As a 14-year-old Heather Barron watched Donny Osmond in concert and fell in love for the first time. Now a 40-year-old mother-of-four, she watched him perform last night - and realised that first love never dies.

THE wildest dream of every pre-pubescent girl of the Seventies walks onto the stage of the Newcastle Telewest Arena in a black three-piece suit.

The walking, talking dreamboat that is Donny Osmond strides out to share himself with 10,000 adoring women for two-and-a-quarter hours of love and lust.

He immediately reaches for the hands of the lucky women at the front, and accepts roses from the fortunate few. Admittedly, he can't meet and marry all of us (the wilder part of that wildest dream) but we can imagine that he is singing to each of us alone as he takes us back through the past 20 years of Donnymania.

He knows what we want. Tonight, for one night only, he is not just going to be that mop-haired teenager teasing us with Puppy Love and Go Away Little Girl.

In the true style of a performer who knows his audience, he also romances us as the mature, sensitive crooner with all-time favourites such as the Detroit Spinners' classic Could It Be I'm Falling In Love, and Air Supply's All Out Of Love.

With a good mix of old Osmond favourites such as Crazy Horses, cover versions from his recent album Somewhere in Time, and the ever-popular Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Donny has us exactly where he wants us.

Tonight, for one night only, I am that hormonal, screaming, 14-year-old from yesteryear, but I am not alone, although the age of the audience was never more apparent than when the woman beside me exclaimed: "Ooh, I do like a man in a suit."

His looks have hardly changed from the teen star I screamed at when he and his brothers played to an uncannily similar audience at London's Earls Court in London in the 1970s.

I was wearing my treasured Osmond badge then as a sign of my devotion.

And I proudly donned the gleaming medal again - untarnished by the passing years.

While his audience may have changed physically, at heart we are still the fans who took him to those dizzy heights he enjoyed as a boy - and it looks like we are going to do it for him all over again.

Donny...we still love you.