The joys of musical comfort food

I’ve given up comfort food. I’m trying to shift lockdown pounds that have left me with the physique of the kind of ageing second-string wrestler you used to see on World of Sport early on a Saturday afternoon in the 1980s. It’s all eschewing oils and measuring portions round these parts, and so I have been seeking my comforts in music. Enough with your Lithuanian drone and your polyrhythmic technical metal from Indonesia! Bring me verses and choruses and melodies and vocal harmonies!

Katy J. Pearson — a young woman from the West Country who perhaps wishes she were, instead, from the American west coast — was true comfort food. The whole thing also felt unnervingly like a real gig, the kind one used to go to Before All This. The streets of Camden Town were thronged — truly, we are on our way back to civilisation when one can once again see credulous teens buying knock-off Supreme hoodies — and the crowd inside the Jazz Café were wildly enthusiastic, albeit at their tables, rather than in a standing throng.