PETER Gabriel was always an innovator, a multi-media magician as much as a musician. First there were the costumed theatrics of Genesis and The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Then came the ground-breaking videos and film soundtracks, his embracing of electronic and African music, his WOMAD festivals and his Real World record label and state-of the-art recording studio.

Gabriel remains the thinking musician's thinking musician you can admire warmly - none of the arrogance of a Sting or Jose Mourinho - and at 54 the white wizard beard makes him even more of a Merlin figure at his first Sheffield show since 1992.

Diana Ross and Cher have passed through Sheffield's cavernous Arena in recent weeks; soul diva Diana alone on an empty stage in a fantastically Norma Desmond turn; Cher in a camp cabaret parade of costumes that ran close to pantomime. Make way for an English dramatist, a serious artist - some would say too serious, even his humour has a grave tone - who has a heightened grasp of music's relationship with theatre. Or in this case, a union of Eastern minimalism and mysticism (black clothes for all the band) and the modern circus of Cirque de Soleil.

Like Ross, Gabriel stages his show in the round, but where Ross and Cher placed the emphasis on changes of costume, Gabriel has a constantly evolving, constantly revolving set that he uses to elucidate his songs, like a stage director working with a text.

He had started alone, warming up his voice on the high notes of Washing Of The Water (in a last-minute change from Here Comes The Flood). Here comes the band of players, three shaven heads and Gabriel's daughter, Melanie, on backing vocals. Here come the sombre new songs, the ecological White Ashes and humanitarian Baby Man, both stronger on mood and rhythm than melody.

Above all, here come the theatrics, Gabriel using both height and width for maximum impact, his band changing position with the aid of the rotating stage. A circular video screen adds further detail, but there is always focus, and visual wit aplenty (to go with his concern at events in Iraq).

For Games Without Frontiers Gabriel and daughter wheel around the stage, striking poses on executive toys, at once conveying child's play and the aggrandising posturing of a Mussolini-style dictator. In Downside Up, they walk upside down suspended from a circular walkway, singing all the while. He tops even that when he climbs inside a diaphanous ball that spins and bounces around the stage in Growing Up, before he rides a bicycle with John Major glee in Solsbury Hill. Pretentious, you say? In other hands it could be This Is Spinal Tap but Peter Gabriel is not "still growing up": this is grown-up musical theatre, not the puppy shows of the Britney brigade.

Updated: 10:15 Thursday, June 03, 2004