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.

For Harket, the curse was to be cast as a teen heartthrob, when he saw himself as a Kierkegaard-reading, philosophy-expounding artist. Even though the sound of middle-aged screams was pretty intense at the Albert Hall — ‘I’ve loved you for 33 years, you gorgeous man,’ yelled a woman a couple of rows behind me — Harket was a defiantly low-key presence, leaving most of the chat to keyboard player Magne Furuholmen, not bothering with anything so irksome as stagecraft, and keeping his specs on. Sadly for him, he still looks like a million dollars: if his cheekbones are no longer sharp enough to cut glass, they could certainly slice through a piece of Cheddar.

Hornsby and A-ha followed different paths. A-ha stuck to a career of pop, albeit extremely well-turned pop, with a level of sophistication that means a song like ‘The Sun Always Shines on TV’ still sounds modern now.