“W e’d like to thank Ed Sheeran for organising this concert,” offers a member of Kneecap, one of several unannounced guests who have turned up for the first European date of Macklemore’s Free Palestine tour. It’s a characteristically two-fisted approach to the matter in hand from a band who have seldom shied away from controversy, but it has more than a grain of truth in it.

The events of the last six weeks are quite something, and perhaps not what Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, had in mind when he led efforts to pressurise Sheeran to remove Macklemore from his summer US tour , after the rapper made a speech about Palestine on stage at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. Macklemore was duly removed from the tour, but the rapper saw his profile rise dramatically as a result – in fairness, he was hardly unknown, but his biggest hits are a decade old – while every other artist on Sheeran’s tour quit in solidarity .…