What does a chubby, bearded American feller wearing a plaid shirt and singing about his dog and truck have in common with a chic, sonically adventurous Irish art-pop star? Both, last year, were inadvertently parachuted into the battlefields of the culture wars.

Oliver Anthony recorded a song called ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ – Virginia, not Surrey – that was picked up by MAGA-types from an obscure country music YouTube channel, became a talking point in the Republican presidential primary debates and ended up entering the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 1 last August.

While the music is appealing enough, Anthony is an appalling lyricist. He trades in clichés

That same month, Roisin Murphy commented on a post on Facebook using her personal account, saying that puberty blockers were Big Pharma exploiting ‘little mixed-up kids’. Her comment was screenshotted and circulated online, resulting in thousands of people – many of whom had probably never heard of her until then – screaming at each other over whether she was a vicious transphobe or a feminist heroine. Questions followed over whether the comment would refresh her career – or wreck it.

Murphy issued an apology that satisfied no one, and has taken care not to revisit the subject. Anthony, after at first telling Republican leaders that his song was intended as a criticism of all politicians, not just Joe Biden, seems to have leaned into his role as the musical wing of idiot conspiracism. Between songs, the crowd at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire sang ‘Joe Biden’s a paedo’, lustily, to the tune of ‘Seven Nation Army’, while Anthony’s guitarist picked out the riff and told the audience they should help write his next single.

Pitching up at Ally Pally for Murphy’s gig, I half assumed there would be trans-rights activists and gender-critical feminists squaring up to each other outside. Maybe the rain put them off. But for all the uproar about Murphy betraying her LBGT fans, there appeared to be plenty of Ls and Gs watching inside.

Murphy, who had a 30-year career to preserve, made her performance entirely about the show: the costume changes, the concentration on the songs. It was all completely professional, with sparks of eccentricity that have both won her a decent following and critical acclaim and prevented her from ever quite reaching pop’s very top tier. She makes music for that uncertain space between the living room and the dancefloor, where you’re not quite sure whether to listen to the details – the analogue-synth squiggles of the chilly and robotic ‘Overpowered’; the restrained but discomfiting ‘Dear Miami’ – or to move your feet.

It’s not completely to my taste: you can either locate the differences between her mood-heavy dance-pop songs, each played at the same BPM, or you can’t. It is not one of my strengths, so the set became more like a DJ mix to me, each song sliding into the next frictionlessly. It was a party – but not my kind of party.

Anthony’s show was the type of party you flee from. Not just because of the boorish crowd, but because he is palpably unready for his current stature. Onstage, he barely knows what he is doing: the set might have been 75 minutes, but he was only playing for half of that time (and in that brief span he had two covers, of ‘Rocket Man’ and ‘Free Bird’). The rest of the time he read Ecclesiastes to us from his phone, or made paper planes from lyric sheets with his bandmates (why he needed lyric sheets for a set so brief was a mystery to me).

And while the music – dusty, acoustic Americana – is appealing enough, Anthony is an awful lyricist. He trades in clichés: there’s a lot of going down to the hollow (always pronounced ‘holler’); you can always rely on a dog; and, gosh-darn it, times are hard. His wife was frequently compared to other things: once, inevitably, to a dog (reliable), and once to an old car. ‘That old darlin’ of mine is like a 90-some Chevy/ She rides just right when you turn her on’, he sang, surely a lyric to romance any woman, anywhere.

The peril for Anthony, unlike Murphy, is that when his crowd tired of singing ‘Joe Biden’s a paedo’, he had nothing else to offer. His songs have just one note – resentment dressed up as social concern – which becomes fairly wearisome, fairly quickly.

Anthony’s rise without trace is the kind that normally only happens to novelty acts, who quickly return whence they came. Perhaps this makes ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ the ‘Gangnam Style’ of the Trumpites. What a fate.