There comes a point in most bands’ lives at which their appeal has become too selective for them to sell out the venues they feel befit their status. The stadium band slips down to the arenas, the arena band to theatres, the theatre band to clubs. If you depend on the roar of thousands of people for validation, that creates some problems: if a power chord is played in an arena, and no one is there to hear it, does it even exist?

The answer is the package tour. Pull together two or three bands (both these shows had a third, complimentary act on the bill) and sell tickets to different fan bases. The results can be spectacular: Def Leppard got themselves back into stadiums by touring as a twofer with first Journey and then with Mötley Crüe (none of those bands can play stadiums as the undisputed headliner any longer), and they’re rightly and absolutely unapologetic about it.

Toto and Christopher Cross fit the package bill perfectly: two acts whose best years are long behind them, but who command tremendous boomer loyalty in America, playing on a hot summer night in an outdoor venue where a Diet Coke cost me $15 – it was a show for people who didn’t have to worry about paying any bills. The audience Venn diagram was interesting: seats that were empty for Cross filled when Toto came on, and plenty of Cross fans left when he finished.

What fascinated me was the very different reactions of the two crowds. Cross played his mellow yacht-rock ballads – you perhaps remember ‘Sailing’ or ‘Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)’ – to couples who were reliving their courtships. They stood and slow-danced, plenty cried, they looked into each others’ eyes. I found their reactions very moving, much more so than the bland music. When Toto played – and I generalise, so forgive me – the men whooped the technical proficiency, and the women looked bored, apart from during ‘Rosanna’, ‘Hold the Line’ and ‘Africa’.

Toto is now made up of session musicians. But though guitarist Steve Lukather is the only remaining member who was around to ‘bless the rains down in Africa’, the rest of them are still stupidly competent people who’ve played on millions of records, and every detail – no matter how irrelevant to me – mattered to them. Hence the drummer having not one, not two, but five floor toms.

In many respects, Toto are one of the world’s most boring rock bands precisely because of that obsession with technical proficiency. But I defy anyone not to hear the wholly preposterous but utterly marvellous ‘Africa’ and not be thrilled. Of course, as sure as Kilimanjaro rises above the Serengeti, we had to wait till the end to hear it. If we hadn’t, I suspect Toto would have finished their set to 200 people.

The bill the following night was more curious to me because I think of Metric and Broken Social Scene as current bands, not ones in need of the nostalgia market. Both – along with the opening band, Stars – came out of Toronto in the early years of this century. They have played on each others’ records and shared stages for years, so at one level it makes complete sense, but also this package enabled the bands to tour for longer, doing multiple nights in major markets, rather than just doing three weeks and going home.

I defy anyone not to hear the wholly preposterous but utterly marvellous ‘Africa’ and not be thrilled

The boomers were replaced by millennials, reliving their college days, but this time the one having the over-emotional reaction was me. Broken Social Scene are a band who I find either deathly dull or entirely compelling, and in their hour-long set they were the latter. They were at their best at their softest and most subdued – on ‘Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl’ (written and sung by Metric’s Emily Haines), and on 2017’s ‘Hug of Thunder’, which for some unknown reason had me in floods of tears. It’s not a song with associations for me, but something in its searching melancholy hit me hard. This is not a band who should be doing packages, but that’s the economics of touring.

I reviewed the excellent Metric in these pages not so long ago, so I shan’t dwell on them, because they were as superb here as they were then – no notes to add. But the good news for Brits is that this package – the All The Feelings tour – is coming to the UK next month.