 47-year old frontman who crowd-surfs and plays a tambourine so hard during a riotous cover of Neil Young's Rockin' in the Free World he smashes it. At one point, he leans so far backwards with the mic stand he appears to be limbo-dancing.
Vedder is ridiculously, almost comically sincere. "How are you doing?" he asks, earnestly. "It's a question we ask of you as a collective, but we mean it individually." But somehow he always avoids self-parody, and with every hand in the air and sometimes every voice singing, the bond between band and audience is extraordinary.
A 150-minute set rifles through their back catalogue, from early hit Even Flow to 2009's beautiful, acoustic Just Breathe, to the sublime Come Back, played spontaneously after a request by a fan in the front row. There's a comedy moment when Vedder showers himself in wine, but when he movingly addresses the fatal accident at last weekend's Radiohead gig, you can hear a pin drop, and the subsequent Alive becomes an emotional blizzard, celebrating those of us still standing, and remembering some who aren't.
