It has been 33 years since Steve Vai started out touring with Frank Zappa’s band, but this sultan of strings has lost little of the risk-taking experimentalism imbued by those early years.

These days, Vai is a lithe 53-year-old with serpentine dance moves and a laser suit allowing the tracking of his every fret trick.

His eighth studio record, last year’s The Story Of Light, was the second in a trilogy of concept albums. And in front of an almost exclusively male crowd, the feverish feel of this sold-out show seemed a further accolade for a man with a mantelpiece of Grammy awards.

Scales and modes were traversed at blistering speed, notes diving and soaring into pitch-perfect extremes courtesy of an expertly-handled whammy bar.

Vai and his backing band – who had their moments, not least on drum solos and comedic, Freddie Mercury-style call-and-respond interludes – seamlessly moved between stylistic contrasts. Songs included the dreamy, Ritchie Blackmore-inspired Tender Surrender, from 1995, the doom metal of new track Weeping China Doll and the thrashy immediacy of 2006’s The Audience Is Listening.

As if their technical mastery needed underlining, they even fashioned an entirely new song under the instructions of two impromptu composers plucked from the crowd.