Carnegie Hall, New York
After winning over gen Z, the cult indie rocker makes the historic venue swoon with introspective anthems and a Michael Jackson cover

More than 68 years after Leonard Bernstein’s first-ever Young People’s Concert, Carnegie Hall was yet again overrun with youthful energy on Sunday night. The occasion was the first of two sold-out performances from gap-toothed indie-pop scion Mac DeMarco, whose adoringly parasocial cross-genre fanbase has been one of the few in 2010s indie to continue an increasingly aged-down trajectory. There was many a parental chaperone next to their beaming teens, while a group of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed post-adolescents sitting behind me – having travelled all the way from Wisconsin for the occasion – audibly Googled: “Where to find Mac DeMarco after the concert” and quizzed each other on whether they’d lay a smooch on The 1975’s devilish frontman Matty Healy if given a chance.

“I can’t believe how fancy this place is for Mac,” one of them marveled – and it has indeed been a strange trajectory for DeMarco, who emerged from the shores of Vancouver in the early 2010s resembling a party-hardy modern-day Pigpen and with an aural suitcase stuffed with lovely guitar-warbles, stained with nicotine and carrying the faint stink of cheap brew. His early live sets were equally prone to Limp Bizkit covers and spontaneous audience makeout sessions; the 2014 docu-short Pepperoni Playboy was replete with scenes of new-indie-money dirtbag opulence, as DeMarco and his ragtag group drank champagne out of lobster shells and went cliff-diving amid a nonstop tour schedule.

From Wichita Lineman to MacArthur Park, he penned masterpieces. As the great hit-maker resurrects his lost songs, he recalls writing for giants – and the night Richard Harris stripped off and disappeared

‘Flat for 50 miles,” recalls Jimmy Webb, remembering the desolate stretch of Oklahoma that inspired his classic song, Wichita Lineman. “Nothing out there except endless railroad tracks and telephone poles. Then suddenly there’s a guy at the top of one of the poles. He’s got his phone, he’s talking to somebody and then … whoosh! He goes by. I never saw him again, but I never forgot him.”

Webb immortalised the unknown telephone worker’s solitude (and imagined conversation with a distant lover) with a 1968 smash hit for Glen Campbell. “But you wouldn’t believe what some people thought it was about,” chuckles the songwriter, now a chatty, self-effacing 80-year-old, video-calling from his kitchen in Long Island. “One guy who wrote to me thought it was about a football lineman, and a woman thought the young man in the song gets electrocuted because ‘the Wichita lineman is still on the line’.”