We have lost one of the great cultural catalysts of our time, a brilliant provocateur, a different kind of artist. Malcolm McLaren was a dear friend, who will be painfully missed – we spent, for example, Millennium Eve together with a few friends in France. When Malcolm hit on the “serious joke” of running for Mayor of London in 2000, he roped me into being his agent. It was a lost cause, of course, but at times it was a surreal and often comic adventure. But then one of his favourite sayings was “Any fool can be a benign success, it takes real courage to be a failure”.

It’s not often at a popular music concert that you hear a piece of music introduced thus: “This is a song about a ghost princess, some real birds, implied unreal birds, and a wolf boy.” But then the Magnetic Fields are a bit different from most groups; the brainchild of Stephin Merritt, a singular singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from the US, they make music that’s clever, witty, strange and funny, but also thoroughly and, at times, profoundly emotional.