The Great Escape 2011: 26½ things learned from Sufjan Stevens at the Brighton Dome

1. It’s possible to make a whole room fall a bit in love with you, all at once.

2. Dressing your band like a psychotropic Tron orchestra, in ludicrous UV neon, and rehearsing them till they fall over doesn’t make them play any worse. “We didn’t sleep too late…”

3. Three trombones, two drummers and at least six giant wings are the minimum requirements for a chamber-pop show nowadays.

4. Phrases like “a battleship in which inner space and outer space are conjoined” have a rightful place in alternative rock.

5. It’s pronounced Soof-yan*. He said it himself. It’s not that hard.

6. The tough economic climate can be faced off by encouraging your band to multi-task: aerobic synchronised dancing while singing perfect three-part harmony is now expected of all backing singers.

7. Releasing an album significantly different in style from your previous work is no barrier to success as long as you spend half an hour of a 135-minute gig explaining why you did it.

8. Throwing down the live gauntlet to The Flaming Lips with an air of nonchalant triumph is not only possible but laudable. “Don’t be distracted…”

9. Attending a Rudolf Steiner school can turn you into a massive hippie.

10. Kitchen sinks across the land might bemoan the neglect they feel, but the use of everything else onstage is to be encouraged.

11. When he was young, Sufjan’s sisters used to taunt him by running around the house while reading his (glowing) school reports out loud.

12. A sentence such as “A lot of my daily life is cluttered with language. Language is extremely fascist; movement allows us to communicate freely” will not necessarily send audiences sprinting for the exit.

13. Folk + dubstep + progressive rock + War of the Worlds + feathers = goosestep.

14. Admitting that your recent chosen method of making songs has proven “arduous, painstaking and inefficient” sounds thunderingly disingenuous when presenting said songs in such audacious style.

15. The world deserves to know more about American outsider artist Royal Robertson and (we’re guessing here) acid-chomping animator Deborah Johnson.

16. As a child, Sufjan had phobias about television, the aloe vera plant, heights, “cooked fruit inside of stuff” and hot lava.

17. Just because the stage is bursting with intellectually and visually taxing, deftly orchestrated joy, doesn’t mean the whole room is going through the same, earnest “second puberty” as the singer.

18. Dressing like a Blue Peter spaceship/human disco ball doesn’t affect your ability to sing one iota. “Tell me/Do you think of me now?”

19. When he sings in the lower register recommended by his vocal coach, Sufjan sounds almost exactly like The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt.

20. Sufjan is either incredibly confident or incredibly shy.

21. Very occasionally, drum solos work.

22. There’s no point in Of Montreal ever doing a turn on Glee – any ideas they might have had for their appearance have already been done.

23. A ticker-tape explosion/balloon drop/standing ovation are both now prerequisites for a rock concert, regardless of location. “Boy, we made such a mess together…”

24. Judging by the sustained, persistent pre-encore whooping, cheering and stomping, absolutely everything just isn’t enough for some people. “All things go…”

25. Sometimes, closing a venue down as a mark of “we’ll never match that” respect is the only truly appropriate response to a gig.

26. Thanking an audience for their “strength and fortitude and patience” at the end of a show might have been better placed at the beginning, as a warning.

27. Hippie? Oh yeah. This is the dawning of The Age of Adz.

*only half a thing, since we knew it already.