Most artists begin an arena show with a bang: emerging from the floor, the gods, on a hoist, everything short of being sprung headfirst from a cannon. Touring for the first time in seven years, Peter Gabriel shrugged off such rote conventions. At 8 p.m. on the dot, he shuffled on alone in a flat cap, for all the world a man with nothing more on his mind than inspecting his spuds down at the allotment. He offered a few words, some avuncular jokes, a self-deprecating jibe at his appearance. I found myself bracing for a PowerPoint presentation, but the message was simple enough not to need one: there are no stars here.

The low-watt mood continued into the concert proper, which started almost without us noticing. Gabriel and bassist Tony Levin performed seated as a duo on ‘Washing of the Water’; beautiful, sad and gospel-tinged, as so many of Gabriel’s songs are. They were then joined around a virtual campfire by the rest of the band for ‘Growing Up’, but not before Gabriel had introduced all the musicians, something he did several times thereafter. He went to almost painful lengths to emphasise that this was a team effort – and it was quite the team, its number including Levin, guitarist David Rhodes and drummer Manu Katché, a gold-standard crop of session players.

Gabriel has always sought, perhaps a little too earnestly, to apply new technological advances to his interrogations of the human condition. There was some amiable Mad Professor spiel before ‘Panopticom’, a new song which was both punchy and self-parodic. As the video screens flickered to life, showing specially commissioned work by everyone from Ai Weiwei to Cornelia Parker, the dynamics of a Big Rock Show finally and dutifully kicked in, but the conversational prelude ensured that the personal connection had been established and was never lost.

It was a smart trick for an artist playing a lot of unfamiliar material. Gabriel is, a little oddly, touring an album that has yet to be released. The three-hour, 22-song set was an even split between artistic evolution and commercial necessity. He played 11 tracks from his forthcoming record i/o – throughout 2023 he has been releasing a new song every full moon, the old hippie, so several songs are already familiar to dedicated fans. These were balanced by 11 songs from his back pages – though nothing from his Genesis days – with the emphasis on his 1986 commercial breakthrough, So.

To my mind, two or three fewer new songs, replaced by pre-So material, would have made for a perfect setlist. Of the unreleased material, the classic ballad ‘Playing for Time’, with piano and strings, was particularly memorable. ‘Four Kinds of Horses’ had a glistening U2-ish grandeur, ‘This is Home’ was languid soul played out to the visual backdrop of baked beans sizzling in a pan, and the album’s title track boasted a bright pop chorus. Some other new songs fell too easily into that slightly generic, slouchy funk groove that Gabriel has been drawn to since So, while more intricate ones such as ‘And Still’ will need time for their charms to fully emerge. Still, when the album is finally released in its entirety, it seems likely to be worth the wait.

Making good on his team-player mentality, for much of the show Gabriel blended with the band, singing from behind the keyboards. He played the frontman role only when the occasion demanded it, which wasn’t that often. There are only a handful of truly mass market appeal-level songs in his catalogue, and he deployed them effectively. Following the opening mix of new and relatively obscure material, ‘Digging in the Dirt’ kicked up quite a fuss. The irresistibly funky ‘Sledgehammer’ closed the first set, with Gabriel strutting across the stage, elbows out, like King Monkey. Kate Bush didn’t show up to sing their 1986 duet ‘Don’t Give Up’, to nobody’s surprise, but cellist and backing vocalist Ayanna Witter-Johnson proved a more than able deputy. Gabriel himself remains one of the great vocalists. His voice was still quite remarkable, sliding from grainy soul rasp to hair-raising falsetto.

No matter how low-key the opening, Gabriel has been doing this too long not to understand that an arena show demands a big finish. In the home straight, ‘Red Rain’ came down a little too hard, overpowered by Katché’s drums, but the final run of ‘Solsbury Hill’, ‘In Your Eyes’ and ‘Biko’ was wholly affirming. ‘What happens next is up to you,’ he told us as the chanted coda to the starkly anthemic ‘Biko’ filled the Hydro. We chose to stay, and sing along. To complete the conversation.