The whole world might have been different had Alasdair MacLean, singer and guitarist of the delicate, pastoral, slightly psychedelic band the Clientele, had his way. In 2006 he told music website Pitchfork about the time he was working for a publisher and strongly recommended they turn down a children’s fantasy novel that had been submitted. They overruled him and published Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone anyway.

We all know what happened to J.K. Rowling. MacLean ended up leaving the world of books, and in due course the Clientele got a music deal that enabled them to turn full time, though I have no idea whether they still survive solely on the tiny margins a working indie band can carve out. So here they are, 26 years on from the release of their first single, playing in Kings Cross on a perishing night, being gorgeous.

Without Pitchfork, the Clientele would never have attracted any attention

It’s easy to see why the Clientele have remained little: they are little. Their music is made up of fragile curlicues and arpeggios. Mark Keen’s drum kit at Lafayette was as small as I have ever seen: a kick drum, a snare, a hi-hat and a couple of cymbals. No toms at all. And often he played with brushes. Rather than being the back beat, the percussion was a whisper of wind behind MacLean’s guitar and Sebastian Millett’s cello; what rhythmic propulsion there was came from James Hornsey, playing bass.

The music had the smell of the library of a small country house: warm, aged and papery, with the scent of fresh flowers drifting in through open French windows. It summoned scores of groups from the past – little snatches of Television and the Zombies and the Left Banke and Fairport Convention and Felt flitted past – and I swear that every second song included the word ‘blue’ somewhere in its lyrics. In the age of oversharing and singers telling you about their mental health, there’s something deliciously restrained about the concept of blue-ness.

I mentioned the Rowling anecdote not just because it’s amusing, but also because of where it appeared. Last week, the magazine publisher Condé Nast announced it was folding Pitchfork – which it bought from its founders in 2015 – into GQ where, presumably, it will become a ‘key vertical’. Lots of staff and freelancers have been bid adieu – no one thinks Pitchfork will survive in any meaningful form.

Those of us in the crowd at Lafayette probably wouldn’t have been there had it not been for Pitchfork. The Clientele are more popular in the States than here, and that’s almost certainly down to the website’s patronage of them: a stamp that carried the same power in indie music in the 2000s as John Peel’s approval did when I was a kid. Without Pitchfork, the Clientele – and scores of groups like them – would never have attracted any attention, and the world would be a poorer place for it.

When Q magazine closed in 2020, David Hepworth – one of its founders – wrote in the New Statesman: ‘To the music business I would say, you’re going to miss the music press. Why? Because it did one thing you failed to value. Through its lens it made your acts seem exciting and larger than life, even when they weren’t.’ That would never have been an issue for the Clientele, who don’t need to be exciting or larger than life, but it might well have troubled Bring Me the Horizon, playing the first of two shows at the O2.

I first wrote about them in 2013, when they had recently been signed to Sony. The company’s then managing director, Colin Barlow, told me it was ‘a landmark deal – it’s as important as when Sony signed AC/DC or when Metallica was signed to a major’. They would, he predicted, be headlining Download, the vast metal festival at Leicestershire’s Donington Park, by 2015. In fact it took them until last year – when they also headlined Reading and Leeds. Part of the reason, I suspect, is that there was little or no music press left to champion them.

I suspect BMTH might not appeal to many Spectator readers – they play a juddering version of metal, where double kick drums are as important to the sound as the guitars, albeit one tempered by a commitment to melody and skyscraping choruses, and incorporating touches of electronica and hip hop – but they deserve to be in the big rooms. Singer Oli Sykes, tattooed up to the nines and with artfully teased hair, was every inch the rock star. If anything, I wanted the gig to be a little more metal; it didn’t quite have the volume to achieve the sense of overwhelming physicality that very loud music offers.

Throughout the set, a thought kept occurring: without a music press, how long will it take the next young band to reach this point?