"Life, it's like a game sometimes". More often, though, it's like work. And if ever there was proof that being the music industry's lucky sacrificial 'Current Big Thing' was No Fun, it would be the look on Avril Lavigne's sharp little china-doll face as she barks, in her flinty Canadian accent, "Y'avin' a good time?"
But then - as a lone midget-sized eleven-year-old boy pulls determinedly on a fag and fiddles anxiously with his tufts of Busted Guy hair - somebody's got to pay for all this y'avin' a good time with some friggin', as Avril would put it, hard work.
And hats off to the t-shirted girl doing it, as she gallops determinedly back and forth, throwing devil signs and fist-punches outward from that default position of anxious teenage elbows folded over her chest, rattling determinedly through fifty minutes' worth of songs from her squillion-unit album 'Let Go' (plus swearword B-side 'I Don't Give').
Not surprisingly, the first ecstatically-received notes of a walloping, two-minute-tops rendition of 'Sk8er Boi' are a catchy summation of What She Does, simultaneously sullen and exuberant and propelled by that youthfully unsubtle, if not unattractive, belter of a proto-Shania Twain voice (and indeed, with a different A&R trawler scooping her up, Shania she could well have been).
Back in the world of the career path and stylist's decisions actually taken, though, we're being dragged with something that feels a little like teeth-set efficiency through the 'Matrix'-channelled (but probably accurate enough) teenage worldviews and boisterous guitar-poppy accompaniment of 'Anything But Ordinary'.
We get clouted with the light-years descendant of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' that is 'Losing Grip', a lighter-waving 'Too Much To Ask', the "everybody jump!" exhortations of 'My World', the Alanis-yodelly 'I'm With You', and two-kids-onstage business of a bounding 'Complicated'. This is, by any yardstick available to those waving glittery-fascia'ed mobile phones, still working out what gigs do, a great show.
For any of us too old for that yardstick, however, there's still the secret, wistful thrill that comes at the top of the night when the lights fire up and the crowd roars and you spot an almost shockingly small, shockingly young-looking girl standing determined and anxious in front of what is, to all intents and purposes - artificial construct or not - a rock band. And looking - artificial construct or not - like she's in charge.
Frankly, it's hard not to conjure up a little hope that Avril, for at least a few of the eleven year old girls here, has added to their menu of daydreams of power and influence - movie star, supermodel, power hungry, no sh*t taker - by one. Perhaps by the year 3000, as the tufty-haired philosophers might put it, we'll even have an Avril Lavigne who looks like she's having fun.
