Fascinating and compelling: Bruce Hornsby at Shepherd’s Bush Empire reviewed

In the unlikely event that Bruce Hornsby and Morten Harket, A-ha’s singer, ended up featuring in the Daily Mail for, I don’t know, getting into a fight in a supermarket over the last luxury Scotch egg, they would be described as ‘“The Way It Is” hitmaker’ and ‘the “Take on Me” star’.

In neither case, I suspect, would that be how they would choose to be remembered. In Hornsby’s case, I know it’s not, because he told me so earlier this year. And when he played that song — a piece of high-class MOR so persuasive that it’s been sampled by hip-hop stars and used incessantly in TV montages since 1986 — at his London show, he introduced it by saying it was ‘why some of you are here. But if you don’t like the rest of it, don’t come back.’ He said it good-naturedly, but I think he meant it.