THE fans are a quarter of a century older now than when Canadian singer k.d.lang released the album Ingénue and came out as one of the first openly gay female singers. But her devotees are still with her every step of the way. Publicly announcing that she was a lesbian seemed a brave move back in the early 1990s. How wonderful then that it all seems so utterly unremarkable now. These days people are more exercised over why she insist on her name - k.d. lang - always being printed in lower-case. In celebration of Ingénue’s 25th Anniversary a predominantly gay female audience was out in force when lang’s tour arrived at Lighthouse last night. It was a joyful occasion and a reminder of how much this album and this singer meant to the LGBT community. It accompanied many of them through heartaches and sometimes difficult, sometimes triumphant times.

They are older now, more reflective.

“We’re just gay seniors” lang told them, addressing her audience from the stage. There were whoops of delight and a round of applause as she posed and pirouetted. Of course her followers are not exclusively gay. Everyone was invited to this party and that is of course the way it should be.

Standing barefoot on the stage, wearing a loose fitting suit and surveying the fans from beneath her trademark masculine haircut, Kathryn Dawn Lang cuts a strange but confident figure

She’s an amazing performer with a voice that can astound with its power and purity. Fronting a superb seven-piece backing band, she performed Ingénue in its entirety. Ten tracks in their original order and a quick reminder of what great songs the openers Save Me and The Mind of Love are.

Things swung up-tempo with Miss Chatelaine and then settled into an almost hypnotic groove as lang delivered the rest of her most famous album ending with, of course, the Grammy winning Constant Craving which had the crowd singing along.

And there was more with songs showcasing her continued prowess as a writer, singer and performer and the brilliance and versatility of her wonderful hand-picked band. She ended with a tribute to three of her fellow Canadian singer-songwriters - Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. Her rendition Young’s Helpless was on of the evening’s highlights and the vocal dexterity and passion displayed on Cohen’s Hallelujah was spine-tingling.

The encores found the 57-year-old singer paying tribute to the power of youth with name-checks for climate-change activist Greta Thunberg and the young anti-gun lobby campaigners in Florida.