September 29th, 2007

By Bernadette McNulty

Bernadette McNulty witnesses the great man's first tour in more than 10 years

Just as Prince bowed out of his landmark 21-night residency in London amid a cacophony of praise, across the Atlantic, another historic run of live performances was coming to a gentler but no less celebrated close.

Stevie Wonder returned to the stage this August with his first tour in more than a decade. The singer, who has won more Grammy awards than any other solo performer, called the 13-date tour "Wonder Summer's Nights" and wound his way eastward across the states, finishing up last week in Boston.

Summer nights linger late into September on the East Coast, but Boston still seemed like a strangely blue-blood, buttoned-up city for a Detroit soul legend's finale. Outside the swooping canopy of the Bank of America Pavilion, tweedy Harvard students held up placards, politely requesting any spare tickets. Underneath, a wave of couples in blue denim, deck shoes and buttoned-down shirts sipped chilled beer in the salty breeze that blew across the bay.

Earlier in the day, when I had arrived at Boston airport, the immigration official had seemed surprised I'd travelled so far just to see "such an old guy". I nervously guessed that Wonder was only in his late fifties but Mr Immigration was adamant he was much older. "He's been around for ever!" he boomed.

Wonder is actually 57 – eight years older than Prince, seven years younger than Mick Jagger – but he has weathered decades of success: from the moment he burst on to the scene in the '60s as 12-year-old Little Stevie with his Motown hits, through a run of revolutionary albums in the '70s that changed the DNA of soul music, and on into the '80s as a pop icon, turning out cosy duets and mega-selling love songs.

While Wonder more or less retreated from music in the '90s, preferring family life and charity campaigns, of late he has tentatively re-emerged from his cocoon, releasing his first album in more than a decade in 2005, A Time to Love, touring, and next week he will put out a new greatest hits album.

But it was clear as soon as Wonder shuffled on stage, clutching the arm of his daughter Aisha, that he wasn't coming back – like Prince or Elton – to remind us how good he was. There was no fanfare, no vanity video tributes, no giant red pianos.

He didn't even begin to sing. First he cracked at joke about the guys in the audience looking at Aisha in her short black dress. "Blind people carry shotguns too and my aim is really good."

Then he went on to describe his mother's death last year, how devastated he had been until one night she came to him in a dream and told him he had to carry on performing, and how grateful he was that his success had allowed him to give her a better life. Finally, he sat down with Aisha and the two of them gently sang Love's in Need of Love Today from 1976's Songs in the Key of Life.

In those 10 short minutes Boston buttons were truly pressed. It was a powerful appeal to classic American sentiments: here was the blind man who had overcome adversity, the devoted family guy, the master musician, the comedian and finally the hippy humanitarian, desperate to make the world a better place.

Anywhere else, with anyone else, it would have been cheesy, but Wonder underplayed it perfectly through the simple, considered delivery of his seemingly endless songbook. Most of the time he was ensconced behind walls of keyboards and piano and a tight, concentrated 10-piece band. You could just about see that familiar upward tilt of the head, the gum-baring grin, the long plaits flicking from side to side.

Yet he held the space like an intense bull of a man, powerfully conjuring up intricate whirls of melodies and high, impossible notes from his voice and releasing them into the air like birds. For two and half hours, he performed the kind of complex symphonies that only a musician of his talent could have created – and that every modern R&B singer from Michael Jackson to Rhianna would die for.

Most of the time it was mesmerising and contemplative rather than jump-up-and-down exciting, but Wonder never stopped working to keep the audience enthralled. In the middle of the ballad section, he even momentarily managed to transform the preppy set into a steamy chorus line – the guys leaping from their seats to sing "I want it, I need it!" while the women panted and cooed in response.

Finally he stood up and, with his feet firmly planted centre stage, he blasted out hits like cannonballs: Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing, Signed, Sealed, Delivered, For Once in My Life, Superstition – sending the crowd into gospel-style ecstasy, and reminding us all just how good Stevie Wonder still is.

A new Stevie Wonder compilation, 'Number Ones' (Island), is released on Oct 8.