Pity Cheryl Cole. Her private life is bumpy, and now she is stuck opening for the Black Eyed Peas. That isn't flippant: the Peas' live show is a hits-and-special-effects blockbuster, and would eclipse any support act. For Cole, accustomed to being a cog in the Girls Aloud wheel rather than doing a solo turn, the contrast is even crueller.
Surrounded by dancers and swathed in white, she looked small and out of her depth. Her best songs, Fight for this Love and Parachute, were rattled off without passion; on 3 Words, a photo of the Peas' will.i.am (who sang on the record) got more applause than she did. Yet her shout-out to "all you strong ladies in the house" was supportively returned by ladies both strong and weak.
The pertinent difference between Cole and the Black Eyed Peas - apart from the latter's production budget, which paid for, among other things, a space-age motorbike and spinning record-deck – is that the Peas are effortless live performers. Putting four such raving extroverts on the same stage should have resulted in nuclear fission; instead, they worked with and around each other like the street band they were before their osmosis into family-friendly hip-poppers.
Fergie, the big voice (who can also spin a microphone like a baton), belted, while will.i.am, irrepressible second banana Apl De Ap and lantern-jawed hunk Taboo threaded booming rhymes between her verses, body-popping all the while. will.i.am, for good measure, turned fans' live tweets into an improvised rap.
Every sugar-soaked hit, from Where Is the Love to I Gotta Feeling – the most downloaded track in iTunes history – was revisited, like a prolonged trip to a sweet shop. Glorious stuff. If will.i.am hadn't wasted the final 10 minutes thanking members of their crew by name, it would have been 2010's best pop show so far.
At the LG Arena, Birmingham (0844 338 8000), tomorrow. Then touring.
• This article was amended on 7 May 2010. The original stated that Apl turned fans' live tweets into an improvised rap. This has been corrected.
