Back in early April, during that brief phase when lockdown felt more like an unexplored alien planet than the inescapable traffic jam it soon became, I called Japan’s biggest karaoke operators to see what they made of it all. Principally, I wanted to know what sort of tech they planned to throw at a problem that, on an early reading, seemed destined to put them all out of business.

There was, I now realise, something visceral about those calls. It was not that, within a couple of weeks, the karaoke pangs of friends and contacts were overpowering. And it wasn’t that the plight of Japan’s tens of thousands of karaoke establishments particularly stood out in a crisis that forced favourite bars and restaurants to close and caused the whole Japanese economy to shrink a record 7.8 per cent in that very quarter.

It was, rather, an article of geeky faith — an innate confidence that karaoke’s survival instincts would propel it towards innovation ahead of everybody else. If anything was going to find a way for tech to reopen its doors, surely it would be a segment of the leisure industry whose entire 50-year-old business model has involved piling ever more seductive layers of digitisation (voice assistance, calorie counters, competitive note-hitting gauges) on what is essentially a campfire singalong.