Half an hour before The Nolans took to the stage a state of near-insurrection reigned at the merchandising stand. T-shirts, tote bags and programmes were abundant, but whither — on this, the mother of all hen nights — the pink cowboy hats?

Happily, there were few other missed opportunities to report once the reunited Coleen, Linda, Bernie and Maureen Nolan took to the stage. A revolving-door rollcall of toned macho archetypes — firemen, soldiers, boxers, etc — set about their “work” while the Nolans sang Holding out for a Hero. Dressed in trouser suits whose design — black with a white hourglass-figure silhouette — served to democratise their varying physiques, they continued with not so much a performance as a detonation of It’s Raining Men.

During the Nolans’ early hitmaking peak it was always hard to gauge who — at the height of synth-pop — was keeping their wholesome disco-lite in the charts. In the wake of Coleen Nolan’s second life as the straight-talking telly bawd of Loose Women, the group’s existence makes more demographic sense than it did the first time around. “I’m sensing a lot of loose women in the audience tonight,” she ventured, to an inevitable roar.

With this re-formation predicated on Coleen’s skyrocketing stock, the sometime lead vocalist Bernie took a back seat on several songs — though not on the 1981 hit Attention to Me, which acquired new resonance on the line, “I don’t want to be the star attraction”. She continues to have the best voice and, on a pleasingly silly version of Pink’s So What, an onstage demeanour which suggests that she isn’t taking any of this too seriously.

Within these walls — walls which would have surely blown apart if all the Spanx in the room were to snap at the same time — Coleen’s turns on Chain Reaction and I Will Survive were a triumph of brio over technique. Nevertheless, she was the Nolan to which the loose women of Brighton felt that they had the surest connection; it was her celebrity which meant that, 27 years after it reached the Top Three, she and her sisters were back in their old shiny disco trousers singing their biggest hit, I’m in the Mood for Dancing, to scenes of almost surreal pandemonium.

Touring: Hammersmith Apollo, tonight and tomorrow; Doncaster Dome, Wed; Edinburgh Usher Hall, Thurs

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