Neil Mccormick

As with the Bataclan, this attack is on pleasure and entertainment, things that give our lives meaning

An Ariana Grande concert seems the unlikeliest target for a terrorist attack. The 23-year-old is an innocuous pop star who made her name on children’s television, playing a sweet natured airhead in an American sitcom.

Her audience is primarily teenagers and young adults, mostly girls, many of whom would have likely been attending their first concert. Grande won six Teen Choice Awards in America last year, which gives you an idea of her appeal. Like many young pop stars, she offers a safe gateway to the entertainment rituals of our society.

What is it about Grande’s essentially frivolous and fun brand of plastic pop that might have incited such murderous hatred? Is it that she is an empowering role model for young women negotiating their first precarious steps towards adulthood?

You could certainly put her in the same category as artists such as the girl group Little Mix, and solo stars Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez, all sexy and sensual yet wholesome and friendly.

Grande wears revealing costumes but teams them with a trademark ponytail. She represents the same kind of values associated with the Spice Girls, offering strong, uncomplicated, positive and upbeat approaches to female identity in the form of catchy singalong mainstream pop. It could well be girl power itself that challenges the twisted thinking of Islamic terrorists.

In purely propagandistic terms, Grande’s US status may also have attracted the attacker. Grande actually first rose to wide mainstream prominence performing for President Barack Obama at a Women of Soul event at the White House in 2014.

That was when the general public really noticed what a fantastic voice the young star had. Her musical heroes include Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, and Grande commands a range and control that suggests she could go on to emulate their success. She was invited back by the Obamas to perform at their White House Easter Egg Roll event the following month.

However, it later emerged that Grande was actually disinvited from a White House event in 2015, following the only controversial incident in her career, when she was caught on surveillance video licking doughnuts in a doughnut shop (for which she apologised).

All of this seems so innocent now. A Nickelodeon singer who was once reprimanded for licking a doughnut... and whose concert has been turned into a bloodbath. None of this adds up. It is not supposed to. Of course it is music more widely that has become a favoured target for terrorists.

As a regular gig goer, I can confirm that security has been stepped up at all major venues in Europe and America since the attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris in November 2015. There are bag searches and metal detectors on entry. You can’t even bring a bottle of water into an arena.

But last night’s attack on the Manchester Arena’s foyer, presumably timed to strike as the audience was leaving, reminds us there will always be weaknesses that terrorist groups can exploit.

It is surely impossible to guarantee absolute safety and security without sacrificing the very freedom the terrorists are so keen to restrict.

As with the Bataclan, this attack is on Western values, on pleasure and entertainment, things that give our lives meaning. It is an attack on our right to congregate, our desire to celebrate.

Music is life, which is why it has become a target for vicious exponents of a death cult. The added horror last night is that they targeted our children.

It should not be allowed to impinge our freedom, but I fear it will. Adults may choose to fight for their right to party, as so many demonstrably did following the Bataclan attack.

But who is going to feel safe allowing their kids to depart on a night out at a pop show now?