The crowd was the star of the show: Carly Rae Jepsen, at Alexandra Palace, reviewed

The other week I saw a T-shirt bearing the caption ‘For the girls, the gays and the theys’. And if you want a very quick and easy demonstration of why someone might wish to wear a T-shirt specifically excluding straight men, I suggest you go to pretty much any big standing show, certainly any featuring a youngish guitar band.

There you will see the straight man in his natural environment, moving from the bar in small herds of six or seven in a straight line through the crowd, charging through obstacles like buffalo through the brush, finding their spot and then performing their rites of shouting through the songs that bore them and pushing one another around to the songs that don’t, then buffalo-charging to the toilets and to the bar and back to their territory to shout and shove. They don’t do it with malice, any more than a badger gives a cow TB with malice. It’s just what they do.

I tend not to notice them very much. I was probably one of them when I was their age, and it’s just one of those things you come to expect at gigs, like plastic glasses that buckle under the slightest pressure, or people going to the loo during the new songs. But I really noticed them at Carly Rae Jepsen’s London show.

I noticed them in their absence. There were straight men there, of course, usually with their wives or girlfriends. And there was me and my friend. But instead of the bulk of the crowd being young men having it large, it was the girls, the gays and the theys having it large, and doing it in a way entirely devoid of boorishness: just as drunk but without the testosterone edge.