
He’s blessed with a fabulous band, the Sensational Shape Shifters, and a sense of musical adventure that should be enough to shame most of his juniors. The former was Robert Plant, whose Glastonbury performance was exciting enough even on TV, but whose two autumn shows at the Roundhouse in London were astounding.

One kept the lyrical content of the blues pretty much the same, but twisted the music into thrilling new shapes one presented pre-Beatles rock’n’roll but paired it with themes that Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard would have found unrecognisable. My two favourite live performers of 2014 both took old forms and did something new with them. Read Alexis Petridis’s review of Miley Cyrus’s Bangerz tour Michael Hann I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed an arena-sized pop show more. The fact that there’s a certain kind of person for whom the notion of Miley Cyrus covering Bob Dylan or the Smiths while wearing a sequin-covered leotard is evidence that civilisation was we know it is doomed just made it more piquant. At one point she sang an acoustic version of, of all things, Bob Dylan’s You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go – at other gigs, she apparently covered the Smiths’ There Is A Light That Never Goes Out – and sounded fantastic. Somewhere at the heart of all this wilfully grossed-out spectacle was someone with real talent, and not just to annoy. When a former tween star goes wildly off-message, the natural reaction is paint them as a kind of hopelessly damaged and confused figure who doesn’t really know what they’re doing, but – at least from where I was sitting – Cyrus appeared to be very much in charge. The show was also very funny, and Miley Cyrus appeared to be in on the joke. Either way, it was overwhelming and engaging: deeply unsexy, authentically weird, powered by a kind of screw-you spirit that’s in such short supply in rock and pop music these days that encountering it felt genuinely striking: bizarrely, the other time I’ve felt it this year was watching Fat White Family. Or perhaps she was just trying to rub the nose of anyone who wished she’d stayed a wholesome Disney princess in it as hard as she possibly could.

Miley Cyrus at the O2 … ‘I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed an arena-sized pop show more.’ Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA When she sang a ballad while being pursued around the stage, for reasons unexplained, by a giant fluorescent orange ostrich? When she entered the stage sliding down a huge model of her own tongue? When she kept addressing the audience as “you bunch of fucking sluts”? When a member of Alt-J, whom I’d bumped into the queue, texted me “this is making this song more interesting, isn’t it?” as Cyrus cavorted around onscreen to the strains of Alt-J’s Fitzpleasure with a bunch of roses sticking out of her bum? The whole show was just so determinedly, relentlessly, gleefully vulgar and ridiculous – like being trapped inside one of Ralph Steadman’s nightmarish cartoons of Las Vegas seen through a fog of drugs – that it was impossible not to be entertained, even as you were struggling to work out whether or not she was trying to make a satirical point about the crassness of a life spent almost entirely in the entertainment industry, a world in which photo agencies once offered $150,000 to any snapper who could pap the 15-year-old Cyrus kissing a boy. I can’t remember at exactly what point in Miley Cyrus’s show I stopped feeling cynical and just started gawping.
