Pop music – and specifically pop music stardom – has an incredible power to transform people into things they are not. The pop sphere enjoyed by my generation as teens transmogrified Morrissey into a sex symbol, Neil Tennant into an intellectual and Simon Le Bon into a surrealist poet.

More recently, pop’s alchemical potency has made Ed Sheeran someone people like to look at and Adele someone people want to hear from describing her emotional upsets at great length. But