The other week I saw a T-shirt bearing the caption ‘For the girls, the gays and the theys’. And if you want a very quick and easy demonstration of why someone might wish to wear a T-shirt specifically excluding straight men, I suggest you go to pretty much any big standing show, certainly any featuring a youngish guitar band.

There you will see the straight man in his natural environment, moving from the bar in small herds of six or seven in a straight line through the crowd, charging through obstacles like buffalo through the brush, finding their spot and then performing their rites of shouting through the songs that bore them and pushing one another around to the songs that don’t, then buffalo-charging to the toilets and to the bar and back to their territory to shout and shove. They don’t do it with malice, any more than a badger gives a cow TB with malice. It’s just what they do.

I tend not to notice them very much. I was probably one of them when I was their age, and it’s just one of those things you come to expect at gigs, like plastic glasses that buckle under the slightest pressure, or people going to the loo during the new songs. But I really noticed them at Carly Rae Jepsen’s London show.

I noticed them in their absence. There were straight men there, of course, usually with their wives or girlfriends. And there was me and my friend. But instead of the bulk of the crowd being young men having it large, it was the girls, the gays and the theys having it large, and doing it in a way entirely devoid of boorishness: just as drunk but without the testosterone edge. On the way out, my friend said it was the loveliest crowd he’d been in for a long time – and I pointed out why.

Their joy made the crowd the star of the show, which – sorry, because I want to say it was amazing out of pure goodwill – was a bit underpowered. There were no screens, which is unforgivable in a venue this big, and very little in the way of production bells and whistles. Jepsen herself might throw the same shapes as, for example, Dua Lipa or Miley Cyrus, but she doesn’t quite have their bulletproof charisma – for all the pink leotard and blonde hair, she can’t help but project approachability.

Nor does she quite have the bulletproof songs of Dua Lipa. There’s one cast-iron, perpetual wedding-disco classic, the one that will ensure the tabs will for ever call her ‘the “Call Me Maybe” hitmaker’, but she’s refocused her music over her last four albums, replacing the pure sugar rush of that song with something slinkier and more sophisticated. It’s like moving from alcopops to old-fashioneds. They’re excellent pop songs – ‘Emotion’, ‘Cut to the Feeling’, ‘I Didn’t Just Come Here to Dance’, ‘Your Type’ and ‘Want You In My Room’ would brighten any drive home if they came on the radio – but they don’t have that extra little burst of extravagance that makes songs part of the pop ether.

Hannah Peel’s King’s Place show was the first performance – delayed by Covid – of her 2021 album Fir Wave. That record reimagined, remixed and rerecorded instrumentals made for the library-music company KPM (you know their music, even if you don’t think you do – google their TV themes) by the electronic-music pioneer Delia Derbyshire.

It’s very hard, if you remember the 1970s, to listen to this music without expecting to hear the voice of Michael Rodd intoning: ‘In the future, music might even be made by computers!’, but there’s a retrofuturist charm to that for the middle-aged. It’s almost Proustian. She knows what she’s doing and you know what she’s doing to the point of it being a bit on the nose. Three tracks in, and I was thinking how the music sounded exactly like clouds slowly drifting across an otherwise clear summer sky. At the end she announced that track had been called ‘Patterned Formation’.

Gorgeous as it was, though, I have to confess to a little feeling of delight that she encored with two songs from her 2010 EP Rebox, covers of beloved old tracks, played on a music box. By being so far off the beaten track, these versions – she performed the Cocteau Twins’ ‘Sugar Hiccup’ and New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ – really do sound new. Icing on the cake of a lovely,
restful show.<//>