Will she or won't she take off her coat? That is the question. It's a nice coat, hued a baby pink by the candyfloss spotlights, with tassels. Gabrielle descends on her audience - Butlins regulars, suburban builders, young men with permed hair, bespectacled housewives, and Julian Clarey - with the thing flapping at her legs. Under it she's wearing jeans and a frilly white shirt, and of course there are the essential dark glasses.
The wait for this grand entrance was attended by a weird atmosphere of mediocrity, Diana Ross tunes blaring through the soulless arena, a lazy Mexican wave, a general sense of waiting to be underwhelmed. For Gabrielle's music, bland and formulaic, a kind of postmodern Motown, is not the sort to inspire the extraordinary. It's a jingling-jangling, head-nodding synthesis dominated by drippy sentiments and a voice made of honey.
The live show does bring out the rock in her though, the harder drums and snarling guitars. And she even dances around a bit during 'Sunshine' and 'Don't Need the Sun to Shine'. But it gets hot under those lights and after three or four songs, she's taking breaks to wipe the sweat off her neck and face and even to sit down on the steps in the middle of the stage (surely those steps were meant for greater things). At one point she tugs at her coat then changes her mind and mutters, 'No, not time to take that off yet,' giving the misleading impression that the taking off of the coat is meant to be some delicious climax of the show; or, on the other hand, that she's just plain shy about not having the size-twelve bum.
Apart from that, she seems to be at the peak of her confidence. She is at Wembley after all, still Britain's yardstick of pop success despite no-one wanting to buy next door. In between songs she makes short husky comments about how great it is to be here and dedicates songs to her audience. They clap when she tells them to and jump to their feet to dance for 'When a Woman'.
After that track it must be so hot up there that Gabrielle starts shoving the wretched coat off her shoulders. Will she? Won't she? Nope. Instead she has another sit down and swig of water. The night's climax, it turns out, is not the coat flying through the air, but a perfectly-pitched delivery of 'Out of Reach' which sends a swell of pure content into the slipstream created by the arena crowd. There are few female artists that have made it without flashing their flesh and Gabrielle is most definitely one of them.
