Aviva Studios, Manchester
The flawlessly classy US singer, actor – and so much more – unleashes costumes, speeches and body-positive party tunes in a virtuoso set spanning two decades of shapeshifting

Not all superheroes wear capes. This one does, though. Janelle Monáe arrives on stage two nights into a three-show residency at Factory International’s well-appointed new(ish) home resplendent in a giant robe made entirely from fabric flowers, paired with blooming boots and headdress. It’s the same outfit she wore at Glastonbury, and the one she has been wearing as support act to Coldplay in European stadiums. The wow factor is, though, undimmed – a tropicalist take on pagan that presages a series of eye-catching costume changes. Monáe asks us to lift up our cups, and we toast “the dreams we chase”: an apposite invocation for election eve.

She, and we, are on our “Champagne Shit” tonight. It’s the title of a party-forward track semi-inspired by political Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti’s Expensive Shit. Monáe’s most recent album, The Age of Pleasure, is just over a year old, and it bumps and grinds the message home that life is for living, that pleasure is both a personal “birthright” and a political necessity, and that “the most abundant and sustainable resource is our love”.

Janelle Monáe’s trousers do not represent a vagina. They represent a vulva. Have some respect!

I have a stick up my arse about the difference between “less” and “fewer”, and women in the generations below have the same about “vagina” and “vulva”, and even though the principle is the same – why not just use the right word, instead of the wrong one? – I have never been able to see their problem. Everyone’s got the gist. Why make a scene?

It happened that I recently spent some hallowed time with millennials and also saw Janelle Monáe, live, and this all coincided at a festival that it would be crass to mention for the 91st time – but suffice it to say, I have finally come round to their point of view.