Scratch the surface, and we're all Neil Diamond fans. The man who wrote I'm a Believer for the Monkees knows exactly where everybody's musical pleasure spot was located.
What is great is that he is still touring, aged 74, and allowing the middle aged, the diehard fans, and those of us who think he is up there with Lennon and McCartney and Barry Manilow (yes, really) in terms of delivery of the perfect three minute pop song, to relish a late flowering of his brilliant career.
But to the gig at the Odyssey in Belfast last night. The crowd was large, enthusiastic and not all of a certain age. A thirtysomething next to me confided that she liked to get a bottle of wine and do the housework to a Neil Diamond soundtrack.
And let's face it, his music is the Spotify to our lives. Diamond, who really doesn't look his age and boogies well in beatnik black, opened proceedings with a very decent account of I'm A Believer.
The gig was slick at times and energised at others. A highlight was Red, Red Wine - when the energy levels soared as the audience to a woman rose and danced. That was fun with a capital f, both musically and physically.
Sweet Caroline, one of the encores, is for me a Proustian song, like the French novelist's little cake that conjures up the past. I hear it and I am straight back to 1980 and being an au pair in Switzerland where the parents of the family I was with loved Mr Diamond's back catalogue. Hearing that ebullient opening riff brought back the delicious sense of being young. Musical youthfulness is something we should bottle. Harmonically, it involves something a lot more sophisticated than you'd think.
We had some autobiography too, with some Diamond home movies shot in his childhood home patch of Brooklyn.
Thank God, Mr Diamond has given up the hair dye. Happily what he hasn't given up is songwriting. Something Blue is a little bit country, and his dark brown voice was always that, plus a little bit The Boss. I don't know if Bruce Springsteen would return the compliment but the lyrics are spot on.
"Took me to a place I never knew," he sang - funnily enough, Neil Diamond manages to take us to that place we've always known.
Like Elton John, Diamond has recognisable musical tics. For example, in Cracklin' Rosie, he uses the old build of a country and western song plus the requisite key changes. Play it now, my baby, and he did. Vocally, the guy is showing a slight sense of age but oddly, the crack in the voice worked well in numbers such as Song Sung Blue.
Having seen The Who and Tom Jones and now Mr Diamond in the last fortnight, music seems to be some kind of elixir of youth.
