As the world's most famous exponent of tantric sex, Sting is well known for taking his time to get anywhere. The Sacred Love tour has been rescheduled from May, when the waspish singer lost his voice from either too much singing or too much panting. However, his hometown crowd is rewarded for the wait with a two-hour-plus marathon at £36 a head. It's a tantric set compared to the eight-song private quickie Sting performed for Microsoft man Bill Gates recently - for £273,000.

Gates should have just flown into Tyneside for this show, which encompasses every stage of Sting's career. There are moments of flushed excitement, occasions of serene satisfaction and endless stretches where you end up gazing at the plumbing. Despite a clutch of songs from Sting's most recent album, Sacred Love, and his claim to be "excited, but anxious" about coming home, the set has a routine feel. Sting tastefully invites everybody around to hear his cocktail jazz collection - Fields of Gold is exquisitely played but dull - but what people really want is to get down and dirty with the Police's rawer greatest hits.

This is a more human Sting, however, than the preachy, rainforest-soaked former schoolteacher of yore. He introduces a song about the Geordie winter with the words "That's why I moved south" (to Malibu, not Darlington). He talks of "dark characters on the world stage. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Osama bin Laden ... and Alex Ferguson." Thousands of Geordies roar but Middlesbrough are more of a threat to the Toon than Man United these days and Sting seems ever so slightly out of touch.

He missed a chance to find a new hip-hop audience when Puff Daddy sampled Every Breath You Take, and while young bands such as Grand National mine his post-punk period, the man himself seems to aim tunes at car stereos. He can still thrill when he varies the routine. He's sung Roxanne "85 million times" but reinvents it as a dub. The uncharacteristically exuberant Eurodisco of Send Your Love sees Sting hurl off his jacket, and where the music fails there is, at least, still a sexual frisson.

During Sacred Love models gyrate in their lingerie on a screen, while the hordes of women in his audience are disappointed that, unlike previous visits, the 53-year-old no longer goes topless.

· At Manchester Arena tonight. Box office: 0870 190 8000. Then touring.