Times are hard for musicians. Members of young bands work in pubs between tours because they sell tiny numbers of CDs and get next to nothing from the streaming services. Older ones are obliged to work well into their twilight years for much the same reasons and they have lost their winter fuel allowance due to Starmer, a man who hates music so much he goes to Coldplay concerts.

There is an upside to this. Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock of Sex Pistols as they now have to call themselves are free of their Faragesque front man and replaced him with Frank Carter, and if it hadn’t been for that it’s very unlikely I’d have gone to see them.

I have a strict rule about not going to see old acts unless they are doing decent new material, but a rave review in The Times persuaded me to bend it. After all, I’ve seen Mozart’s Requiem a couple of times and he hasn’t done anything decent in years and Never Mind the Bollocks is even better than that. Plus, although lots of the great punk bands played Belfast the Pistols never got there.

The show started half an hour late due to “a medical emergency”. Happily, it wasn’t a Pistol but probably a few members of the audience who had heart attacks on learning that their pint was £8. Most of the punters were of a vintage who could remember when that sort of money bought you a terraced house and a fish supper. The two Glaswegian chaps beside me whiled away the time reminiscing about memorable fights they’d seen in pubs and at football matches.

Out of an abundance of caution I was in the seated area. The last time I pogoed Teenage Kicks had started to feel longer than Wagner’s Ring Cycle by the end of the first minute. I buggered my knee and was on crutches for a fortnight.

The set was mostly material from Never Mind The Bollocks and the band was in the rare position of having an audience where everyone knew every word to every song and was willing to sing along with gusto. The love for the band and the propulsive energy of the performance made for an evening which left everyone happy. That album is a mix of some very good songs and four masterpieces and time has been kind to it. That said, there were some tweaks. It’s no longer “God save the queen / she ain’t no human being” it’s now “God save the king / he ain’t no human being”. The IRA have been replaced by the IDF in Anarchy in the UK”.

To compensate for the overwhelmingly male composition of the audience, Frank Carter explained that the mosh pit was only for the ladies and asked the ladies to come forward. He chose Bodies as the song for this welcome gesture, the lyrics of which seem more anti-abortion than pro-choice. Still, the intention and outcome were welcome.

It was a greatest hits show by a band revitalised by having a front man a generation younger than the others. In its way it proved that even the most thrilling, subversive, angry music changes nothing in the long run and we’re still waiting for the communist call, but they are bloody good.

Did I leave with the feeling I’d been cheated? Definitely not.