Oh, nostalgia – so much better than it used to be! You’d never have guessed pop music was once the preserve of teenagers had you been visiting the Greenwich peninsula last week – not from the crowds, or from the artists. Here were Roxy Music, whose four core members boast a combined age of 295, playing what might be their last ever show. Here were the Tops and the Temps, bands each with just one original member left – 86-year-old Duke Fakir of the Tops, 80-year-old Otis Williams of the Temps. And here was the absolute youngster of the lot, Robbie Williams, a stripling of 48, but 32 years into his pop career. Blimey, I know we keep being told retirement at 65 is a thing of the past, but this was ridiculous.

The oddity was that it seemed as though Roxy had the oldest crowd of all. Odd because Roxy’s influence has echoed down the decades in so many new pop movements. Every couple of years there’s a hot new band trying to be early Roxy, all archness and glitter and mixing skronk and melody, while one of alternative music’s most prevalent current trends is a sonic devotion to the sound Bryan Ferry and co were making on their Avalonand Manifesto albums, a kind of distanced, uncertain, anxious sophistication. Young people still want to be Roxy, they just don’t want to see them (or, possibly, they can’t afford to see them).

Truth be told, Roxy didn’t have quite the magic of the Bryan Ferry solo show I reviewed in these pages just as the first lockdown struck. Perhaps that show gained some extra edge from the knowledge that cataclysm was just around the corner, whereas this was much less emotionally complex. Perhaps, too, it’s that this one leaned quite a lot on the early recordings with Brian Eno, and – the big bangers aside – I suspect connection with some of those songs depends on context and memory because not all of them were great melodies. Still, when the bangers include ‘Virginia Plain’ – maybe the best debut single ever – it seems a little churlish to complain.

And the closing run – ‘Dance Away’, ‘More Than This’, ‘Avalon’, ‘Love Is the Drug’, ‘Editions of You’, ‘Virginia Plain’, ‘Jealous Guy’, ‘Do the Strand’ – was peerless. Ferry’s voice is now a papery wisp, but the more desolate the sentiment, the more apt it seemed, and a trio of backing singers filled in the gaps where needed. I may not love all their catalogue, but Roxy have a good seven or eight songs that are among pop’s greatest achievements.

Also among pop’s greatest achievements are the recordings of the Temptations and the Four Tops, though of course they neither played any instruments nor wrote any of the songs. But why would you need to? The Temps had Smokey Robinson, Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong writing lots of theirs; the Tops had the Holland-Dozier-Holland team. The two leaders are these days supplemented by others to do the vocal heavy lifting. Neither was ever a soloist, and when Duke Fakir took a solo slot on a maudlin version of ‘My Way’, it was hard to know whether to be moved or embarrassed – presumably he is aware his pitch is approximate these days, so it might well be a statement of human frailty. But to hear so many glorious songs – the Temptations’ set, especially, was classic after classic – was a privilege. It was just a shame so few were there to hear them: the top tier was curtained off, and there were a lot of empty seats at the back. People! How many more chances do you think you’ll get to see these groups?

No empty seats for Robbie, who put on the most purely enjoyable show. He can’t help but be a showman, and anyone who ever dismissed him as just a former boyband star really should pay closer attention to the craft in the songs. Yes, there was a lot of pastiche but the pastiches of Oasis – songs such as ‘Strong’ – secured him the male fans who took him out of the post-boyband world. And yes, sometimes the lyrics were a little ‘will this do?’, but they were sturdy constructions.

There was room, too, for a slightly chilling dissection of pop’s exploitativeness. At one point, the video for Take That’s first single ‘Do What U Like’ (not as good a debut as ‘Virginia Plain’, in case you were wondering) was shown on the big screens, with Williams offering commentary. We saw the quintet lying naked on the floor, all fetishised smooth skin. ‘I was 17 years old then,’ Williams said, ‘naked, with jelly on my arse.’ The music might have been the preserve of teenagers; the rest of the grubby business was always the preserve of adults, and not always the good ones.