Even before albums became bloated, thanks to the largesse offered by CDs and streaming, most contained filler: those so-so songs merely passing needle time, weak aural bridges between the big hits and superior deep cuts.

Increasingly, live concerts have filler, too. With the collapse of record sales, young pop performers feel compelled to jump into huge arenas more quickly than might be wise. It’s not always as easy as it looks. A massive social media profile doesn’t always translate into having sufficient willing bodies to fill these vast spaces, and while you can ship in pyrotechnic back-up, fancy sets and snazzy screens, one thing you can’t subcontract out are the songs.

Traditionally, arena shows require a big, rangy catalogue. When that’s lacking, the enterprise can be a perilous one. This becomes obvious during Yungblud’s set (which, looking round, is lacking quite a few of those willing bodies, too). Formerly an actor in Disney teen drama The Lodge, Dominic Harrison has prepped astutely for the role of TikTok pop star, singing all the right things about all the right subjects. Yet touring his self-titled third album, released last year, it is apparent that while the flesh might be willing, the material is lacking.

His rather dated mix of bubblegum-punk, emo-rap and Auto-Tuned pop, sung in a distinctly challenging nasal American-Yorkshire hybrid, struggles to convince. For an hour in a sweaty club, perhaps it would work. For 90 minutes in this hangar? Not so much. A handful of songs – ‘I Think I’m Okay’, ‘Medication’, ‘Cotton Candy’ – rise above the fray, the rest sink into a generic mass. As the set goes on, the early momentum flags.

None of which really matters tonight, because pop today is about connection, and Yungblud is good at that. His energy is impressive. He enters dressed as a millennial Beetlejuice, and ends in long shorts and T-shirt, as though all artifice has been stripped away. The show is so inclusive the audience are practically co-stars. He presses the flesh and lets fans choose which song to play next. When he retreats to the bathroom-themed B-stage to smoke a cigarette (fake, of course) and read, the action plays out on the video screens. More filler. No one seems to mind, for now. But to continue playing these kinds of venues, songs are what he will need.

Suzanne Vega is no slouch in the song stakes, though in general her writing has always felt a little too knotty – fussy, even – to deliver on a mass market level. The exception is ‘Luka’, her 1987 hit, which she plays tonight in faithful form.

She performs at the intimate Queen’s Hall with Irish guitarist Gerry Leonard, a splash of pink in his grey hair complementing Vega’s top hat, which she plonks on her head at opportune moments. The stage is stark, almost symmetrical. The mood board reads: Serious Artist, with a twist.

In the 1970s and 1980s, any young man armed with an acoustic guitar and a college education was branded ‘the next Bob Dylan’. For aspiring young women of a similar bent, Joni Mitchell was the perennial reference point. Vega is one such artist. In the current era of tell-don’t-show, her songs can feel like dispatches from a distant age. Precocious, street-smart, sexy in an underplayed kind of way, the craft and coolness (of delivery; of language) belies the heightened emotions in tracks such as ‘The Queen and the Soldier’ and ‘Gypsy’.

Her natural epoch may have passed, but Vega appears in fine fettle. Although the pandemic fused her muse – she has written only one song since, she says, and plays it tonight, the lightweight ‘Last Train From Mariupol’ – she has plenty more to fall back on. There’s little filler here.

Smartly, she begins with older material that the audience know and love. Strong versions of ‘Marlene on the Wall’ and ‘Small Blue Thing’ ensure the set quickly finds its feet. Leonard’s quietly crunchy electric guitar and atmospheric augmentations prove a fine foil to Vega’s voice and picked acoustic guitar, while the range of styles reaches well beyond her folk-pop origins. She comes out swinging on ‘I Never Wear White’, ‘Tombstone’ and ‘Tom’s Diner’, on the latter skipping around the stage in her topper while Leonard conjures beats and loops. Played as an encore, her version of Blondie’s ‘Dreaming’ foregrounds its sweet, romantic yearning.

Her voice is clean and clear, and so casually conversational that at times the join between the songs and her commentary seems to dissolve. Her explanation of the connection between ‘Gypsy’ and ‘In Liverpool’ – the same lost lover, it transpires, captured many years apart – ends up being a song in itself. And, as we know, the song is the thing.