James Jackson
The Times

★★★★★

It’s not often that you get members of Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, the Who, Aerosmith, Metallica and Oasis jostling about on the same stage. In fact, this never happens. Except, that is, when it’s Mick Fleetwood organising a “dream come true” celebration of his onetime bandmate and mentor, Peter Green. The drummer clearly has quite an address book.

It’s not just Fleetwood who reveres Green either. The Syd Barrett of blues burnt briefly but brilliantly in the late 1960s before LSD triggered mental collapse (Green is an elusive presence today, but by all accounts more content). As with the best guitarists, you could always hear something deeper in his playing, some indefinable evidence of a fragile soul.

No one could quite capture that magic, not even the top-tier musicians on this night, but several came close. Not least the former Mac member Rick Vito, who took charge of the breezy opening numbers Rollin’ Man and Homework. From there the star cavalcade began: Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top added a Texas shuffle to Doctor Brown, John Mayall gave some vocal welly to All Your Love (at 86 he still has the blues) and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith brought rock-star charisma to Rattlesnake Shake.

With respect to these luminaries, early on it was Jonny Lang’s earthy solo attacks and Vito’s slide-playing on Love That Burns that offered the most mesmeric moments — far more so than Noel Gallagher’s attempt at acoustic blues or even the windmilling Pete Townshend’s demonstration of the link between Won’t Get Fooled Again and Station Man.

Still they kept coming . . . Christine McVie, Neil Finn, Bill Wyman, the Mac alumnus Jeremy Spencer (on stage with Fleetwood for the first time in 50 years) and David Gilmour lending his plangent tone to the live debut of Oh Well, Part 2 before a delicate Albatross. Most potent of all was the psychedelic nightmare The Green Manalishi, during which Kirk Hammett of Metallica threatened the Palladium’s plasterwork with an almighty solo wrung out of Green’s 1959 Les Paul guitar.

By the closing Shake Your Money Maker jam, you would have almost forgotten that the one person absent in this unique blues circus was Green. If he was in the audience (who knows?) he surely would have been quietly amused by all the fuss.