Just by chance, I recently saw three concerts over about three weeks and it struck me that each one was an example of something I hadn’t realised was important to me. And in perfect dramatic form, one was poor at this thing I care about, one was good, and one was excellent. In that order.

Okay, let me tell you that the last one, the excellent one, was Midge Ure. When I got married, part of the marriage settlement was that my wife took the spelling of my surname, but not my pronunciation. (I say Gallagher with a hard second g, she says it with a soft one.) But in return, I got Midge Ure from her — and not Ultravox, the band he’s best known for.

Okay II, “Vienna” is an Ultravox song and it was remarkable hearing a full Birmingham Symphony Hall audience singing that. I can only imagine what it must feel like to have your own words sung back to you.

Anyway.

The first concert was a short one with a group of singers doing cover versions. A clue that there was a problem came quite early when one singer announced that we would get to hear songs by some of the world’s most credible artists.

That was a three-blink moment for me and in case you’re a couple of blinks behind, she meant “incredible”.

Obviously anyone can mis-speak, yet that word felt like a summary of my problem. I don’t think that singer knew what the word meant and I felt throughout that none of them new what the lyrics they were singing meant, either. A nadir was saying they were going to do a stripped down, minimal version of their favourite, and it turned out to be George Harrison’s “Something” – completely overblown with the lyrics bouncing between three singers to give them each a turn.

You knew the song wasn’t a favourite of theirs, you knew they hadn’t heard it before the show, and you also knew there was no particular reason that they should: I’m rubbish with ages but they were all far, far too young to know The Beatles much. So fine, but telling me that something is a favourite, then rather demonstrating that it wasn’t, felt like a modern-day politician’s lie. Politicians have always lied, but they don’t bother putting any effort into it any more.

These cover singers diminished the music they were covering and one of the effects was that they made it seem like the show was supposed to be about themselves instead of the “credible” artists and their work.

Which I realised more fully when I saw the second concert and it was also a short show made up cover versions, but there it was all about the music. The pianist and singer would enthuse about the writer of the song — consequently winning my heart instantly — and enthuse about the history of the piece and enthuse about the piece itself and repeatedly enthuse about the band he was working with.

He made it that the show was about the music, not remotely about him. And specifically because of that, he was a star on that stage where the previous lot were not.

All of which is trundling through my head at Symphony Hall as Midge Ure played almost entirely his own music. (He did one cover, No Regrets.) Here is the writer, playing what he wrote, and however many hundreds of people were there, they were there to see him and his music. In every sense of the phrase, he was the star of the night.

Except he didn’t act like it and that was damn right.

At one point, he and his band had started a piece when he paused for just the smallest moment and asked the audience: “Ready?” I can’t explain why that was so likeable but I think it was because it was about the audience and it was about the music. It wasn’t “here’s a song I wrote”, it was “here we all are together.”

It’s always the writing and it always the audience that matters. It is never the star.