Midlife Crisis: We’re kind of automatically opposed to anything we’re told to like, or anything that seems like we’d like, anything too obvious

You had to laugh when you imagined what their children, their grandchildren would think if they could all see us.

Watch in awe as a tiny woman plays an electronic violin, snatches of Mongolian throat singing and distorts her voice with her signature vocoder.

Or do some tai chi for us to keep alive the 21-year conversation she had with her late husband, Lou Reed. Or do some kind of group meditation.

Or tell us the plot of Aristophanes’ play The birdsapart from what happens at the end, because she wants us to read it for ourselves.

Even Ruben, the cellist, plays it softly to laughter. He turns up the intensity even when he’s on James Brown’s Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine. Funky cello.

We gave this defiant madness a standing ovation at the end. Middle-aged people here will speak of the performance with the same reverence that some middle-aged people speak of Leonard Cohen performances.

I participated most of the time, although I got a bit bored at times. At times I wished she would pick up the pace.

But one or the other bit of boredom was part of it. I came here to be surprised, to be easily challenged, to be confronted, to think about it and to think a little bit about the end of the world. All the things nobody goes to Ed Sheeran feel.

I’m not a snob. That’s how we were raised. We were raised to distrust, even hate, the mainstream. I was too young for punk, which was overrated anyway.

But my main cultural blueprint/template was what came after, and it was based on the spirit of punk. The post-punk/new wave ‘independent’ ethos was exemplified for me by Joy Division and New Order and Factory Records.

For years, New Order has strived to challenge the mainstream music industry. They released singles that they never included on their albums, often only on 12-inch vinyl.

They refused to write their name or the name of the record on their sleeves. These sleeves were works of art, a product of their longstanding collaboration with designer Peter Saville, who invented an entire design aesthetic.

One of those record covers, the original “Blue Monday” sleeve, is known to cost the band that much, and their record company lost money with every copy sold.

This record company, funded by the success of New Order, released music by a slew of other iconic bands that didn’t make any commercial sense apart from the occasional fluke like Happy Mondays. It was art for art’s sake.

New Order made sublime music but refused to simply consume it. They were tricky, difficult, dull, surprising, refusing to play the game.

If they had a record in the charts, they would insist on playing it live top of the pops and the record usually went straight up the charts once people saw the unpolished roar of New Order live.

New Order would eventually sell out just as defiantly as they had refused to sell out. But by then it was too late anyway. They had set a template for a certain type of person from my generation.

We don’t want music to be easy, obvious, or fed to you from a commercial system. We’re kind of automatically opposed to anything we’re told to like, or anything that seems like we’d like, anything too obvious.

We want our artists to be weird and contrasting and surprising. In a way it’s a bit immature, a hangover from our teenage years. When some things were just cool and they were a little harder to find.

We’ve softened with age and sold out like New Order, and we’re less hardcore now. But we have indie hearts, and we have a special place in it for little 70’s survivors who challenge the notion of what a concert is.

Even if we get bored at times, it’s worth admiring people who do things on their own terms and don’t get angry.