There is more to my musical hinterland than groups virtually no one has ever heard of playing in pubs and clothes shops, so I went to see Van Morrison, Neil Young and Cat Stevens on Friday night. They’re all pushing eighty and I was slightly worried that over-zealous social workers would stop them supplementing their pensions by working in the open air on the hottest night of the year.

Van Morrison, three times winner of The Dourest Ulsterman Trophy, was definitely affected by the heat. We know this because he got a fit of the giggles and I was rather concerned that the medics didn’t pull him off stage immediately.

Cat Stevens / Yusuf was the surprise of the evening. We will draw a veil over his version of Jimmy Reed’s Big Boss Man, easily the worst version of a masterpiece I’ve ever heard.  I never listened to a single one of the classic Cat Stevens albums, can only name about two of his songs and only found out a week ago that he wrote The First Cut is the Deepest.  By contrast, a many of the younger people in the crowd, and there were a lot of them, seemed to know much of his repertoire by heart.

Yusuf converted to Islam ages ago and he does lay the religion on a bit thick on his website for my taste. “Palestine and Israel has indeed been bequeathed for all the children of Abraham, and the teachings and worship of One God.” That isn’t quite a call for a democratic, secular Palestinian state.

By pure coincidence the show coincided with the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, an event the entire European political class from Ursula Van Der Leyen to Angela Rayner rushed to call a genocide. Rayner even promised to “play her part in ensuring that lessons from the genocide are learnt”.

It was left to Yusuf to draw the connection between Srebrenica and Gaza. Assuming this video of the whole show isn’t taken down, you will see that at thirty seven minutes into his set he gets visibly upset as he gives the crowd what he calls a “little snapshot of reality” just before he performs The Little Ones. Unlike Rayner, Van Der Leyen and all the others who have unconditionally supported the genocide he says “the slaughter hasn’t stopped”. While Van Der Leyen and Rayner are happy to stay mute on the IDF murder machine he says, “you can’t live on this planet and ignore what’s going on unless you have lost your conscience”.

The series of shows at which he was playing is among the most corporate, apolitical and posh type of gig you will find unless you are into opera. There are no political flags or T shirts but the audio shows that the crowd was fully behind him. Most people around me applauded vigorously.

Politicians are terrified of making the obvious link between Srebrenica and Gaza. It looks like Yusuf is much more expressive of what people think than the people who sit on the Labour and Tory benches.