I didn’t get to see George Michael’s Faith tour. Can a new concert film make up for that?

As deceptively simple opening lyrics to pop songs go, George Michael’s “Well, I guess it would be nice if I could touch your body” is up there with the best. It sounds as if he’s being politely forward, but it turns out that Faith, his 1987 hit, is about resolving not to touch the person he’s addressing because there’s an emotional penalty attached.

This classic is one reason why I’m in the market for next week’s release of George Michael: The Faith Tour but am prepared to have to pick my heart up off the floor afterwards.

The concert film, directed by Andy Morahan and David Austin, surfaces live performances from two Parisian dates on the late singer’s first solo tour, the unearthed footage capturing the swaggeringly potent spell of his career in 1988 before he took a step back, overwhelmed by superstardom. It will be accompanied by Finding Faith, a short film by Mary McCartney that resurrects audio interviews and photographs from the era.

Seeing concert films in cinemas can be strange and bittersweet even when the artist is alive and has many performances in their future. Any sense of immediacy and connection that flows from being in a cut-off auditorium with like-minded strangers is undermined by the detachment effect of the screen. No amount of clever camerawork can completely disguise the fact that you’re viewing an event from afar. Whatever joy the music brings is tempered by the sadness of not being there, if not ever, then not in that moment.

This was true even for Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, the highest-grossing concert film of all time. I saw it in 2023 – on an incongruously small cinema screen – knowing I was lucky enough to have a ticket to see her live the following year. That anticipation is rare. Most concert films emerge not mid-tour but long after the ticker tape has been swept up.

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Thanks to the enthusiastic response to Swift’s film, which took in more than $260 million worldwide, and the post-pandemic push to lure as many fandoms as possible into cinemas, concert films have been coming at us thick and fast. In the past two years we have had, among others, Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft – The Tour (Live in 3D), Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore?, Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back to the Beginning, The Cure: The Show of a Lost World, Mitski: The Land, Aurora: What Happened to the Earth? and Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert.

Some of these titles are hybrid concert-documentary films where the appeal resides offstage. The Oasis one is aimed at people who haven’t had enough of the Gallagher brothers (or sentimental segments about their fans). The Pulp film lingers on key songs but owes its charm to Jarvis Cocker’s voiceover and a “scrapbook” narration of the band’s story.

At the other end of the spectrum sits “event cinema” such as the BTS concerts taking place in South America last weekend and this one. These are being streamed live in some regions and on a delay of less than 24 hours in others, including our own.

The hybrid type elicit a sort of elevated MTV-at-the-cinema vibe. They’re pleasant and welcome, if eminently watchable from home. Concert films designed as proxies for the experience of being at live gigs – which may be geographically or financially out of reach – have the most reason to be in cinemas. They’ve gained traction as a big-screen product, but as substitutes for the real, sweaty thing they’re limited.

Concert films are, in truth, something of a category error. Unadorned recordings of live performances barely seem to qualify as films, while the documentary kind transcend the label. Summer of Soul, the Questlove film that won the Oscar for documentary feature in 2022, is a concert film, but it seems daft to call it that when its point is not the performances in isolation but the revelatory chasm between the resonance of the Harlem Cultural Festival for those who were there in 1969 and the media industry’s failure to memorialise it.

The Faith Tour didn’t come to Ireland – two performances here were among those cancelled due to throat pain – and I would have been too small to go to it if it had. I later took the opportunity to swoon at Michael’s voice in person, but only once.

I’m not expecting this concert film to make up for that. I’m expecting it to be a poignant and slightly eerie time capsule, because that’s how I find all footage of 1980s concerts, with their optimistic approach to crowd control and surfeit of youth.

It takes a melancholic mental recalibration to accept that everyone in the picture is now old or gone and that the moment, though preserved, was fleeting.

Still, you wouldn’t want to go to the cinema and feel nothing, would you?