An evening of familiar music has confirmed to an adult audience that its formative cultural preferences were unusually sound and need never be reconsidered.
Listeners arrived hoping to reconnect with an earlier period of their lives. They left with the pleasing impression that this earlier period had also been objectively superior.
One attendee said the opening song took him straight back to his first flat. His companion remembered the flat’s unreliable heating but agreed that memory worked better without the accompanying inventory.
The concert allowed several complicated decades to become a coherent sequence of songs. Disappointments were edited out; friendships acquired better endings; a regrettable haircut was restored as an expression of youthful possibility.
A programme purchased at the interval will preserve this interpretation in full colour.
The audience welcomed the songs it knew and listened patiently to a less familiar number, acknowledging the artist’s right to have continued existing between the important years.
Afterwards, a man described the performance as timeless before explaining how precisely it belonged to 1974.
He plans to return at the next opportunity. There are few cultural experiences more reassuring than paying to discover that the person you used to be was right about something.
